Sermon for Trinity Sunday
“How can these things be?”
This might well be our question after such a challenging, demanding and dauntingly robust exercise as saying together the Athanasian Creed, one of the three great Creeds of the Christian Faith! But perhaps the question helps to awaken us to the wonder of God.
“Blessed be God that he is God only and divinely like himself.” A phrase used by John Donne as a kind of meditative mantra, it captures something of the mystery and the wonder of this special day, The Octave Day of Pentecost, commonly called Trinity Sunday. And it is a most holy and special day, one of the most holy and special of days because it is, first of all, unique and, secondly, the ground and basis of all our days and all our life. It is simply a forthright celebration of God.
Trinity Sunday celebrates God himself, we might say, Deus in se, as distinct from thinking about God in relation to us, Deus pro nobis, which so easily turns into our concerns and our interests and our ways of thinking and doing which so easily becomes the basis for our thinking about God. It is as if God is made in the image of our thinking rather than our being made in the image of God and participating in the life of God. Trinity Sunday challenges us precisely on that score. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity,” as the Athanasian Creed puts it. To think God as Trinity is to think God in himself and only through that to begin to think God in relation to us.
The doctrine of the Incarnation, the doctrine of the redemption of our humanity, the doctrine of the Trinity: these are the three great and essential dogmas of the Christian faith, and the greatest of these is the Trinity, we might say. The distinctive and essential way of thinking God in the Christian understanding, it is the doctrine through which Christians can respectfully engage the other great monotheistic religions of Judaism and Islam, however much the Trinity is repudiated and denied by them, as well as engaging the other religions and philosophies of the world. In other words, the Trinity is not some speculative add-on to the other fundamentals of the Faith. It is the fundamental and essential doctrine without which all of the other principles of Faith are really meaningless and empty.
