Sermon for Trinity Sunday

admin | 27 May 2018

“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.

“Thought thinking itself thinks all things” is the height of Aristotle’s theology, a “thinking of thinking … upon which depends the heavens and the world of nature” and our humanity, he suggests. The doctrine of the Trinity belongs to both the traditions of metaphysical or natural theology and to the theology of Revelation; in fact, it really unites them and allows for their mutual interplay and interdependence. We cannot not think the Trinity. Thought thinking itself all things equally turns into the love which loving itself loves all things; in short, it is the very basis of the mystery of our incorporation into the life of God.

And yet it is, perhaps, one of the hardest things to think. We behold a mystery, literally and metaphorically, mystically and providentially. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” John the Divine proclaims in the great lesson from Revelation for this day. At once we are given to behold and to enter into what we behold. And what is that? It is the mystery of God in his majesty and truth, pure and simple, which is the basis of our life.

The Trinity is not a puzzle to be solved, some sort of clever algorithm, a kind of Rubik’s cube, or should one say, triangle? The Trinity is the mystery of God which we are given to behold and think. The point is that the Trinity is the mystery of all life. God is life essential and we only have life in him. The divine self-relation is the ground of the being and knowing of all things without which they are nothing. About God it would be best to say that he is nothing, too, meaning ‘no thing’ so as not to be confused with a whole world of other ‘things.’ God cannot be compared except by analogy to anything else; he is above all being and knowing.

The great challenge of Trinity Sunday is to think the mystery of the Trinity without reducing it to our finite ways of thinking. To think the Trinity is to think upward, to think into the mystery. It is about being “born anew,” literally, born upward. This is the point of the Gospel story about Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night. He is being taught about the mystery of God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. He confronts the mystery of God in Christ. “How can these things be,” he asks? The question points to the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity and our world. It is always about our being raised up to see and think things in a new way.

That way of thinking is what we see and say in The Athanasian Creed. It is the way of apophatic and kataphatic theology, negative and positive theology, respectively. God is totally unlike anything else and is not to be confused with anything that belongs to the created order, and, yet, as the cause and principle of all things, there is a degree of analogy in which God may be likened to certain things. Such are the divine attributes of God. God is both distinguished from and connected to everything else, all of which proceeds from the divine self-relation. God in thinking and loving himself thinks and loves all things which have their source and end, their very being and meaning in him and in him alone.

If Pentecost celebrated the idea of unity in diversity for the human community and the redeemed created order, then The Octave Day of Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, celebrates the God who is Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity, the divine ground of all unity and diversity. It is found in the life of God in which we participate through prayer and worship as the Lesson from Revelation makes so very clear.

The word Trinity appears nowhere in the Scriptures, yet the idea of God as Trinity is at the heart of the scriptures of the New Testament and belongs to our thinking upon them. It is the doctrine that arises directly from the words of Jesus Christ. He teaches us the most in the whole of the Scriptures about God as Father, about himself as the anointed Son and about the Holy Spirit. The life of God with God in God is the essential teaching of the Christian Scriptures about God in himself.

To be alive to the wonder of God is our joy and blessedness on this day and always. He is “God only and divinely like himself.” The question “how can these things be?” suggests that we have to behold and think things in this way. And so shall we be blessed.