Sermon for Trinity Sunday
“How can these things be?”
Nicodemus’s question highlights the mystery and the wonder of this day. It is complemented by Mary’s question. “How can this be seeing I know not a man?” she asks the Angel Gabriel. We are in the midst of great mysteries, the mystery of God and the mystery of our humanity. The mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of the Incarnation are just so intimately and inescapably connected.
Trinity Sunday is the speculative Sunday of all Sundays, a day when we, quite literally, it seems, are walking on our heads. The Athanasian Creed wonderfully captures the mystical wonder of this day in the dialectical dance of affirmation and negation. To put it in other words, “This is Thou and neither is this Thou.” God is more unlike than like anything created. Think the Trinity in this way, the Creed advises. We cannot take God captive to our minds but our minds can be taken captive by God, by what we are given to see and hear; in short, to think, and in which we are privileged to participate.
“Behold a door was opened in heaven,” John the Divine tells us. Revelation is not a window out of which or into which we might peek and peer, but a door through which we enter into the mystery of the understanding. To think God as Trinity is to praise him.
The Trinity is the central and great teaching of the Christian faith. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible,” as the 1st article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Article begins, articulating in a concise and clear way the classical understanding of the idea of God common to ancient philosophy and to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike. Today’s readings are about the making known of the mystery of God in himself and for us, a mystery which we can only think. To think it is to be born again, literally to be born upwards into what is revealed and belongs to thought. God in thinking and loving himself thinks and loves all else; everything is gathered into the mystery of God, the mystery here revealed to us. The 1st Article goes on to express the specific Christian understanding of the mystery of God, gathering up the triplets of everlasting unity, life and truth, and of infinitepower, wisdom and goodness, into the Trinity. “And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”.
