by CCW | 30 May 2021 06:00
Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity Sunday[1]
“Now the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity, and the Trinity in unity.” A surprising and startling statement, it may seem, and yet it belongs not only to the Athanasian Creed but to the central logic and meaning of the Christian Faith. God is Trinity though the word Trinity appears nowhere in the Scriptures. It appears first in the writings of Theophilus of Antioch writing in Greek in the second half of the second century, albeit in a peculiar form, and then in the Latin writings of Tertullian in the late decades of the same century. Yet it belongs to the revelation of the essential life of God and to the equally essential task of our thinking God. The first section of the Athanasian Creed ends with the words: “He therefore that would be saved, /let him thus think of the Trinity,” think of the Trinity in this way, the way of affirmation and negation in the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology that is the Athanasian Creed. Pretty strong stuff. Can we really think this?
It is the essential proclamation of the Christian Faith but far from being something exclusive and forbidding, exotic and remote, speculative and abstract, it is the doctrine, the teaching, that requires and provides the basis for the Christian engagement with other religions and faiths and with ourselves. In short, the divine self-relation which the Trinity is and reveals offers the connection to the universal idea of thinking God without which we cannot think ourselves. It is not about some form of Christian triumphalism or supersessionism – the idea that one religion or philosophy supersedes another or that the latest fancy or fantasy is by definition the best. It connects us instead to the quest for wisdom that belongs to the radical truth of our humanity.
“No one has ever seen God,” John tells us. He states a simple truth. God is nothing, no thing among other things, not an object, not a thing, but rather the very ground of the being and knowing of all things. What John highlights here belongs to his thinking deeply and profoundly upon the words of Christ. “Apart from me you can do nothing,” for instance; “Before Abraham was, I am,” and so forth. These are radical words which speak about God in himself without which we are nothing, not even selves. As John rightly intuits, the truth of God is revealed in the only-begotten Son, who ever is and never was not. His words compel us and challenge us. That is the meaning of the Gospel lesson about Nicodemus coming to Jesus in the hiddenness of the night. The meaning is about how we have to think about things in a radically new and different way; literally, to be born again, into a new way of understanding.
God is not some sort of extra, something added on to our quotidian lives, the ‘cream in your coffee’, as it were. Such is the decadence of bourgeois culture in all its varied and self-serving forms. Quite literally, without God we are not, that is to say our lives are but an illusion and nonsense apart from the realization that we are the Sons of God in and through God’s Son and Word. What lives in our own sense of being living beings is the life of God in us. To think this is to be born again, born from above, from the very Word and Son of God, who is God and who makes God known. In ways that seem so utterly paradoxical, we don’t begin with the world (or with ourselves) but with God himself in his own self-revealing. He is essential life. The Trinity is the primary expression of the essential life that is God himself. With the Trinity everything is turned around but turned around to God, first and foremost.
That is why John the Divine (whether he is the same John as John the Evangelist or not is another question) gives us this marvellous vision of the whole of creation, angelic and human, engaged in the praise of God. The vision is our life really in the sense of the joy of life in which we are most truly alive. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” and we are ushered into the vision of worship in the images of the four and twenty elders, symbolic of the writers of the books of the Old Testament, and the four living creatures, symbolic of the Gospels of the New Testament, all united in the triune praise of God. “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God the Almighty, which was, and which is, and which is to come.” This is the God who is eternal life whose life is the essence of all life. It echoes the First Lesson from Matins from Isaiah 6 about the Trisagion, the thrice holy God. The vision in Revelation celebrates the end or purpose of creation: “For thou hast created all things, And for thy pleasure they are, and were created.” We are created by God and for God; we live in him and he in us.
The 17th century poet and Anglican Divine, George Herbert, has grasped the logic of Trinity Sunday beautifully in a poem entitled, ‘Ungratefulnesse’, itself a telling rebuke of ourselves in relation to the fullness of life revealed in the living God, a rebuke of our forgetting of ourselves. “Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,” he says, naming them explicitly: “The Trinitie, and Incarnation,” each of which is bound up and inseparable from the other. “Thou hast unlockt them both,” he says, for each is revealed in and through the other. In ways that echo the lesson from Revelation, he says that God has “made them jewels to betroth/The work of thy creation/Unto thyself in everlasting pleasure.” We live only when we live to and in and with God in God’s own self-relation as Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Note the language of intimacy and love in the idea of betrothal. God takes delight in us in our taking delight in him. We rejoice or joy in God in God’s living enjoyment of himself. The thought that in thinking itself thinks all things is the love that loves all things in himself.
All this stands a long way from the current distresses and distempers of our times. We are too much with ourselves, it seems, in the triumph and tragedy of the therapeutic culture which Carl R. Trueman, a thoughtful evangelical theologian, identifies as the contemporary form of the psychological person, namely, “the sovereign right of individual self-determination” (The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 69). This comes down to being only what we think we are in our own minds as if that is reality. This contrasts completely with the long traditions of reflective wisdom about a universal human nature grounded in what is at once transcendent and immanent; in short, God. But this is what Trinity Sunday opens out to us, the vision of our humanity in God by virtue of God’s self-giving life revealed and made known by the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father.
Only through the only-begotten Son of God are we the sons of God, born of the Spirit of their divine love. Trinity Sunday marks an end and a beginning, not just in terms of the patterns of spiritual life but in the most radical sense imaginable. It celebrates God’s life and God’s life in us for our life is grounded in God’s self-relation and self-revelation. The Trinity is not some puzzle to be solved by the clever and the quick-witted. It is nothing less and nothing more than the mystery of God revealed. The wonderful point of emphasis is that this is a matter of the greatest joy, a matter of the truth of life because it is the Life of Truth.
We cannot figure it out as if God were a creation or invention of our thinking. We can only live and think in what is made known and revealed as the true ground for all life and all existence. For that is our joy and our delight. Jesus, as John grasps so clearly, has made known what cannot be seen and known in worldly ways, simply empirically, as it were, and yet is made known to us through the words of God’s Word and Son. To think this is to be in the Spirit, drawn into the very life and love of the Father and the Son, the love-knot of them both which joins us in their everlasting love. This is the great wonder and truth of the Christian Faith which in these dark and self-destructive times we do well to recall, to remember, and above all, to celebrate.
There is, I think, a further wonder to Trinity Sunday. For all that it celebrates the life of God revealed, it does so in and through the images of the things of the created world. This is the basis for the sacraments already signalled in the second lesson at Matins in the story of the Baptism of Christ, at once a revelation of the Trinity but also to the sacramental form of our participation in the life of God, being born again, as it were. The created things of the world are not the revelation but the means through which the prior essence and nature of God, of creation itself and of our humanity are disclosed and made known. This is an affirmation of creation and our humanity as part of the created order signalled most wonderfully in John’s great apocalyptic vision. That affirmation is our betrothal to God in his everlasting pleasure. This is the teaching which in our times especially turns the world on its head and counters the illusions of ourselves. Our thinking on its own creates nothing, thinks nothing, is nothing but illusion and folly. But our thinking the Trinity shows the radical truth of human thinking: it participates in the thinking of God. That is our life. It is truth and life in its entirety.
To recover the primacy of the Trinity is to reclaim God and ourselves as unthinkable as selves apart from God. The Church, too, is nothing apart from the proclamation of the Triune God, the God who is Trinity. Without that thinking we are indeed nothing and nothing worth. We have ignored what has been explicated or exegeted to us by the Word and Son of God. But it is there before us in the Word who is God and with God, the Word who is with us and in us. We only live when we live in and with God in the mystery of the Trinity.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday, May 30th, 2021
(Under Covid-19 Lockdown restrictions)
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2021/05/30/sermon-for-trinity-sunday-12/
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