by CCW | 4 June 2023 10:00
It is the mystery of all mysteries, the mystery of God as Trinity. It is the counter and check to all of the illusions and the idolatries of the self. God is not a metaphor for our pursuits and projects and interests. God is nothing, no thing, we have to say, for God is the mystery of all reality and not some aspect, not some thing in a continuum of things and beings, nor some idea in an endless chain of ideas.
God is the ultimate mystery which we cannot not think and yet cannot be contained and limited to our minds and hearts. God is the mystery revealed for thought into which we are lifted up by grace even “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.” God is the mystery revealed for thought: “a door opened in heaven” into which we see and enter. God alone is the mystery of praise and worship, the praise and worship of the whole of creation. “Thou art worthy.”
Trinity Sunday is unlike any other Sunday or festival day in the Christian calendar. It marks no event, no happening. It is purely speculative in the most positive sense of that word and yet gives meaning and substance to all our liturgies and celebrations, to all of the activities that belong to the life of faith. God as Trinity is the faith. Everything arises and converges in the mystery of God in himself and what that means for us, God for us.
The Trinity is not a puzzle or a riddle to be solved, some Rubik’s cube to be twisted and turned about in the illusions of our own cleverness. At once the summary of the whole pageant of scriptural revelation – this is the point of the reading from Revelation – it is also the pinnacle and height of all thought and requires our willingness to engage with what we have been given to see and think, to live and honour; in short, to be like Nicodemus. We have to want to enter into the mystery of all mysteries because it concerns the very truth of our souls. The mystery lies in what is disclosed for thought. Trinity Sunday in this sense signals the true vocation of our humanity: to think God in the form of God’s own thinking as revealed and shown to us for thought, each according to the capacities of our own thinking. It is for all for all are called to worship. That is the real truth and meaning of our humanity as souls made apt for worship, to honour what is truly worthy of honour above all else.
“Thou art worthy, O Lord,” as the lesson from Revelation puts it, drawing upon imagery from Ezekiel after quoting Isaiah about God as the Trisagion, the thrice-holy. God is worthy “to receive glory, and honour and power” not out of any need or desire on his part but as belonging to the truth of all created beings “for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are, and were created.” All creation is good and finds its good in God.
Scripture and doctrine unite most wonderfully on Trinity Sunday. Here is the fullest expression of revelation and of human thinking; our thinking upon what our thinking and being, our loving and knowing ultimately depend. We are quite literally “in the Spirit.” We can only think God through God. To know that is, in some sense, the height of human knowing.
What does it mean to think the Trinity? It means to enter into the mystery that is given to us to think. The Athanasian Creed[1], one of the three creeds of the universal Church, proclaims the way of thinking. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think the Trinity,” think the Trinity in this way, the way of kataphatic and apophatic thinking, terms which belong to the interplay and balance between positive and negative theology. “This also is Thou; neither is this Thou,” to put in Charles Williams’s aphorism. To put it more simply, God is both like and utterly unlike all things created. Thus Trinity Sunday can be understood as a kind of summary of the highest forms of metaphysical thought: Plato’s Epekeina, the Good as Beyond all being and knowing, and Aristotle’s thought thinking itself thinks all things has become the love which loves and knows all things. This is the mystery which is opened to view.
Along with the Athanasian Creed in its dialectical intensity of the dance of the back and forth between “this” and “not this”, the very first article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles states clearly and wonderfully the principle of the Trinity. Both are a strong counter to the anti-intellectualism of our Church and culture, it seems to me, a strong affirmation of the highest form of spiritual thinking, our thinking the inexhaustible mystery and wonder of God himself. That alone is a rebuke to the tiresome forms of our instrumental and technocratic reasoning which are really the negation of life. The Trinity is essential life.
“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.” So the Article begins with a summary of what belongs equally to both the theology of Judaism and Islam and to philosophy itself. It then goes on to the distinctive Christian understanding. “And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” It is a precise summary of the profoundest theological thinking that belongs to the intellectual and spiritual life of the universal Church. The terms are of the greatest significance; the language of persons, of substance, of power and eternity are gathered into the explicit Scriptural images and names of God as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the definitive names which come almost entirely from Jesus Christ. They are not the projections of our human experiences. God the Father is not like any human father and so too for God the Son. We are lifted up to see what is beyond the limits of our human knowing and experience.
What does Jesus mean by his reference to Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness? It is a wonderful image from the Exodus as told in the Book of Numbers (ch. 21) where the people of Israel complain “against God and against Moses” about the wilderness journey. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” they say, where there is “no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food,” the food which God has given them. In response God sends fiery serpents among them. The people immediately repent and recognize that they “have spoken against the Lord and against Moses” and ask Moses to pray to the Lord “to take away the serpents.” God directs Moses to make a fiery serpent out of bronze and to set it on a pole. “Every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” They have to contemplate the image of their sin made visible to them and in so doing behold the healing grace which saves them.
This is very much a feature of our liturgy; the confession of sin and the confession of praise go together. Through both we are lifted up into the greater mystery of God in his love for us, a love which finds its highest expression in prayer and praise, in worship and service. Such is the vision of Revelation and such is the teaching of the Gospel on this day. Scripture and doctrine are one in unlocking the mystery of all mysteries, the mystery of God the Trinity. The poets capture it best. George Herbert, in a poem called Ungratefulnesse, comments on the passage from Revelation and upon the mystery of God as Trinity.
Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,
The Trinitie, and Incarnation:
Thou hast unlockt them both,
And made them jewels to betroth
The work of thy creation
Unto thyself in everlasting pleasure.
We find our good and the truth of our humanity in the worship of God, the one who alone is worthy, the God who is Trinity.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday, 2023
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2023/06/04/sermon-for-trinity-sunday-14/
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