by CCW | 31 May 2026 10:00
The mystery of God reveals the mystery of our humanity; the one envelopes the other. Trinity and Incarnation are intimately connected and inseparable. They go together. “Thou hast but two rare cabinets, full of treasure,” as the poet George Herbert puts it, “The Trinitie, and Incarnation”. He highlights what is emphasized in the Athanasian Creed[1], namely the connection and interplay between these two essential doctrines revealed to us. He goes on to say, “Thou hast unlockt them both,/ And made them jewels to betroth/ the work of thy creation,/ Unto thyself in everlasting pleasure.” This is a commentary on the Lesson from Revelation indicating how the fullness of the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation embrace, contain, and restore the whole of creation and especially our humanity. Our task is to make the effort to enter into what is revealed and made known to us; the mysteries of grace perfecting nature not destroying our nature. Nowhere is that more concentrated than in the Athanasian Creed, itself a creedal reflection on God and our humanity born out of the witness of the Scriptures.
“Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” John tells us in his Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Scriptures. Earlier this week on Tuesday after Pentecost, in the Gospel from John 10, Jesus identifies himself as “the door of the sheep,” one of the so-called ‘I am’ sayings about the essential divinity of Christ revealed through his humanity. The lesson from Revelation is a lovely summary of the whole pageant of revelation, with the books of the Old Testament symbolized in “the four and twenty elders” referring to the writers, and the New Testament, especially the four Gospels, symbolized by “the four living creatures.” The whole vision is not just about what is seen, but rather, through the telling image of the door, it is what we enter into and in which we participate. And what is that? The life of prayer and praise as the signalling the whole purpose of creation and our humanity.
Everything is gathered up to God and by God in Christ in prayer and praise. “Thou hast created all things, /And for thy pleasure they are, and were created.” God has unlocked the “two rare cabinets, full of treasure”, full of truth, goodness, and beauty, which he has made like jewels “to betroth/The work of thy creation/Unto thy self in everlasting pleasure.” God’s good will and pleasure is our good and blessedness. He plays with what becomes the early modern concept of the kunstkammer or kunstkabinett, cabinets of curiosities housing things unknown in Europe as found in the voyages of discovery, or things discovered through empirical investigations into the workings of nature by natural philosophy. Herbert applies that concept to the essential mysteries of the theology in the Christian view: Trinity and Incarnation, but only by way of a profoundly Scriptural register about our end in God from the Revelation of St. John.
Nicodemus in the Gospel wonders (as no doubt we do), “How can these things be?” in relation to what is seen and known in Jesus. The point is that the supernatural virtues of grace are given in ways that go beyond our ordinary or natural sense of things. “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb?”, Nicodemus asks. That is to look at things in a worldly and literal fashion as if that were the whole meaning and content of life.
The point of the Gospel is to teach us about the meaning of being “born anew,” namely, being born upward into the things of the Spirit which seek the recapitulation, restoration, and perfection of our humanity to our end or purpose as found in God. It means thinking things in a new way, a way given by God in the opening of the door of heaven through the humanity of Jesus Christ. It is worth noting that this Gospel in part is also read at the baptism of adults.
This Gospel too, like this morning’s lesson, shows the gathering up of images from the Old Testament into the New. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” An explicit reference to Christ’s Passion on the Cross, we behold, as the ancient Israelites did in the wilderness in the bronze serpent a visible image of their sins, our sins made visible in the Crucified. Yet in so doing we behold even more the greater love and goodness of God. Sin and redemption open us to the grandeur and wonder of God in the mystery of the mutually indwelling love of the Trinity which embraces and gathers all things into unity in God.
The Athanasian Creed is a theological extension of these readings in the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology, negative and positive thinking about the relationship between nature and grace, between God and man. God is always more than what we can imagine and think; he cannot be reduced to human and natural images, hence the importance of the negative. God is literally nothing, meaning no thing. “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the holy One” (Is. 40. 25, EP lesson). For God is ultimately above and beyond the finite. Yet God makes himself known through the images of creation and human life to gather us into what is greater and prior to ourselves and upon which our thinking and being depend. Hence there is also the importance of thinking positively, positing a connection, an analogy between natural and the supernatural realities. Analogy is about thinking upward, not downward. Thinking upward is thinking better! Analogy, anagogy – being led upward, and ανακεψαλαιοσις, the recapitulation or gathering of all things upward into God, all share the same preposition, ανα, ana, meaning up or again. Thus born anew or born upward.
The Creed proclaims in exaltant and extravagant language, language stretched to the breaking point, that God is not to be reduced to our categories and terms whether psychologically, sociologically, economically, or technologically, but rather through our thinking being raised up into what God shows us through these images and through our thinking upwards into their meaning and understanding. This, in turn, reveals something about our humanity as restored in Christ. Thus the Incarnation is not “the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, [collapsing God into the world and ourselves] but by [the] taking of Manhood [meaning our humanity] into God,” the God who is Trinity, the Three-in-One and the One-in-Three.
The divine co-inherence or mutual indwelling of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is equally our co-inherence or dwelling with and in God; in short, our being made “partakers of the divine nature” through the door of Christ opening us out to the workings of grace through revelation. Perhaps nothing speaks more profoundly to the truth and dignity of our humanity than our being made in imago Trinitatis, in the image of the Trinity; the counter to the utilitarianism of our technocratic culture which reduces us to things to be used and exploited by others.
This is the wonder and answer to Nicodemus’s question: “How can these things be?” Only by God’s grace, the grace of God with God and in God in their mutual and co-eternal love, the ground of God’s indwelling us. God is Trinity, the wonder of the divine and eternal indwelling of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost which by grace indwells us. We are made for God by God and not God for us. “Not by the conversion of Godhead into flesh, but by taking of Manhood into God.” Only so can these things be.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/05/31/sermon-for-trinity-sunday-17/
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