Author: CCW

“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

It was behind closed doors, literally and figuratively, that Jesus made known to us his resurrection. But it is not only behind closed doors that the things of God are made known to us. Through the fullness of the meaning of God’s Revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, “behold, a door was opened in heaven”. We behold the glory of God. God makes himself known to us.

Trinity Sunday sets before us the vision of God which is the end of man. Trinity Sunday, we might say, is the great Te Deum Laudamus of the Church. We proclaim God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. We proclaim what we have been given to behold through the fullness of the scriptural witness to God’s revelation. It is what we have been given to proclaim and in which we are privileged to participate.

We meet together in the glory of the revealed God, the glory of the Trinity. All our beginnings and all our endings have their place of meeting in the Trinity. It is, we may say, the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor.12.3). To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement. It is the burden of the Church’s proclamation precisely because what has been shown to us in Jesus Christ. The open door captures clearly this idea of this revealed and learned, things known and loved, things which we can only enter into more fully in order to love and understand more deeply.

We are given to behold and enter into what we behold. What we behold are the highest things of the Spirit; in short, the spiritual reality of the living God. But it is what we are given to participate in, too.

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“Thou art worthy, O Lord”

Well, that was quite an intellectual and spiritual work out, wasn’t it? You are probably completely exhausted and utterly mystified, confused and bewildered. And well you should be! Yet the Athanasian Creed is one of the three catholic creeds of the universal Church. For Anglicans there was a time when it was stipulated to be used thirteen times a year, once a month and on Trinity Sunday. That intention says a lot about how the Anglican Churches once appreciated and understood the fundamental importance of the doctrine of the Trinity as the essential and defining doctrine of the Christian faith. If the Anglican Church is going to be an integral portion of “the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” and not merely some fideistic sect, it will only be through the intentional recovery of the centrality of the Trinity. The Church is about our communion in the Trinity. The Church is herself Trinitarian.

The “Supplementary Instruction” in the Catechism of the Prayer Book (BCP, p. 552) makes this clear. “What is the Church?” It is asked. The answer is “the family of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit.” It is, in a way, a remarkable summary of what the Church is in the witness of the Scriptures creedally understood. The Church, too, is one of the creedal mysteries. Though not mentioned in the Athanasian Creed, unlike both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, the Church is completely presupposed, as our liturgy puts it, as “the blessed company of all faithful people” whose faith is in God the Blessed Trinity revealed through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Such is the twofold focus of the Athanasian Creed. It presents a remarkably concise and concentrated understanding of the Scriptural witness to the nature of God.

The very first article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles complements the Athanasian Creed. It is “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity”, an article which expresses, first, the philosophical and theological understanding of God that Jews, Christians and Muslims hold and, second, the specific Christian form of that understanding. “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”, it begins and, then, concludes, “and in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”. What the Athanasian Creed sets before us is a theological way of thinking God as Trinity. Thinking about God in a certain way.

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“At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you”

What is that day? It is Pentecost, this day, the fiftieth day after Easter when we celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples to establish the Church as the spiritual community of our abiding in the Trinity. And what a day! Wind and fire, as it were, the most elusive and intangible of tangible things, signify the spiritual presence of God through the Holy Spirit, the promise of the Father and the Son. Out of the chaos and confusion of tongues come order and praise, worship and life, light and love, and the peace of God. Pentecost recalls us to the spiritual mystery of God and to our being with God in the spiritual community shaped and informed by the Spirit, the Church. “Christ, being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear”.

Things seen and heard betoken an understanding of things invisible and spiritual. “A sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind” and “cloven tongues, like as of fire.” There is everything in those little words “as of” and “like as”. The Holy Spirit is not wind and fire. The winds and fires of our world are nothing in comparison to the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son. We have seen the conflagration of wind and fire that has destroyed Fort McMurray, for instance, and there is the deep memory, too, of the Great Fire of Windsor in 1897 which destroyed nearly three-quarters of the town, a fire which this building somehow miraculously escaped. We know about the fire-storms and wind-storms, too, of human hearts in disarray. We know about the fire-storms and wind-storms of our contemporary social and political landscape, globally and locally. We know, too, about the fire-storms and wind-storms of the churches in their various confusions, sins and follies. Confusion and chaos seem at times almost rampant and overwhelming. Pentecost is really the wonderful counter to all of the forms of confusion and chaos of our world and day.

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