Trinty Sermon 30th May 2010

***EDIT***

Lest I or you take the following too seriously, here is BoscoPeter's debunk.
And now, onto the actual sermon...

[Numbers relate to Powerpoint slides.]

[1] If we try to look at the sun with unprotected eyes, we will damage our eyes.


[2] Some things are beyond our capability; we cannot only see the sun by using special filters

[3] or reflectors.

In a similar way to our eyes, our minds are also limited. There are things that are so much bigger than we are that it is hard to understand them, and I think God is one of those.

[4] We have a relationship with God, but we struggle to describe God. And that is, I think, a good thing. In my opinion, the day we think we understand God is the day we are in grave danger of imagining God in our own image, and putting God in a box.

I wasn’t surprised to read a rumour that in the Middle Ages it was forbidden for priests to preach on Trinity Sunday because of the difficulty of explaining the Trinity.

I get no such exemption, and today is Trinity Sunday. I also think the Trinity is simpler than we sometimes make it, because it is about love.

[5]To orientate ourselves: We are half-way through the Church Year, and we’ve come to the end of a line of themed ‘Seasons’.

The Church Year started in November with Advent.

At Christmas we celebrated God’s incarnation as human and his life as a human among us.

At Easter we remembered Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Since Easter, each Sunday, we have read from the Acts of the Apostles, about the growth of the early church.

10 days ago we celebrated Jesus’ ascension into heaven, and then

Last week we celebrated the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church at Pentecost

gift of spirit

birthday of church

continuation of OT covenant, and start of new covenant

every believers birthright, the love of God, as Dick put it, poured into our leaky hearts,

Today is Trinity Sunday, when we pull strands together and think about the Trinity - God as our Father, Son and Holy Spirit; creator, redeemer and sustainer. Tri for three, Unity for one, Trinity for three in one.

The word Trinity does not appear in the Bible. Yet, we proclaim our faith each week in our creeds, faith in our Trinitarian God – following the model that is implicit in the New Testament starting with the incarnation (The angel answered and said to her, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy Child shall be called the Son of God.'"[Luke 1:35]) , and going through to Matthew 28:19 where we are commanded to baptise in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

At the very beginning of Jesus ’life, and right at the end, we have Trinitarian statements.

It’s obviously important.

And that brings me onto our statement of faith in the Trinity; the Athanasian Creed, which is normally only used on Trinity Sunday, and which, once you have said it, means there is nothing left to have to explain, so no need for a sermon…

Hmmm.

[6] A short diversion, with limited apologies to the company whose software has been fighting me all week, to retell an old story from my IT days.

A helicopter was flying around a city when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications equipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to fly to the airport. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window. Their sign read: "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER." The pilot smiled, waved, looked at her map, determined the course to steer to the airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position. The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the xxxxx building because the response they gave me was technically correct, but completely useless."

The Athanasian creed isn’t quite that bad, and it is reproduced in the housegroup notes, but we won’t be using it today.

”And in the Trinity none is before or after another; none is greater or less than another, but all three Persons are co-eternal together and co-equal. So that in all things… the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.”


[7] The Athanasian Creed explains the Trinity in words that are correct, but,if you don;talready understand, itmay not help.

[8] I think the key lies, not in our attempt to understand the bare words, or the picture, but in the word ‘worship.’

[9] Worship implies, in fact requires, a relationship. Alistair McGrath writes that it “allows the individuality of the persons to be maintained, while insisting that each person shares in the life of the other two.”

God, the Trinity of creator, redeemer and sustainer, is about a relationship that has always existed.

[10] At the start of Genesis we read that, as God was creating the world, the

“Spirit of God was hovering over the waters”

[11] Our Proverbs reading today has Wisdom telling the story,

“I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep, when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep, when he gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep his command, and when he marked out the foundations of the earth. Then I was the craftsman at his side.”

[12] We can see that God is about creativity and community, and our reading from John speaks about the persons of the Trinity as Jesus tells us,

“All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you”

[13] There is generosity in that example –not just a once-and-for-all sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross, but that outpouring of love that continues and gives us peace. Like the faith that we share, that leads from our relationship with God, this has never been about individualism, it has always been about sharing and relationship, and love.

When Dick spoke last week about the Holy Spirit, that presence and power of God among us, he emphasised the love of God being poured into our hearts, and about us being leaky vessels. In 1 John 4:8 we read that “whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (interestingly, Dick chose this yesterday for Prayer Breakfast)

[14] That mutual dance of love, of that “community of being” that is often used to describe the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit of the Trinity is ’perichoresis’- Greek for 'to dance together' - think of the word 'choreography, as in 'the Three Persons dance together.'

[15] If you have read the Shack, you will recognise the references in there to a joyful-filled interdependent relationship of mutual love and sacrifice that is God, and how that relationship spills over in to our lives. And then, from our lives, how that overflows again into those around us.

We’ve looked at the way the Trinity is described in the Bible, through the incarnation and the Great Commission.

We’ve looked at a diagram describing the relationship between God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

We’ve seen pottery, and paintings that attempt to depict the dance of love that we share.

We’ve looked at about how God was in community at creation, as spirit and as wisdom.

[16] I opened by saying how dangerous it is even to look at something as powerful as the sun, and how hard it is to understand the full power and nature of God. We can feel overwhelmed by God’s majesty. Listen to the psalm that we heard earlier,

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have ordained, what is man, that you should be mindful of him”

And that’s the joy and simplicity that we come back to in Jesus. A real man, a human, someone we can identify with, and who can relate to us on our terms.

“Romans 5:1-2 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.”

[17] I’d like to remind you of the words of a song by Sidney Carter.

“I danced in the morning when the world was begun
I danced in the Moon & the Stars & the Sun
I came down from Heaven & I danced on Earth
At Bethlehem I had my birth”

And it goes on,
“They cut me down and I leapt up high
I am the Life that’ll never, never die!
I’ll live in you if you’ll live in Me -
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!”

Jesus then, as now,invites us to join the dance of love that is God the Trinity, creator, redeemer, sustainer of us all.

Let us pray.

God for us, we call You Father, God along side us, we call You Jesus, God within us, we call You Holy Spirit. You are the Eternal Mystery that enables, enfolds, and enlivens all things, even us, and even me. Every name falls short of your Goodness and Greatness. We can only see who You are in what is. We ask for such perfect seeing. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen.