The Trinity

1990 (Year A), 10 June /
Trinity Sunday

Holy Trinity Church Dalston

For those to be confirmed this evening, today is very special. And it’s unusual for parish clergy to get a chance to say anything; normally it’s all left to the Bishop, so it’s a rare day for me too.

I hope above all the candidates enjoy the whole thing and ask the rest of you to pray that this might happen. For over the past weeks you’ve been encouraged to think about your beliefs, and what’s important in your lives. You have begun to think about your life and how that relates to the church and to God as we come together in worship. In a few hours time you will make your own profession of faith. The place where it happens is Holy Trinity Church and the day, just happens to be Trinity Sunday.

Now much of what you’ve learnt will still be confused and some will already be forgotten. It’s not surprising, for when we begin to think about even the most apparently simple statements of faith they suddenly seem to become anything but simple.

For example, you will this evening profess your belief in the Most Holy Trinity, God the Father who creates, God the Son who redeems and God the Holy Spirit who gives life to the people of God. It is the essence of our faith. It’s this experience of the Divine which distinguishes us from all other religions for no other religion claims to know God in this way. And when we say it quickly like this it all seems quite easy to understand.

We are told, ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ – well a rose might, but when it comes to describing the Trinity in other ways something goes wrong immediately – here’s what one man wrote about the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit and us.

‘Man (and any other being of limited freedom and responsibility like man) can forget Being and their guardianship of Being, and can chose to be for themselves, gathering up their being and ceasing to manifest that letting be which is the essence of Being of which they were constituted guardians. Or to put it another way, they can become alienated from Being, although they have received their being from the letting-be of Being; and have become alienated from Being, they themselves slip back from fuller being to less being and toward nothing. This in turn frustrates the letting be of Being for the being that Being has let be fail to fulfil their potentialities for being, and slip back from them.’ Now I want you all to know that the confirmation candidates have not been taught that. It’s just one of my problems, that the man who wrote it played a part in teaching me.

The Trinity is a poetic description of God. Perhaps it’s true that it reflects the totality of our Christian tradition’s experience of God, but it may well not be our experience at this moment. There have been times, when one of the separate parts seemed more important, more real to me, that the other two, sometimes the whole thing had made very little sense.

An important marker on the journey to God is being laid down for those shortly to be confirmed. I hope some foundations have been laid over the last few weeks which will stand them in good staid for the future but I hope that the most important thing they’ve learnt is that there is nothing so firm that it can’t be changed as our knowledge of God grows. I hope that we and they can sit lightly enough with the doctrines of the Church, so that we are all able to see them only as indicators to God, not God in all glory.

There is an instinct in all of us to create doctrines as if they’re enshrined unchangeable in heaven. Yet the moment we do that, we must realise that we’ve constructed something which will eventually have to give way to new understandings.

It’s always very hard, at any time on our journey, not to be frightened and confused when our experiences don’t measure up to the things we profess to believe, or the things we long for don’t come to be. The temptation is to give the whole lot up as a bad job and go and do something else. And even if we stick with the things we were taught, we become so fearful about giving them up that they become more of a hindrance to our growth than springboard to greater understanding.

What today is all about, and what God wants, is for us to know, and experience the diving in all fullness whether it means being embraced by the Father, following the Son or being strangely warmed by the Spirit. Pray God that it maybe so. AMEN