Trinity Sunday

1991 (Year B), 26 May /
Trinity Sunday

St Peter de Beauvoir Town

The experience of God has been central to our history and still is so for many of us today. And how to express this experience so that we might speak about it to others has exercised people from the beginning of time. By and large all people have been able to do is to tell stories. ‘It’s like this’ they said and so we got stories of creation like the ones in Genesis. Sometimes they pointed to great events and said, ‘There is the hand of God’, and so it was when the Israelites crossed from Egypt to the Promised Land. Occasionally someone lived such an extraordinary life that people recognised the hand of God at work in them. ‘There is God’, they said, and so people like Mother Theresa become revered.

Some, not particularly religious people have been involved in it as well. At the clergy conference the other week a professor of physics came to speak. He showed pictures of the universe and spoke eloquently of creation. ‘It’s all so simple really’ he said, ‘It’s so simple that it has led some scientists to suggest that there must have been a creator.’

This encounter between God and creation, this experience, when it’s described is always a bit one sided. An example. Job, we are told, spent hours railing against God on account of his suffering. He goes on and on. In the story you can almost feel God’s patience reaching breaking point. Finally when he can bear no more God explodes and answers Job out of the whirlwind ‘Who is this’, he demands, ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge’, and from that point Job is just taken apart.

‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements, surely you know … Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness. Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.’

Faced with this onslaught Job answered the Lord, ‘I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee’. Words expressing awe, wonder and finally his acceptance in the scheme of things. Words which find an echo in the response of Thomas to Jesus after the resurrection, ‘Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails and place my finger in the mark of the nails … I will not believe. And when confronted by the wounds of the risen Christ all he can say is ‘My Lord and my God’.

The experience of God ranges from awesome wonder at the immensity and power, people are literally struck dumb, to the intimacy that human lovers might share. So we get God the Father and God the Son. Yet there is more, for God is also known in our lives as the one who joins us together, the one who inspires and leads us on. The one who is literally everywhere. The Spirit. ‘Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or wither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend to heaven, thou art there! ... If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me ... If I say, let the darkness cover me, and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to thee, the night is as bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee’.

The experience of God enlightens, enfolds and empowers creation. God spoke and it was, God lived in creation and blessed it, God breathes life and it is sustained. This is the record of our encounters with the divine. It’s clear and precise.

Yet the explanation of all this has been anything but clear and precise. Preachers, including me, did great verbal summersaults trying to explain all the apparent contradictions in the definition of the Trinity. I feel no need to do that anymore. It’s all so amazingly simple. We experience God in different ways only because our experiences and our visions are limited. St Paul says now we look through a glass dimly and there will come a point when we see clearly.

So today on the Feast day of the Holy Trinity – when the church recognises the awesomeness, and majesty of God. A time when we recall that God is also a sharer in our humanity and weakness. And when we give thanks to God as we see the divine nature leading us on and bringing us into all truth. We rejoice in our knowledge and awareness of God and look forward to a time when words will be superfluous and we will simply rest in the arms of the divine. AMEN