| The Dance of the Trinity |
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Sermon by Marjorie Brown for Trinity Sunday 2009 If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of reluctant footsteps of assistant curates and visiting preachers all over the world climbing into pulpits today, preparing to tackle the subject of the Trinity. It is notoriously the day when vicars want someone else to give the sermon. Everyone feels daunted by this subject, and the usual wheeze is to admit defeat before you begin. Undoubtedly the most popular starting point for the day is a quote from the Athanasian Creed, also known as the Quicunque vult, which used to be recited at Morning Prayer on Trinity Sunday. It states that a Christian must believe in “the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.” That’s as far as many people get with the Trinity – it’s such a mysterious business that it doesn’t seem worth thinking about it. And it is indeed a very difficult subject to discuss with people of other faiths. I know, I have tried! Muslims and Jews are often deeply offended by the very idea because of their unwavering commitment to the oneness of God. Yet the Trinity is the distinctive core doctrine that differentiates Christianity from the other Abrahamic faiths, so we must be prepared to talk about it. We don’t help this conversation much by some of our artistic representations, particularly those from the Middle Ages. The other day I was in the National Gallery with a clergy group, being shown round some religious pictures. We looked at the 15th century Pistoia Santa Trinità Altarpiece by Francesco Pesellino – a stunningly beautiful painting, but in theological terms perhaps not very helpful. It shows an old man in a papal tiara on a throne holding a young man crucified with a dove hovering between them. When we think of God, is this really the picture that comes into our minds? If we showed it to a Jew or Muslim, I don’t think our dialogue about the one God would progress very far. Perhaps pictorial representations of an idea as mysterious as the Trinity aren’t a good idea. Or if we do use them, we might be wise to try to get away from the childishly naive old man, young man, bird scenarios. Linda has reminded us of the Rublev icon of the Trinity above our candlestand. It’s a symbolic picture of the story of three angels visiting Abraham and sitting round his table, with the fourth side open to us to join them. The Bible makes it clear that the visit was somehow an encounter between God and Abraham. So Christians have used this scene as a way of thinking about God in three persons, though of course that was far from the thought of the writer of Genesis. The reason that Rublev is more helpful theologically than Pesellino is because the icon shows the Trinity in a dynamic relationship with one another and with us. All that we can attempt to speak about is how God relates to us. Before the ultimate mystery of God’s eternal being we must be silent. The truth about God cannot be unmasked, as it were, by human effort. We would know nothing about God and have nothing to say about God if God had not chosen to reveal himself to us. And right away we are wandering into dangerous territory, because of course there is no “himself” about God, who is utterly beyond gender as well as beyond every other category we can imagine. But Christians do believe that we can rely on the revelation of God shown to us in Jesus Christ. Whatever is true of Jesus is true of God. This doesn’t mean of course his maleness or his beard or the colour of his eyes: it means that the way Jesus relates to people, with compassion, with acceptance and with challenge, is the way God relates to us. It means that the forgiveness and freedom Jesus offers are divine gifts. And it means that Jesus’ passionate proclamation of liberty to captives and sight for the blind is a sign of God’s preferential option for the poor. Christian social teaching is deeply rooted in the doctrine of the Trinity. Our belief that God reveals God’s own true self to us in a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and that God dwells with us in the presence of the Holy Spirit, means that we can never fall into the trap of “me and God”. Cardinal Newman was famous for the phrase “solus cum solo”, “alone with the alone”, which he used to describe his ideal relationship with God. There is something very important here, about the need to spend time alone in silence with God. But the flip side is that we find the rest of humanity a bit of a nuisance and a distraction. Christians can never go down this road. If God is Trinity, the Father eternally loving the Son and pouring that love into our hearts through the Spirit, then divine truth is about community. And it is in community, in the Church, the Body of Christ, that we learn about what God is like. Only through giving and receiving love on a human level can we begin to understand the love of God. Only by forgiving our debtors can we receive the forgiveness God longs to give us. Only by eating and drinking with our brothers and sisters at the table of the Lord do we awaken our hunger for God’s heavenly banquet. And in caring for the poorest and neediest we see the face of Jesus. God’s plan, so we learn from the Bible, is not for a long line of individuals to be let through the pearly gates on the basis of right belief or action. God’s plan is for a renewed creation in which lions and lambs, Jews and Gentiles, frolic together in joyful harmony. God so loved the world that he sent his Son, says John’s gospel. It is through our rebirth in the Spirit that we see the kingdom of God – our goal is not escape from it all, but mutual delight in God’s family. Paul puts it very plainly in the letter to the Romans, and here perhaps is one of the clearest Biblical references to God as Trinity: “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” This is an intimate picture of our life in union with the triune God. The Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit to our filial relationship with God, enabling us to say “Father” just as Jesus said in the Lord’s Prayer. That relationship makes us sisters and brothers with Jesus. We inherit the same promise of glory that he made manifest to his disciples in his resurrection and ascension. We are one with him when we suffer, and we will be one with him in glory when we see God face to face. In a word, we are being invited to take our place at the table, in the space left vacant for us by the gracious hospitality of the Holy Trinity. God doesn’t need us, because Father, Son and Spirit live eternally in a perfect exchange of love. But God chooses to invite us into that endless exchange, to be caught up into that loving dance. Here in Primrose Hill we are privileged to have Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society just down the road, and several members of this parish know it very well indeed. Sir Thomas Beecham took the view that everything is worth trying once except incest and folk dancing. If you agree with him, then the image will not be attractive, but if you enjoy folk dancing you will understand and remember the delight of being pulled into a dance with a circle of other people. The inclusiveness, energy and sheer joy of dancing facing others in a ring takes us back to the earliest pleasures of childhood. All language about God is inadequate picture language, but this comes as close as any to what the Christian faith teaches us about the Trinity. Through the Spirit we are caught up into the joy of being, with Jesus, a beloved child of God. And through the Spirit we are sent to serve Jesus in our neighbour in the world that God made, loves and is remaking as the peaceable kingdom. The circle of that celestial dance grows ever wider and wider, but we are never any further away from its centre. The great hymn by John Mason, “How shall I sing that majesty”, that we had at my induction in January, has a final stanza which expresses this:
How great a being, Lord, is thine,
Which doth all beings keep! May the Holy Trinity draw us ever deeper into that circle whose centre is everywhere. Amen. |
