Trinity Sunday
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 18th May, 2008
(I am grateful to Canon Eric Woods for the opening image in this sermon)
Now, a bit of work for you this morning. I want you to imagine, in your mind´s eye, three scenes. The first is of a man – the age doesn´t matter – who is very alone and isolated. A solitary – not by vocation or even by choice, but who is so caught up in himself that there is no room for other people. Someone locked in the centre of his own circumference or self-obsession. He is a self-contained, self-constructed atom, he reflects to and for himself and even when he speaks it is to himself because there is no-one to share even the simplest of words with.
The second scene to imagine is of a teenage couple, perhaps sitting out there in Churchill park on a bench by the water. They are totally entwined; they have eyes only for each other, their words are as few as the solitary’s but this time they are solely for one another. They can´t see or hear anyone else. They don´t see what´s around them. They are absorbed in each other. They don´t notice the little duck by their feet.
The third scene is of a husband and wife who obviously love one another greatly, their body-langauge says so just as clearly as the teenage couple. But that love has now grown and matured until it overflows – to their children who surround them, and to the wider cricle of their family and their friends. It overflows in every look, word and action. They somehow centre a whole network of connection and relationships, their togetherness creates other togetherness.
Keep these scenes in your mind and then ask yourself, taking on board that we can only think and talk of God using analogy from our own world and experience: which of the 3 pictures most accurately reflects the nature and being of God? Well, surely it cannot be the first. If God is love, he cannot be solitary or alone. The one who is his own ”all” cannot love. Love demands encounter and exchange, vulnerability and freedom. The man sitting alone and muttering to himself in a life of days centred on himself is no icon of the God we can recognise.
So what about the young couple, so in love? Here is love indeed, passionately felt, offered and returned but it is not yet complete because it is still too exclusive and excluding, they have no room for anyone else and they are not yet so confident in what they are sharing and its durability to let it reach out to others.
And so we discover, perhaps as a surprise, that if we could paint a picture to capture something of the essence of God, the God of Love, we must be able to show unconditional, self-giving love, freely offered and returned, and shared, overflowing to all with whom it has to do, as inclusive as that wedding couple say on their anniversary having a dance and pulling everyone else on to the floor to dance with them together and share in what is being shared.
And that is why the best Christians can do to try and capture the likeness of God, his nature and self, within our limitations, is to portray God as Trinity, being in a constant movement of love, given, received, returned between Father and Son, outpoured in Spirit. Early theologians described God as Trinity as the communion of love. God´s being was not solitary or self-absorbed. He was in his very heart a relationship of love in whom we are called to live, move and have our being. Father, prayed Jesus, may they all be one as thou Father art in me and I in thee so may they all be one in us”.
Christians came to realise that they couldn´t talk about God without talking about God as creator, source of all that is, without talking of God as redeemer, the one who repairs our wholeness, who seeks to rescue with a passion and resolve like that we have seen in China this week, and as Spirit, the overflow of love and energy that carries us and challenges us. These ways of talking of God were authentic to their experience of God although their words cracked under the strain. This was one God that was being spoken of, not three gods. As John Donne said, the belief in the Trinity is bones to philosophy but milk to faith. As milk it helps us to grow in the faith of God who is not static like a statue we can bow to, but who in the very depths of who he is, is a relator, dynamic, dancing, loving with an inclusive love.
Christians in their life together, we call it Church, are called to live in and reflect in the world the divine communion of love. This has been called the Christian calling to ”live the Trinity”. In the Easter Orthodox churches immediately before reciting the creed the congregation says: ”Let us love one another so that we may with one mind confess Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Trinity one in essence and undivided”. Note the words ”so that”. A genuine confession of God can only be made by those, who in likeness of the Trinity, show love mutually towards each other.
The 15th century Rublev icon is often interpreted as being a depiction of the Trinity. There are many things to say and I cant say many of them in a short sermon. However, after noticing that the eyes of each figure look at the others and that a circle of love is created you also notice that it is as if there is a seat yet to be taken in the centre foreground, by you. It is as if you are being invited to join at the table, centred by a chalice. In other words this mystery is not something we can gaze at in an abstract way or treat like some philosophical equation. It is a mystery that calls us in and that when you have seen this mystery you can not but keep looking there and become part of the communion of love. As St Augustine said of the Kingdom of Heaven, it is not just to be looked at but to be lived in. To proclaim faith in God as Trinity is to commit yourself to a radical new way of being and living your life.
One of the monks of Mount Athos has written the words with which I want to end:
”Believe me, there is one truth that reigns supreme from the fringes of the throne of glory down to the least shadow of the most insignificant of creatures: and that one truth is love. Love is the source from which the holy streams of grace flow down unceasingly from the city of God, watering the earth and making it fruitful. Like a deep or an abyss, in its infinity love helps us to picture to ourselves the dread vision of the Godhead. It is love that fashions all things and holds them in unity. It is love that gives life and warmth, that inspires and guides. Love is the seal set upon creation, the signature of the Creator. How can we make Christ come and dwell in our hearts? How else, except through love?
