Sermon: Evensong - Trinity Sunday 2014

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 15th June 2014

Service:

Evensong

Readings:

Isaiah 6 1-8

John 16.5-15

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 14.8M)

‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;

the whole earth is full of his glory.’ (Isaiah 6.3)

+ In nomine Patris…

Isaiah, the prophet, is quite specific about when and where it happened: in the year King Uzziah died; in the Temple. Through the smoke of the Temple Isaiah saw a clear vision of the Lord of hosts, God, ‘I AM WHO I AM’, the one who declares to Moses, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ (Exodus 3.6a). There in front of Isaiah the LORD is sitting on a throne, high and lofty. Moses at the burning bush hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God’ (Exodus 3.6); Elijah wrapped his face in his mantle as the LORD passed by (1 Kings 19.13); did Isaiah look? Well, he doesn’t describe the features of God, but simply comments on the hem of his robe that filled the temple and the seraphs that were in attendance.

The Hebrew tradition generally recoils from looking on the face of God, since looking on that face in some way diminishes the majesty of God. To describe God is all too often a human strategy to confine or domesticate God. Reticence in describing God is fundamental to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

However this proper reticence is disrupted in the incarnation of the Word, Jesus Christ. For in the incarnation God is seen in human form, gazing on the face of Jesus Christ is to gaze on the Father, as he says, ‘whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14.9). Paul says in Colossians, ‘Christ is the image of the invisible God the firstborn of all creation’ (Colossians 1.15). The incarnation and seeing the Father in the face of the Son doesn’t tidy up our image of God or mean we can domesticate or confine God: quite the contrary, because the incarnation unlocks our understanding of God as Trinity and what we might think we mean when we say we believe in the one true God. It is, as it were, that the pieces of the puzzle of God, and our entrenched images, are thrown up in the air and start landing in a Trinity shaped pattern mapped out in the Creeds. The Creeds may look like attempts to tidy things up but are quite the contrary, because they are like buoys bobbing in a vast sea, marking and pointing to the expansiveness of the catholic faith that is rooted in the Trinity, rooted in the expansiveness of God.

The incarnation disrupts how we can think about God ‘high and lofty’; in the incarnation we don’t just see the hem of his robe, but we can reach out with the woman suffering those long years from haemorrhages and touch the hem of his robe and be healed (Matthew 9.20; Mark 5.25; Luke 8.43). God’s nature hasn’t changed but our horizons of imagination of God have been stretched by the intensification of God’s presence on earth in the person of Jesus Christ. The psalms anticipate this saying, ‘Your face, O Lord, do I seek’ (Psalm 27.8).

At matins this morning Canon Nicholas illustrated Trinty by reflecting on our wonder looking at the heavens and speaking of the cosmos and light years, pointing to the vastness of things. At the other end of the spectrum, last week I visited the University of Surrey Advanced Technology Institute where I saw images of objects measured in micrometres, a millionth of a metre. I saw a magnified image of some silicon that was 1 micrometre wide. A human hair measures something like 100 micrometres wide; it’s an almost meaningless measurement. The point of that is to suggest that curiously the more tiny something gets the more our vision expands. It is a metaphor that cannot be pushed too far, but the immensity of God is captured in, what is in cosmic terms, the ‘nanotechnology’ of a human baby in Bethlehem and man of Jerusalem; the incarnate, crucified, risen and ascended Lord. Just as I can never again look at a silicon in the same way having seen those images last week, the incarnation of the Word says that we can never look at God in the same way again, because now we can look at God. But then God cannot be measured in micrometres, kilometres, or even good old feet and inches, or even furlongs and cubits.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, then, magnifies our understanding of the nature and possibilities of God. Magnifies is a really useful word in this context. The magnifying glass both expands and intensifies. Placed over something tiny the magnifying glass enables us to see details invisible to our naked eye; it expands our vision: placed over a dry leaf on a sunny day the same glass will intensify the sun’s rays such that those rays will burn the leaf; it intensifies light.

When we were baptised, we were baptised with the Trinitarian formula of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To be baptised in the name of the Father, and of Son and of the Holy Spirit sets out both the beginning and completion of our journey, it tells us what we are and what we are to become. What we are is precious creatures made in the image and likeness of God; and that is what we become. This is the intimacy of the Trinity. We become, as St John intimates, nothing less than the sons and daughters of God who are drawn into the mystery of his life so that we find our true identity in him in relationship.

Looking through a smoke filled Temple Isaiah knew that God is indescribable. St Paul knew that gazing on God is like seeing, ‘in a mirror dimly’, or as the Greek puts it, ‘in a riddle’ (1 Corinthians 13.12a). The Trinitarian markers unleashed at the incarnation enable Paul to say ‘but then we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known’ (1 Corinthians 13.12). The partiality of our vision will come to an end when we are drawn fully in to the life of the Holy Trinity.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is about getting our language right about God in relation to God’s immeasurable unconfinability and connecting that to the nanotechnology of human existence. This is the life of prayer, of all who delight in the mystery of God – mystics, contemplatives, theologians, you and me.  The doctrine of the Trinity is too important for us, as Christians, to walk away from, for it a tremendously optimistic anthropology let alone theology, a vision of humanity finding its completeness in the life of God, the blessed Trinity.