Trinity Sunday

 

Trinity Sunday

Isa 6.1-8

Rom 8.12-17

Mark 1.9-11

So, it’s Trinity Sunday - a day on which traditionally the Church reflects on no less than the nature of God’s own life. On how Jesus as the eternal Word of God is a co-equal person of the Godhead and how the Holy Spirit as the mutual self-gifting love of Father and Son spills over in loving gift to all creation. To spill the beans on all that in a 15 minute sermon without committing any of the enticing but deadly heresies of the ancient Church. I’ve heard it suggested that Trinity Sunday is also the one day of the year on which your hardworking preacher is most likely to call in sick!

Well, what if we forget the tricky theological formulas the Church has wrestled with for two millenia and ask ourselves, seriously, how do I personally imagine God? What picture comes to your mind when you think of God? 

I remember once asking members of a parish study group to draw something that summed up what God “looked like” to them. Well, none of us were artists, but we produced a variety of images - a smiley face or a warm hug, a loving parent or grand-parent, stars and galaxies or the Sun in the sky - and a few that looked something like a judge or a police officer or a thunder-cloud. Writer Gerald Hughes talks of a figure he calls “Uncle George” who is benign enough on the surface - always smiling, always dishing out treats and remembering birthdays and special occasions - but waiting, secretly, for us to make a mistake that deserves punishment. And he notes that when we have the idea of God as being a bit like Uncle George then our own attitudes, also, can become less than loving to others. So it matters how we imagine God.

But, let’s face it, the Bible shows us not just one but many images of God, some tender and protective - but others, like the one we heard about in our reading from Isaiah, downright terrifying. It seems the God of light and life - the compassionate, intimate and nurturing God – the forgiving, understanding God - can’t be separated from the God of darkness – the avenging, wrathful God, the God that the prophet Jeremiah even describes as an enemy. It seems we can’t pick and choose, we can’t just choose the idea of God that appeals to us, and we need to hold both in some sort of creative tension.

In the first reading today we hear the prophet Isaiah telling of his vision of the Lord, when he finds himself commissioned to be a prophet. It is an awesome, even terrifying, vision. God, seated on an enormous high throne, dwarfs everything on earth. God is surrounded by seraphim, bizarre and wondrous creatures like six-winged flying serpents who call out constantly in the words of worship, declaring God to be Holy! Holy! Holy! 

And how does this vision affect Isaiah? Well, immediately, and quite reasonably, he decides that he’s cactus. His number’s up. He feels like he’s experiencing a nuclear explosion from its epicentre - an exhilarating experience but one that you know is going to be your last. Why does he feel like that? Because the vision makes Isaiah horribly conscious of his own sinfulness and he’s suddenly confronted with such awesome holiness that he assumes it can only burn him up like a feather in a furnace. And then in his vision the refining fire is brought to him, in the form of a coal from the altar, but instead of burning him up he is purified by it, his sinfulness has been burned away so he can be fit to be God’s messenger.

The reading we heard this morning from Paul’s letter to the Romans gives us a completely different view from the other end of the spectrum of experience of God. Far from experiencing God as terrifying, Paul speaks of us being adopted as beloved children into God’s family. He compares our experience of God to a toddler running excitedly to its parents yelling “Daddy! Mummy!” And even though Paul writes in Greek, he brings in an Aramaic word here, the familiar word ‘Abba’ which Jesus also used when he prayed or talked about God. Paul seems to be telling us that with God we can be totally confident that we will be gathered up in big warm loving arms and hear the words, “I love you, my child.”

And the reading from St Mark’s Gospel? Actually, this one is not so often noticed as a trinitarian passage but it absolutely is because in this brief description of Jesus’ baptism by John in the River Jordan, we are privileged witnesses to the movement of love that is at the heart of Jesus’ relationship with his Father. Mark reports this as a private vision - it is Jesus himself, not the bystanders, who sees the Spirit descending on him like a dove, and the voice of his Father in heaven addressing him personally, naming him as the beloved Son. What I notice most about this is the tenderness. Not for Mark any Niceaen Creed-type speculations about having two natures and being of one substance with the Father - that happens centuries later when the Church gets round to the important but dry work of hammering out doctrine. For Mark, what is important is intimacy and relationship. And this moment that we are invited into in Mark’s Gospel seems to me to be mirrored in that other moment of trusting abandonment in the prayer of Jesus on the cross. 

So - what is God like - for us? Well, it strikes me that in Jesus we see who God is and what God is like. If we want to know what God is really like - well, the one thing we know for sure is that God is like Jesus. You know, people expected the messiah to come with fire and judgement? That’s what John the Baptist expected, for example. Maybe because that’s what they thought God was like. But Jesus surprised everybody by coming with humble vulnerability, with forgiveness and compassion - and still people say, ‘well, just wait until Jesus comes again - the second coming - then he really will be sorting the mess out, then we’ll see some fireworks’. As though he got it wrong the first time around. But, you know what? When we see our Lord again it will still be the Lord of loving forgiveness and humble vulnerability because that is who Jesus is. And that’s who God is. 

Of course, Jesus himself evokes a range of reactions. The first time Simon Peter meets Jesus he reacts pretty much the same as Isaiah in the Temple. He falls to his knees and says, “Get away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” Peter felt like he was naked – exposed - way too close to the fire, and as though if he didn’t get some distance he might not survive the experience. But then, on the other hand, there was a woman who apparently had every reason to feel herself a sinner, who when she first encountered Jesus she walked into the middle of a respectable dinner party and fell down crying and began massaging his feet. Sounds to me like this woman would have related much more to Paul’s image of loving arms that you could hide in and know you were safe.

I guess, when it comes down to it, we need the full range of images of God that the Bible offers us – the awesome, transcendent God – the holiness and Otherness of God that provokes the reaction of holy fear in us – as well as St Paul’s image of the tender and loving God. Because our experience of God is not only determined by who God is, but also by who we are and how we react in God’s presence. The baggage we each bring along with us from our past is different. The whole range of ways of reacting to God is right there in the Bible – how we hear the stories of our faith depends on who we are. Which means that our personal images of God – like the images of God we find in the Bible – tell us something first and foremost about our own divided and contradictory nature.  The tension is not in God, but in us.

So I can’t help asking myself, what if at the end of all things I find myself in God’s presence and discover that the judgement of God is nothing more or less than that – in the presence of God’s holiness, unconditional forgiveness and love – I simply can’t help but acknowledge my own vindictiveness and selfishness. What if, in other words, the only real judgement is the one I pass on myself? What if the scariest thing about God is the demand that that much love places on us – on how we live our own lives?

Actually, when it comes down to it, God isn’t a problem to be solved but a relationship to be lived. The doctrine of the Trinity teaches us that God is a community of self-outpouring love and holiness that – in some way we can’t comprehend but can experience – includes us. And that’s the good news.