So… Trinity Sunday. I’ll be honest — this is the one I’ve quietly dodged over the years. Many a preacher has stood before their congregation on Trinity Sunday and tied themself in knots with their Trinity metaphors.
The Trinity is like a shamrock…the Trinity is like water, ice and steam…the Trinity is like Aquafresh toothpaste – although other brands are available. Before you know it, you’ve gone and accidentally explained a heresy from the 4th century. Trinity Sunday heresy is rife in its preaching.
Congregations may politely nod at these sermons, but at the end of it you’ve no more idea of how the Trinity actually works and maybe some really unhelpful and confusing ideas of how it doesn’t. So today, I don’t want to try and explain the Trinity – I don’t think I ever could. Instead, I want to invite you into it.
Because at its heart, the Trinity isn’t a puzzle to be solved. It’s a relationship. Or, as Fr. Richard Rohr beautifully puts it… it’s a divine dance. Dance is about movement, reaction, and being in unison.
Now I did a little bit of
dance in my younger days – I even have a medal for coming 3rd place in
a cha cha contest, but dance in my adult years mostly consisted of being in a
mosh pit at Jilly’s Rockworld – for anyone who doesn’t know what that means you
can ask me questions over coffee!
But however we dance or move our bodies, the Divine Dance of Father, Son, Spirit; Maker, Redeemer, Sustainer; Speaker, Word and Breath – the Divine Dance of the Trinity is never still, but constantly in motion, pouring out towards one another an eternal exchange of love.
You might find this way of thinking about the trinity easy to grasp – or you may be sitting in your pew absolutely flummoxed. As always, the bible readings today have been carefully curated to reflect where we are in the liturgical year- but we don’t find any further explanation in them. Instead, they give us glimpses — windows into this holy mystery.
In Isaiah we read - “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand?" “The Lord is the everlasting God… the Creator… who does not grow weary.”
This gives me a sense of a
God so big, so beyond us, as to be uncontainable…and yet…“He gives power to the
faint… and strengthens the powerless.”
Despite that vastness, ours isn’t a distant, detached God. This is a God who is both beyond everything, and yet intimately present with us.
Then Paul, in that
beautiful closing blessing from Corinthians writes: “The grace of the Lord
Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with
you…”
Grace, Love and Communion.
This isn’t about doctrine; it gives us something tangible to explain how we experience God. We can see Grace at work, we can feel Love, and we live within Communion with God and each other.
And then we have the Gospel. The risen Jesus stands with his friends — some worshipping, some doubting – and I love when we have a bit of doubt thrown in, I’m sure Thomas in the altar window would agree, because that’s our reality, that’s how church is - a mixture of faith and uncertainty, with a bit prayer and worship thrown in.
Jesus doesn’t separate his
disciples into good and bad, the believers and the doubters. He includes all of
them in what we call the Great Commission – and this is the reading we have in all
our afternoon baptism services.
“Go… baptising… in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…” Jesus then promises: “I am with you always…to the end of the age." Intimately close to us though our entire lives.
When I try and put the
glimpses from each reading together, it gives a picture of a God who is vast
and yet comes and meets us where we are.
A God who is grace, love
and communion.
A God who is Father, Son
and Spirit
It gives me a sense of a God who wants to know us and be in relationship with us.
In Baptism we’re drawn into that relationship with God. When Jesus tells the disciples “go and baptise” he’s telling them their work is to draw everyone they meet into that relationship too.
When we say yes to God’s invitation, we allow ourselves to be drawn into the dance, caught up in the movement of God and living within that flow of love.
If God is a dance of love, then faith isn’t striving to reach God “up there”, always feeling beyond our reach. Faith is noticing that we’re already being held within God’s love, we're already part of the movement.
This view of God can also
teach us something about our communal life and how we move together.
Paul says: “live in peace…
agree with one another”
This doesn’t mean we all have to think the same things, because we know whether we’re talking about the wider church, or just our little corner of it, we’re never going to be the same as each other.
The wonderful thing is unity doesn’t mean sameness - the Trinity itself isn’t sameness, it’s diversity in relationship, or difference held together in love.
Which means church, at its
best, is meant to look a bit like a dance too, sometimes in harmony, and sometimes
out of step but continuing to move together, and to make space for each other.
The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th-century English mystical treatise, teaches that God cannot be grasped by thought or imagination but can be approached through a "cloud of unknowing" sustained by a loving intention.
So maybe Trinity Sunday isn’t about getting our heads around something impossible, maybe it’s about letting go of the need for explanations, trusting the holy mystery and stepping onto the dance floor.
Letting ourselves be drawn
into love.
Letting ourselves be held
in grace.
And letting ourselves become part of a communion that’s always been there.
We humans love to
complicate things, so maybe in times such as these we need to keep it simple;
God isn’t distant or
unknowable
God is a community of
love.
And we’re already part of that community
It can be so liberating to stop trying to solve the mystery and instead to start living it.
In the name of the Father,
and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
