First preached as a sermon at Croydon
Minster on Trinity Sunday 2019
‘You stand on holy ground’ (Exodus 3.5)
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Tonight’s
readings (Exodus 3.1-15; John 3.1-17)
present us with the mystery of God: God in wind and flame, and yet also a God
found in silence and indefinable.
God as
mystery; God in history; God through love.
Wind
and flame evokes our celebration of Pentecost last week.
Then
we recalled the coming of the Holy Spirit, a Person of the Trinity, who is the
fullness of God, without denying the divinity of the Father and the Son, who
comes in mighty rushing wind and tongues of flame.
Today
we celebrate the Holy Trinity, a celebration of the Unity and the fullness of
God, a fullness and plenitude that spills into our lives and is made known in encounter-in-love with Father, Son and
Holy Spirit.
The flames of our first reading speak of the
mystery of God to be encountered and yet not touched. Moses encounters the
fullness of God, the One who speaks and says ‘I am who I am’.
Moses
is told to remove his sandals for he stands on holy ground. The sense of the
holiness of God is palpable in this encounter. In it too is the full presence
of God. The Father, the source of all, speaks: ‘I am’.
The
flames point us to the Holy Spirit, the voice that speaks of the redemption and
deliverance of Israel places the Son, the Eternal Word, Jesus Christ as the
heart of this, before his incarnation. Herein is the Trinity: Father, Son and
Spirit.
The wind of our second reading, blowing
where it will, speaks of God who is beyond our grasping, beyond holding on to,
beyond categories that we understand.
Nicodemus
encounters Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is not concept, Jesus Christ is a person,
a human being, yet the fullness of God is pleased to dwell in him.
A most
beautiful icon captures this divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ. It shows
the Blessed Virgin Mary bearing Jesus in the midst of the flames of the Burning
Bush: neither his divinity nor humanity is compromised or consumed in who he
is.
We see
that describing God (who cannot be described), describing God as Trinity states
the Unity of God, and the Diversity of God.
How
can we describe mystery? How can we describe love? We can describe its impact,
we can use the most beautiful and evocative of language, but that language
quickly runs out.
That’s
why there is a strand of theology known as apophatic, or negative, theology,
which acknowledges that as soon as we start speaking of God we become tongue
tied.
The
language of Trinity guards how we speak of God, constantly checking and
restraining our fantasises and projections onto God. The Book of Common Prayer contains the Creed of St Athanasius. It is a
dense, but rich, account of the Trinity and guards any language we put on God
at every turn.
When
we speak of God we have intellectually to remove the sandals from our feet, not
because our minds don’t matter, but because ultimately our quest to search out
God, to measure, categorise, handle, label God is fruitless. We move from mind
to heart: comprehension to apprehension.
This
is how we journey into the Mystery of God.
As the
Letter to the Hebrews puts it: ‘You have not come to something that can be
touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and the sound of a trumpet,
and a voice whose words make the hearers beg that not another word be spoken…
but you have come to the city of the Living God (Hebrews 12. 18, 19, 22)
The
Trinity roots us in the life of the Divine, and that’s what we celebrate today:
God as mystery; God in history; God in love.
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