Trinity Sunday: For love; against idolatry

Proverbs 8.22-31 Before the beginning of the earth, Wisdom was brought forth

Romans 5.1-5 To God through Christ in the love which is poured out through the Spirit

John 16.12-15 All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

+ Blessed be God the Father, and the only begotten Son of God;

and blessed be the Holy Spirit: for the mercy he has shown to us.

 

It is often said that it’s rude to talk about money, politics, sex and religion.

These things can make people feel very uncomfortable for a variety of reasons.

That said, it is not unreasonable to expect a priest from a pulpit to address any of those topics, from time to time.

Money, politics, sex and religion all have a bearing on how we live our lives and therefore have a deep bearing on how we live life as followers of Jesus Christ.

On Trinity Sunday, I’m not going to address the impolite, but rather focus on God.

Shock, horror: a priest preaching about God!

And, let’s face it, God should not just be pondered on Trinity Sunday: every Sunday, every single day, sees us immersed in the life of God, the Holy Trinity.

After all, we are baptised, ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit’.

Every time we gather to celebrate the Eucharist we do so, ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit’.

Some might say, and have said, that the Trinity is really Greek philosophy, playing with words, getting too dense for simple faith.

The Church of England begs to differ, declaring that account of God is, ‘uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds’. (Church of England, Preface to the Declaration of Assent)

And it matters.

The Christian belief in the one God, revealed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, takes us to the heart of the nature of God.

This belief is expanded every time we say or sing the Creed.

We sing of the Father, the creator; the Son, - Eternal Word - always nestled in the Father’s heart, who takes human flesh and redeems us from our sinful condition; the Holy Spirit, the One who sustains us in life, and forms us into a body of worship and adoration of the Holy One.

We believe in one God.

And to declare, ‘I believe in one God’ is a very bold thing.

It is bold, not simply because in an increasingly disenchanted world people find it harder to say, but it is bold because to believe in God expresses concrete hope in something unseen; it is bold because it reminds us we humans are not gods!

To believe in God is to be enchanted, to believe that we inhabit a world that is bigger than ourselves, that we are not in control and God is the ground of our being.

And it’s not just theory.

Have you noticed that the so-called New Atheists, the likes of Richard Dawkins - who weirdly loved talking about God - are now really rather quiet.

Their splurge against God has fizzled out because it could only mock and just offered a blackhole of despair and doom and nothingness.

For believers not only do we assert that there is such an entity as God, but that God is sovereign in our lives and concerned about our lives.

Our belief in God shapes who we are, how we make decisions, how we cherish and value the creation, life and purpose.

The Trinity sketches out the inner life of the God we cannot fully know or understand.

What a Christian can, and should, always say of God is that, ‘God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.’ (1 John 4.16b).

To speak of God the Trinity is the beautiful sense we have that God is love: God created us out of love; God saves us out of love; God sustains us and draws us together, out of love.

Love is not simply a by-product or an ‘output’ of God, but is the heart and essence and substance of God.

The image of the Trinity, this glimpse into God, is of a perfect unity of love: love that gives of itself, is free of rivalry and manipulation, that delights in the other, and wills the good of the other, simply because they are there.

God is not in competition with you!

The Trinity is the love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

And to speak of God as Trinity also guards against idolatry, which is love misdirected.

What the New Atheists got right, was to warn us – in the same way the Old Testament prophets do - against creating idols of our own making or to invoke God to coerce or denigrate others.

An idol is something that becomes an object of devotion or worship that deflects us from God.

All those things considered impolite to talk about - money, politics, sex and, even religion (at least when we stop talking about God and talk about ourselves) - can easily become idols themselves.

Jesus says that ‘the Spirit of Truth will guide you into all truth’, (John 16.13) in other words guide us into the truth of the God of love, the blessed Trinity.

God is not a figment of our imaginations; he is always beyond them.

The invisible God is made visible in the face of Jesus Christ. (cf Colossians 1.15)

The unknowable God is knowable, as St Paul prays, in beautifully mystical language:

that you, being rooted and grounded in love, ¹⁸ may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, ¹⁹ and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3.17-19)

May we be filled with the fulness of God, + Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion and power now and through the ages of ages. Amen.