Sermon for Trinity Sunday 2020 (following the protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd)
It can feel unfashionable enough being Christian in the public square without the added burden of Trinity Sunday! Here in Western Culture it often feels like we are done with placing trust in institutions, done with the Establishment but most of all we are done with Dogma. The Trinity always appears to us first and foremost as dogma or doctrine – as Luther called it, the mathematics of God.
Mark Oakley writes engagingly about the terrible way that much contemporary Christianity is desperate to be relevant but a lot less good at being resonant. At first glace The Trinity appears neither relevant nor resonant but nevertheless it is at the heart of literally centuries of exploration about what it means to be Christian disciples.
In the bible the word Trinity doesn’t appear but the ways in which people learn about the nature of God and the language they use about God gives us a picture of God as Spirit, God as human and God as Father or sometimes Mother.
It took the Christian community 300 years to come up with a coherent notion of God as Trinity and since then some of the great minds of the Church have used the language of the Trinity to give voice to their picture of God. Christians believe that God is both three persons but also one God. Clement of Alexandria called it a marvel and St Augustine said it was something that could not be grasped by human knowledge alone. Although the way the medieval theologians wrote about it you might be forgiven for thinking that they felt, if you were really, really, clever, you could explain it all!
Its often frustrating when preachers say that the answer is that ‘It’s a mystery’ but in this case, mystery really is at the heart of the Trinity because it’s a way of talking about the nature of God, and God is not a God who we can intellectually take hold of.
Having said that God isn’t something we can ‘intellectually get hold of’, I am equally frustrated by the kind of Trinity Sunday sermon which just says ignore all those fusty old book bound folk, the Trinity is just about love and community. One of the joys of Trinity Sunday is that it doesn’t let us off the hook that easily. Faith isn’t easy. The Trinity is Church doctrine and its potentially complex, baffling and unapproachable – as my kids might say to me ‘You don’t like it, well its not changing so suck it up!’
The first thing we might say about the Trinity is that it is rooted in our lived experience. This week the death of George Floyd in America has set the world on fire with rage about police brutality but also moved us into a wider debate about White privilege and the continuing racism in many of our institutions and organisations including in the Church. James Cone’s theology of black liberation focuses on the liberation of oppressed black persons in the US. In A Theology of Black Liberation, Cone writes that “the Holy Spirit is the spirit of the Creator and the Redeemer at work in the forces of human liberation in our society today. In America, the Holy Spirit is the black persons making decisions about their togetherness, which means making preparation for an encounter with whites”. Cone grounds his theology in the black experience in the US, which has an atrocious history of slavery, rape, lynching, and incarceration. Yet, Cone finds eschatological hope in the God of Liberation in the Scriptures and in the Spirituals.
Another Black American Theologian, Kameron Carter wants to talk about how we live in society with difference – including racial difference. He claims that Christians who want to think about difference should look no further than the Trinity. Difference is not just something we have to try to cope with, difference exists within the heart of the mystery of God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God’s invitation through Jesus for us to share in the life of the Trinity is an invitation to live our differences in love and peace and celebration.
The Trinity is the mystery at the heart of God but it is also a model for making sense of human spirituality – the fact that we find God as the fundamental and indescribable ground of all, as a partner in personal dialogue, and as the energy of one’s own deepest selfhood…”
One writer has called the Trinity the Grammar of Christian Discipleship. He claims that the powerful thing about the Trinitarian character of the Christian faith is that “there is no over arching single head, no ultimately privileged descriptive category …in terms of which the mystery of God is best considered.” In very simple language, The Trinity puts difference and diversity at the heart of the Christian picture of what God is like.
My struggle with preaching on Trinity Sunday is that doctrine can appear so lifeless, so often couched in the language of fact and intellect and not in the language of poetry and the heart. But in many ways that is exactly the point. At different stages in our lives we are touched by God in different ways – intellectual and rational, poetic and emotive, – in the head and the heart.
But as all good Liberation theologians would tell us, the point of the Trinity, of Christian Discipleship is to be touched in the feet! – Because we are called to walk and live the truths of the Trinity.
And the mystery of God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit which we encounter on the journey is what transforms us. But the Trinity stops us from saying, in this life at least, here it is, here is God, because the mystery of God is always in movement, dancing between the three persons of the Trinity, pointing to difference not as a problem to be solved but as a delight to fall into. Amen.