Invited in

A Sermon preached on Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021 at St. Augustine’s

Isaiah 6:1-8, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17

Today is Trinity Sunday, sometimes also referred to as the only Sunday dedicated to a doctrine, rather than an event or a person. But of course, I could also make a case for Christmas being dedicated to the Incarnation, God becoming human, or Easter to the resurrection, and both of those are doctrines. And Trinity Sunday may not be about a person, but it is about God, one God in three persons.

Today is also a Family Service, so I thought I would look at ideas for explaining the concept of the Trinity to children. One suggestion was to use a hardboiled egg – one egg in three parts: shell, egg white and yolk. I did not find that very convincing. There is not a lot of life or love or movement in a hardboiled egg. And we cannot imagine the Trinity without any of those!

Another idea was to talk about the Trinity as describing God as a team, in which each person plays a particular role: a soccer team we have the goalkeeper, a defender and a forward (and yes I know that a football team has more than three people!). That’s not too bad an idea actually as in the course of a football game a forward player will also defend, defenders stop goals, and goalkeepers have even been known to score goals. And in the Trinity, it is not the case that each person only has one role. Take our creation for example. According to the Nicene Creed, the Father is “the maker of heaven and earth,” but through the Son “all things were made,” and the Holy Spirit is “the giver of life.” But still, team still sounds like three separate people and therefore overemphasises the three at the expense of the one.

The problem is that most analogies, however well intended, are always oversimplifications and end up diminishing one of the truths about the Trinity – whether it’s the distinction – that God is three persons – or the unity – that God is one. Even St. Patrick, one of whose prayers to the Trinity, to the Three in One and One in Three we will hear sung later as our final hymn, was guilty of an oversimplification when, at least according to legend, he used the shamrock as a metaphor for the Holy Trinity when he was first introducing Christianity to Ireland.

So, if analogies won’t help, what about our readings, what do they have to say about the Trinity? One of the challenges to preaching on Trinity Sunday is that there are no Biblical passages that fully describe our Christian understanding of God as three persons. But it is still a concept that emerges from our reflection upon scripture, upon how God was experienced.

The first passage we heard this morning was from the Prophet Isaiah. Seemingly out of nowhere, he finds himself in the presence of God and it is terrifying. This is God the creator, mighty, lofty, transcendent, utterly other. Isaiah believes that no one can see the Lord and live. After all, God told Moses “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live." (Exodus 33:20) But Isaiah doesn’t die, instead God reaches out to him, makes him worthy and invites him to go as God’s messenger: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” God asks. Isaiah replies - emboldened and empowered - “Here am I; send me!” We hear nothing about Father, Son or Holy Spirit here, but we do learn one important thing. God desires relationship and God makes us worthy of that relationship, God values us.

The extract from Paul’s Letter to the Romans is a little more explicit. We have the Spirit of God, we have Christ – not called the Son in this section but still referred to as a child of God, and we have the Father. Even more importantly we have another invitation: if we allow ourselves to be led by the Spirit of God, we are children of God and we are empowered by the Spirit to call God “Abba (Dad)! Father!” Just as Jesus did. The Spirit brings new life and draws us into that relationship with God that we need and that God desires.

And then we have Jesus’ nocturnal encounter with Nicodemus. Here we have the Spirit, and we have God the Father sending the Son and again we have an invitation, to be born again or born from above or born of the Spirit. This is John’s equivalent of us being invited to become children of God, to enter into a new relationship with God, and to be given the gift of relating to a loving and forgiving God exactly as Jesus did.

In the end we cannot really explain the Trinity, not with an egg, not with a shamrock, not even with Scripture. God is not a thing or a being and so the categories we use to describe them just do not work. But what scripture and experience tell us is that God revealed godself in several distinct ways, that we call the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Together they form a communion of persons in perfect relationship with one another. But this relationship is not exclusive, it is not turned inward as if the persons of the Trinity were turning their backs on us. It is open and inclusive and invitational. God invites us into relationship, all of God. We heard how God the mighty Father and Creator invited Isaiah. We heard that God sent the Son – lifted up – to draw us closer to God. And we heard that God sent God’s Holy Spirit, that person of the three who stands most for connection, to makes us worthy and able to enter that relationship. And like Isaiah we are also sent – not sent away but sent into the world on God's behalf to extend that invitation to all we meet. There are no limits, no boundaries, no end to God and to God's love and desire for relationship.   

Amen.