Trinity AF

 Today is Trinity Sunday - the day of baffled congregations and speakers - when we speak of God as three in one, one in three - Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  I guess, if we're honest, not many of us think all that often of God as Holy Trinity.  It's just too complicated.  It seems too high and heavenly an idea to be of any earthly use.  Most of us, if nationwide surveys are to be believed, have some sense of God as a mighty mystery behind all creation - God the Father.  We may not know what to make of God, but we think we have some sense of what we're talking about.  But I'm not sure we do really, if we try to unpack it all.

Is God a being, for example?  Some would say God is just an idea - I don't agree.  But clearly God isn't an ordinary being in the sense in which we usually use the word.  God is not one being that can be picked out from all the other beings in the world and pointed at.  It is probably more accurate to say the God is Being itself (Being with a capital 'B') - that which holds all other beings in existence.  God is not just a being, but God is not less than a being, God is more - in him we live and move and have our being.  But then language is being stretched to breaking point and we don't really understand what we're saying.  Is it accurate, then, to say God is a person?  Again we run into problems for the same reason.  God is not a person we can pick out from all the other persons in the world - not a single limited consciousness like you and me - and yet God is no impersonal force.  God is not less than a person, not less than conscious - God is more personal than you or I, not less - more conscious than you or I - almost the consciousness behind all consciousness - the personality behind all persons.  Whenever there is consciousness - wherever there is a person - God is there.  But again language is falling apart.  We don't really know what we're saying.  This is God the Father - Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.  Are you baffled yet?  I know I am!

But then, thankfully there is God the Son - Jesus.  Jesus may baffle us at times, challenge us beyond where we feel comfortable to go, but at least he's human like you and me.  For Christians, Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the exact imprint of God's being stamped on human flesh.  Jesus is God the Father translated into a language we can understand.  It may puzzle us, but every Christmas we hear of the mystery of the Incarnation - the Word who was in the beginning, was with God and was God, become flesh.  Christmas we're familiar with up to a point.  It's still pretty baffling though.  And again, even if we think we know what we're talking about, I'm not sure we do.  What does it mean to say this man is God?  How can Jesus say, "All that the Father has is mine"?  But up to a point we can make sense of Jesus - enough sense to follow him - to be challenged by him - to trust in him.  We can read stories about him.

So even though they are both a mystery to us - beyond our understanding - if we are used to faith we can make some sense of God the Father, as the one we pray to, the Creator, the meaning of Life the Universe and Everything, and of Jesus as the one who called God Father, who revealed the loving nature of the Father to us.  But what about the Holy Spirit?  What do we make of that?  Of him?  Of her, even?  (Because the word for Spirit is feminine in both Greek and Hebrew, the languages of the Bible.)  There most of us get lost - and I feel a bit lost too.  What is the point of the Holy Spirit?  And yet that is the Christian faith.  The honest truth is that most of us don't understand our faith.  And more worryingly, most of us don't even try.  We worship God, Father and Son, but what about the Spirit?  What about the Trinity?

Christians in years gone by were far more clued up as to the Holy Trinity.  It was a very important idea to them.  They spent a lot of time reflecting on it and preaching it.  It was a very important idea in Celtic Christianity for example.  You may well have heard the tale of St Patrick explaining to the Irish the idea of God as Trinity and how it differed from their pagan beliefs.  And how, when they couldn't grasp how something could be three and one at the same time he used the shamrock leaf.  One leaf and three leaves.  But would we talk to non-Christians about the Holy Trinity at all?  Let alone try to explain it.  That's a telling thought about the difference between the importance of the Trinity for us and for Patrick.  

The Bible speaks of the Holy Spirit all the time.  True, the Bible makes no attempt to talk philosophically of God as three and one at the same time, but it does speak of Jesus' divinity and it speaks of the Holy Spirit all the time.  But what about us?  We might say we believe in it, but, if we're honest, we could probably go most of our Christian lives without a mention of the Holy Spirit.  I think we need to do some hard thinking - some reconnecting with our historical and theological roots.

Because ... belief in God and in Jesus is all very well, but what difference does it make to us?  Jesus is a wonderful example - but one we can't live up to.  God is a wonderful, comforting idea, but a total mystery, and completely other - completely unattainable.  So we say we believe these things but they make no difference to the way we live.  This is why the Spirit is so vital in the New Testament - it is what connects us to God and to Jesus.  God's love has been poured into our hearts, through the Holy Spirit he has given to us.  Jesus says, "All that the Father has is mine." And that the Spirit will "take what is mine and declare it to you."  The Spirit makes the relationship between God and Jesus accessible to us.  We come to be part of it.

There are numerous images for the Trinity - like the Shamrock leaf, or like the example of water - H2O which can be liquid water, steam or ice - one substance, existing in three different states - or the image of a triangle - one figure with three sides to it.  But all these images simply end up with a strange three in one God in heaven - you can't really imagine God as a triangle without thinking nonsense.  The trouble with these images is they leave us out of the equation.  The Spirit brings us into the life of God and brings God into our lives.  This is where Christianity differs from most other faiths.  Islam and Judaism, for example, are acutely aware of what we call God the Father - the mighty mystery behind Creation - but for them God is completely other - remote from us - utterly holy, even dangerous.  And actually I'd go so far as to say they have a lot to teach us of God in this sense, but in Christian faith God draws close to us in Jesus, and even deigns to live in us, by the Holy Spirit.  The Trinity is God the Father - God above us - God the Son - Jesus -Immanuel - God with us - and God the Holy Spirit - God in us.

Trinity is also tied up with the idea that God is love.  If God is One - and only one - then the meaning of life the universe and everything - where we connect with this One God and find our fulfilment - is oneness, aloneness, solitude, loneliness.  But what the Trinity says is that in the very nature of God there is love and relationship - a relationship we can be part of.  God chooses, from all eternity, to be love - to be Father - and you can't be a Father without being a parent.  God, from all eternity, gives up self-sufficiency in order to be love.  When you love, you give something of yourself to another so that your very being is tied up with theirs - so that you can't be completely yourself without them.  That is what God does.  But in God's case it happens, not in a limited fashion, like it does with us, but totally - completely.  So when God the Father gives himself completely in love - the one he gives himself to is really part of himself - really is God.  The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father - they are one.

But we are not left out of this.  Jesus (the perfect expression of God) teaches us to call God Father too.  When we pray 'Our Father...' we are caught up in this total relationship of love between the Father and the Son.  And that perfect love between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit.  So when we are loved by God and when we love God back, that is the Spirit at work in us.  As our first reading says, "God's love is poured into our hearts."  Elsewhere in the letter to the Romans Paul talks of how we don't know how to pray - we don't know how to relate to the mystery that is God the Father - but the Spirit prays in us - with groans too deep for words.  When we find ourselves groaning - longing for creation to be as God intended it, Paul says, that is the Spirit.

I don't really expect you to understand this - I don't pretend to myself - I'm groping, and continuing in the time-honoured tradition of baffling congregations on Trinity Sunday(!) - but half of the point of the Holy Spirit is that we don't need to understand - we simply need to love - love back as we are loved.  We really have no idea of God, but the Spirit draws us Godwards nonetheless.

So where do we go from here?  Should we be content to be baffled?  I think we should be honest when we are.  But then we should wrestle with the idea of the Trinity, and particularly with the Holy Spirit.  I think Christianity in this country has tended to hold God at arms length.  We say we believe in God, but actually we struggle to make God relevant to our lives.  We say we believe in Jesus, but we struggle to really follow him.  We struggle to even want to.  We can't make the connections that bring our faith down to earth or that raise us to heaven.  That is the realm of the Spirit.

I personally want to wrestle with this, because I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I am convinced that the Holy Spirit is the key.  There have been and are abuses of the idea of the Spirit, but does that mean we give up talking of the Spirit?  Then we give up the only means of making our faith real and life-changing in this world.  Let's wrestle - in mind with this difficult idea - in prayer with God who gives the Spirit - who gives himself to us - and in our lives as we seek to become Christlike.

Somebody once said, in describing the Trinity, that "in God there is no un-Christ-like-ness at all."  Jesus, in his pouring out of himself in love to an imperfect world, perfectly reveals the Father.  The Spirit, as Jesus said, "will glorify me" - if it doesn't make us more Christ-like, it is not the Spirit, and wherever we see ourselves becoming more Christ-like, that is the Spirit at work.  Let's wrestle with this, seek to be more open to it, and be willing to be changed by it - in Jesus name.

Alastair