In their relatedness

In their relatedness

Trinity Sunday

Exod. 34.4b-6, 8-9; 2 Cor. 13. 11-13; Jn. 3.16-18

In the 37 years that I've been ordained, no day has terrified me, and I think most priests, as Trinity Sunday - the prospect of trying to say something useful. So this is a benchmark day because it is the first time ever that I don't feel totally hapless.

The Trinity : I want to say two things. First of all, about how we came to believe in the Trinity, and secondly, what kind of implications this may have for the way we live.

The Trinity is not present in the Bible. That is, it is not a biblical belief. This is commonplace among scripture scholars. There are intimations of it, clearly. The thing that Rob just read is one of several. But to talk about God is always, for a good Jew, - and all these texts are Jewish - is to talk about God we know as God the Father. Jesus, especially as seen in the gospel of John, is certainly seen as very intimate with God, but not divine. And the spirit, of course, as I said last week, is simply the normal Jewish way of talking about God's activity. It was not really until the Council of Nicea in 325 where the trinity was absolutely put out as part of Christian belief. It's not surprising because if we began as a Jewish reform movement, the central pillar of Judaism, of course, is that God is one. "Here, Israel. God your God is one." the great prayer that the Jews say today. And so it would be rather unlikely, even in the wake of the career of this Jew, Jesus, to move from there to some notion of God as Triune.

The point I want to make is fairly simple. It's the one that's imbedded in the text from the Pentecost reading from John, that God does not do magic tricks on our head. God does not plant ideas, full formed, in our heads. The one thing that is the hallmark of this Jewish God is enormous patience. So that we move slowly, slowly, slowly. Much more slowly than most of us would like to think today where we live in a world of so called instant communication. A lot of instant stuff. But real human growth, real human understanding, takes time. And so what we see as one of the beauties of the Feast of the Trinity, which finally dawned on me after all these years, is precisely God's patience with us.

Even with regard to the central notion, namely, an understanding of who God is. It's amazing to realise that it was not always present. There are indications of this even in the scriptures; the gradualness of our coming to understand. Scripture regularly talks about people never having heard of the spirit, for example, in the Book of Acts. If they were baptised believing in Jesus, yet never having heard of the spirit.

So all of this says what? That it takes a long, long time for things to grow for us, Even to marginal intelligibility: about ourselves and about the most profound realities that we say exist, namely, the reality of God. That's heartening, it seems to me. It's heartening, but also unexpected because we talk so readily about instant information and communication. We have a lot of instant stuff going on. Whether it's real communication, I think, is a whole other question. We can in fact communicate columns of figures, statistics. But unless we are going to take that as a model for human interaction and human communication, I'm not so sure of how instantaneous human communication is. Anybody who has been married for longer than two months knows exactly what I'm talking about.

So there's that. It is the hallmark of the doctrine of the Trinity. Three hundred years before it gets sorted out. And then, what have we sorted out? That God is one. That God is one - but TRI-une. Now is having this word a great advance? I leave it to you to think about whether it is or not. But there is certainly all kinds of, I believe, useful things in the early attempts, by people such as Augustine, in the late third and fourth centuries, trying to make sense of the Trinity. And saying stuff like this: that the Trinity consists of God as a family. There's only one God, but that God is a society. Is a family. And it's only as a family that God is God. That's the first fairly astonishing deliverance, I think, of the doctrine of the Trinity.

But then the early theologians went further and said some very interesting and, I think, useful things. They said: the Father is the Father only because there is a Son. The Son is the Son only because there is the Father. The Spirit is the Spirit only because the Father and the Son love each other and the Spirit is the subsistent love of the Father and the Son.

What does that mean? And where does that get us? In God's only reality, these three persons who constitute God are real only in their relationship, only in their relatedness, only in their total sharing of themselves with each other. And that is fairly astonishing. Nothing held back. Nothing withdrawn. Nothing concealed. But the Son is there wholly with and for the Father, and the Father wholly with and for the Spirit, and the Spirit is that very bond. That sounds fairly abstract until you begin to imagine what it would be like for us. Is that the way I am constituted? And as you read the biblical texts, that's exactly what is the case. I am myself only in terms of my relationships. I am my relatedness. Here too we fly very much in the face of the good old western ideal that: No, by God, I am bloodied but I am unbowed. I am here in solitary grandeur. Here in my incommunicable, precious, singular reality. Because I think that is clearly the way that most of us feel. At least that's the tradition, at least since the Renaissance, if not before then, into which we have been brought up.

But it's interesting to ask why if this sense of solitary grandeur as the very nature of who we are. I'd like to make a suggestion. Is it because we have so little experience of an utterly shared existence that it is inconceivable? I really believe, as I've been thinking about this for weeks and thinking about myself and my own life, that's dead on. Where in my experience do I withhold nothing from someone else? Where do I not substitute all manner of alternative self-presentations with the other and call that connection? Relationship. I don't think it happens. If it does I think it's an illusion. I remember in adolescence a couple of notable times when this lady and I were talking and I thought; Oh my God, all the barriers are down. Oh, boy, this is wonderful, and we have interpenetrated - and I'm not talking about sex. I'm talking about what seemed to be an absolute melding of myself with this other human being. But it was a fluke. And I'm not even so sure now that it was real. And it certainly didn't have much durability. On the other hand, if I look at myself and see my relationship with everyone else, the word is by and large a fairly ominous place. Even with those people with whom I am the most intimate. The world is frequently ominous. I remember a friend of mine, married now for 50 years, who said to me once, and this when I was a very young priest and I was fairly shocked when she said it - there is no solitude so great as that which you experience when being with someone with whom you are supposed to be the most intimate. And they're still happily married after all these years.

So where do we end up celebrating the Trinity? First of all by trying to appropriate that this is what God is, and this is what I am called to be. And yet, in fact, my reality right now is so circumscribed, so truncated, with so many surrogate "me's" set out before other people.

Well, at least this makes a great deal of sense of this feast to me. At least it gives me an agenda, a way of understanding myself, a way of looking at the world which is actually quite discomfiting. Because it is much easier to say that we are all these little monads, that everybody is solitary. It's much easier. It's more plausible. On every hand it's easier, because then I can cut myself free in instance after instance, and feel "I'm doing the right thing." Whereas here, in the light of what we say is our Trinitarian faith, all that is put in question. An alternative quite beyond my reach and certainly beyond my own capacity, is presented to me as who I really am. For that we can be grateful.

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