Sermon: The Trinity and Public Life

In today's Old Testament lesson, wisdom cries aloud in the streets inviting anyone who has ears to listen to her advice.  For wisdom, says the reading, has been around a long time, since the creation of the world indeed, when she was with God banishing chaos, bringing worlds to birth, charging inanimate molecules with life.  Wisdom knows how to confer shape on disorder, harness the huge forces of nature that could either create or destroy.  More than this, wisdom knows what is in the heart of human beings, and can therefore bring order to our unruly wills and desires.  The Book of Proverbs, perhaps written to instruct the young in the arts of leadership in the royal court of Israel, has much to say about the need for wisdom in public life.  With wisdom, leaders flourish and a nation prospers.  Without it, their vices unbridled, their flaws unchecked, they are inevitably corrupted by their power.  It is not their personal tragedy when this happens.  It is the nation's.

I do not need to tell you what prompts these reflections on the Sunday when we are glad to welcome our new Mayor and Mayoress to the Cathedral at the start of the civic year.  It is not long since I preached at the farewell service for the old City Council.  In the past weeks, it is not only the arrangements for local government in our County that have changed.  What we could not have predicted is the devastating collapse of trust that has happened nationally with the revelations about members' expenses.  It is not for me to point the finger of blame: all of us who hold public office should expect to be scrutinised as to our stewardship of the trust placed in us, and we must each answer for it.  My point is simply that wisdom, divine wisdom, is never more needed in our midst than now if our public institutions are to regain the respect and honour they have hitherto deserved.  We may well have operated within the rules and not done anything wrong.  Yet like sincerity, compliance is not enough.  Wisdom says to us that leadership has to be premised on ethical intelligence, a moral sense, what we can call virtue.  The seven principles of the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life sum it up: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and a quality of leadership that models responsibility and goodness in society.

So this is a particularly exacting time to take up the role of Mayor.  All the more reason for us to pray for him and the Mayoress and all who hold leadership in our City.  For the scriptures tell us that we are not innately wise or virtuous.  Virtue, character, wisdom are gifts of God that we must learn to covet if we are to only to be successful and achieving, but retain a good conscience.  The God who gives this gift to mortals is the Three-in-One whom we celebrate on this day of the year, Trinity Sunday.  How might the nature of God the Holy Trinity help us as we dedicate ourselves today for the responsibilities and tasks that lie ahead in our local community?  I should like to take just two of the Seven Principles and reflect briefly.

The first is accountability.  It is easy for that word to become a mantra.  But if we can see it in ways that are larger than the tired rhetoric of compliance and micro-management, it comes into its own as an extraordinarily rich idea.  For in a universe that wisdom says is the work of God, where God continues to be present and active through the Spirit, accountability means recognising whose we are and to whom our ultimate loyalty is due.  If it is to God that we must ultimately account, then how we lead, how we live, how we love become matters not simply for today or tomorrow, but of ultimate concern.  When the Bible uses the language of God as the One to whom all hearts are open and all desires known, it is urging us to take our creaturehood seriously and acknowledge that we are accountable to our Creator.  This is a true dignity of being human; it is how Jesus taught us to construct our lives, as coming from the Father to whom all things belong. In today's second reading, Jesus says that he has come to bring glory to him who sent him - not himself.  On this Trinity Sunday, we honour the Maker of all things and Judge of all men.  We listen to the voice of wisdom that says to us: submit your achievements and your aspirations, your motives and ambitions, your thoughts and tears and struggles and triumphs to his gaze.  Let that divine scrutiny, so searching yet so kind, purify us, ennoble us, make us men and women fit to stand before others in their name and in God's. 

My second principle is selflessness.  Of Nolan's seven, it comes first, as if to say: we are only worthy to lead in public life if we offer for it out of a sense of sacrifice and service, not because we want to aggrandise ourselves but because we want to contribute to the wellbeing of other people, seek the best for our society.  This is always the acid test of leadership.  And wisdom scrutinises the whispers of our hearts here, because it is near impossible to shed the pride and self-interest that haunt even our best efforts to make a difference to the lives of others.  Here too, Trinity Sunday offers us a picture that can inspire us to great, even heroic acts for the good of our fellow human beings.  For one way of looking at God as a Trinity of Persons is to see the Three as a divine community of perfect love and friendship in which each is always seeking the honour of the other.  From this divine intimacy, this God who is love, the Son becomes incarnate, and abases himself to live among human beings and take the form of a servant.  ‘Whoever is greatest among you must become the servant', says Jesus; and in this as in all else, as he taught, so he lived: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, washing feet, going freely to his death.  That is true selflessness.  Wisdom says to us: this is all that matters - that we give without counting the cost, for the cost of all true serving is the whole of us. 

I am saying that in suggesting images of leadership, God the Holy Trinity speaks to us about what it means to serve others, and how in serving others we learn how we are accountable to the God.  Perhaps you will say to me, ‘Physician, heal thyself' and you would be right to.  We do not become wise overnight: these are lessons it takes a lifetime to learn.  So I am trying to speak as humbly as I can when I say that we should perhaps try to help one another to practise virtue and cultivate wisdom both in our public personae and in our private selves.  How we could become genuinely selfless and accountable ought to be a conversation topic among those in different walks of life whose experiences can surely enrich one another.  I should like to think that the church could be such a conversation partner, not least so that we too can learn how to be wise in our beautiful but precarious world.  For in a society where trust is so damaged, all sense of common purpose is eroded and care for others can no longer be taken for granted, the wreckage of pride and hubris stand as a stark warning of the danger of not enthroning wisdom in her rightful place at the heart of life.  Wisdom is crying out in the streets.  We need to listen to her. 

(Proverbs 8.1-4, 22-31; John 7.14-18)