Sermon: The Trinity

Earlier this week we lived through the ominous day where the date was 6^th day of the 6^th month of the year 06. This was used as the date for the launch of the sequel to the film The Omen because of the associations of the number 666, which is described as the mark of the beast in the book of Revelation and is thought to have diabolical associations. Whether there is a substantive connection is immaterial - thanks to the efforts of bands such as Iron Maiden the association is believed to exist and once these connections are made they get a life of their own. Thus there were those who thought that the apocalypse would come on the 6^th of June 2006. They were wrong. Last Tuesday was a very nice day. And, perhaps more significantly, so was Wednesday.

Three years ago, however, there was another auspicious date, 3^rd March 2003: 333. And the Guardian commemorated this by celebrating the positive power and associations of the number three. It makes the point that many things are thought to come in threes: buses, bad luck, blind mice, musketeers, wise men, little pigs, bears (as in ‘Goldilocks and the') and of course - and here come the only reference to the World Cup, lions (as in ‘on my shirt'). (Though one could also mention the mystique attached to a hat trick in both football and cricket.)

Some people believe three to be a lucky number. It is certainly an odd number -and we might note in passing that it is not a number that is very significant in terms of body parts. We have lots of ones and twos of this and that, as well as fives and tens, but no part of us comes in threes..

And yet we often think in threes; every story must have a beginning middle and end; every solid object must have height, depth and length, and there are three primary colours.

And you cannot deny the importance of threes in Christianity, trainee preachers are told that every good sermon should have three points and the third most recent bishop of Durham was a master of the triplicative rhetoric. And if example is needed, take these three consecutive sentences from the penultimate paragraph of his enthronement sermon:

‘What we have to do is to face up to what is going on, get involved in what is going on and discern [God] in what is going on. His gift will be himself; his promise will be the growth of all that is human and his power will be hope. And in the midst of it all our anchor and assurance will be to worship him, to wait for him and to rest in him.'¹

As you know, Jesus was baptised at the age of 30 and died three years later aged 33 at 3 o clock under an inscription written in three languages. On the third day he rose again and in a resurrection appearance he asked Simon Peter ‘do you love me more than these?' three times, echoing the three times that threefold Petrine denial.

Three, then, is a very special number. More than lucky, it seems to be fundamental to our perception, thought and rhetoric. And on this Trinity Sunday we celebrate the Christian understanding which says that God is three. But not only do we celebrate this, often in hymns and songs that cause us to sing ‘holy' three times in a row, but we also invite our preachers to explain this mystery a little more fully.

For while we say that God is three we do not say that there are three Gods. Rather we say that there is one God. But as I try to steer my way through theology books without confusing myself too much it is becomes clear to me that there are significant problems with just about every word we use in a sentence to describe God after we have said the word ‘three'.

Nicholas Lash puts this problem in typically striking way

‘We call God ‘one'. We call God ‘three'. One what? Three whats? We might in either case say simply ‘thing' or ‘things' (for this is after all what the ancient terms amounted to). This would admittedly be inelegant but, if we insist on having an answer to the question ‘three whats?' then there is something to be said for choosing an expression which does not misleadingly appear... to be informative'.²

So a conversation with a theologian could go like this:

Is there only one God? Definitely yes.

Is God three? Definitely yes.

Three what? That is more difficult to say.

Now those of you who have been to church before might think I am playing games here. The answer, you know well enough, is that God is ‘three persons'.

But it is not so simple because to most listeners, ‘three persons' means ‘three people'. But the threeness of God, if I can put it like this, is not like the threeness of three people - nor that of three musketeers or three bears. Three people means three individuals. Three musketeers are three musketeers (and their slogan was ‘all for one and one for all', not ‘three in one and one in three'). And the three bears each had their own bowl of porridge and bed and each of the three little pigs had a different little house. But it is not so with the Trinity. The three persons of God all have the same being and that means, in common English, that it is less misleading to say that God is one person and not three. And yet as we say that we instantly have to correct the impression that there is no differentiation within God and say that God is three.

At this stage in this sermon I would like to speculate that there are two questions running around in people's minds. One is: How can we be helpfully, honestly and accurately articulate about what we believe about the threeness of God? Or in coarser language ‘three whats, then?'

And the other question is this. But does any of this matter?

I think it does matter, actually. We live in a world where people of different faiths increasingly live alongside each other and as a result enter into formal or informal interfaith dialogue and, sooner or later, want to know what each other believe about God. Until recently I was in the Midlands for 12 years and in that ethnically diverse environment you notice that your thinking, preaching and teaching begin to take shape as a response to the interfaith context. As a priest in such a community you begin to address people's desire to understand not only what Christians believe but the way in which our beliefs are similar to, or different from those of other people of faith. And there is no more important relationship here than that with Islam. Muslims, like us, believe in one God. But when Muslims encounter Christianity with its talk of Father Son and Spirit they easily misconceive it as another form of Hinduism. And this effect can be made worse when they are invited into church and see the statues and the stained glass windows. But their sense of what they see as a Christian pantheon gets distorted here as on the evidence of what they see they get the impression that the Trinity is the Father, the Son and Mary and they, like the Hindus will form the view that these three are gods in the same sense as Ram and Shiva and Ganesh are ‘gods'.

In other words you can't get very far in interfaith dialogue if your understanding of the Trinity comes from Reginald Heber's hymn ‘Holy, holy, holy... God in three persons' because to the Muslims you will sound like a Hindu every time. And yet the Christian will want to put some clear blue water between their understanding of Trinity and a Hindu conception of God as having many forms and incarnations even if there is within that same tradition a mysterious and rationality-transcending sense of the oneness of all things. It is precisely a oneness of all things - which is not what we mean by the unity of God.

So it does matter. Which brings is back to the question: ‘but three whats then?'

It is a question that I am reluctant to answer in the abstract because every answer is so inadequate. Rather I want to suggest that the best thing we can do in this predicament is either to tell stories or to make models that bring some concrete shape and expression to our belief that God is three in one, that God blends unity and diversity, singularity and plurality in a way that transcends all our language.

The model I wish to leave you with is one developed by the theologian David Cunningham and is based on the idea of water. ³ Now there are several ways of making not very good Trinitarian models based on water. For instance, you may like to think of the Trinity as a celestial version of the H2O molecule with the Spirit and the Son as the hydrogens bonded to the oxygen, the Father. But that does not work as oxygen and hydrogen are so different. Equally, you may think of the three states of water, steam and ice as parallels to the Trinity, but this does not work either as there is no kind of relationship between ice, liquid and steam - they are the same thing under different conditions rather than different in themselves.

What Cunningham suggests, in a nutshell, is this. That we think in terms of God as source, wellspring and living water. The picture of a river comes to mind and the idea is that there is an eternal and original source (in traditional theology ‘the Father') and that this in turn generates a spring (the Son) which overflows as living, moving water which tumbles down and brings life (an image of the Spirit). Whether or not this appeals to you, and whether it will help next time you are talking to a Muslim, I cannot say. But for me one of its strengths is that the model has an energetic outward flow about it which does some justice to the idea that God is love and that God is grace, gift. It has God as utterly beyond our grasp or ken and yet reaching or rather flowing out to soak us in that living water. Here we have an image of the Trinity which affirms all three equally and places them in a progression where they exist both for their own sake and for the sake of all that is. So I commend to your patient meditation, ‘source', ‘wellspring' and ‘living water' who together offer to make us holy as they touch, wash and refresh us I themselves, the divine river of grace, gift and love.

¹ Jenkins, D. Enthronement Sermon in The Calling of a Cuckoo London Continuum 2002 p. 114

² Lash N Believing Three Ways in One God p31-2 quoted in Cunningham D. These Three are One Oxford Blackwell 1998 p28

³ Cunningham D. These Three are One Oxford Blackwell 1998