Sermon: On Trinity Sunday

‘Great music’ said the pianist Artur Schnabel ‘is music that is better than it can ever be played’. That fits my faltering attempts to play Bach or Mozart at the keyboard. I know that I am touching a mystery here. It lies within the notes I stumble over, and in a sense, I am releasing that mystery as I play. Yet somehow it is always beyond the notes themselves, beyond even the most perfect performance of them imaginable. Worship, too, is something that is performed. The words we say and sing this morning – the gloria, the creed, the readings, the intercessions, the eucharistic prayer, the hymns, even this sermon – they are like a musicical score: only in the performance, in the doing, do they come alive. And we realise that however good the words, however honest our intentions, our worship always falls short of what it proclaims, always points beyond itself.

On Trinity Sunday, we realise the impossibility of ever doing God justice by talking about him. We ask too much of language when we expect it to carry this profoundest mystery of all:

"words strain, / Crack and sometimes break under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place."

says T.S. Eliot. For how can we speak about the God who is both high and deep, beyond us yet within, encompassing all that has been, and is, and is yet to come? ‘To whom then will you compare God?’ asks the prophet. I can barely comprehend the mystery of another human being, my own self even, let alone the mystery of God.

"For one like me / God will never be plain and out there, but dark rather and / inexplicable"

writes the Welsh priest-poet R.S. Thomas. Perhaps what the preacher on Trinity Sunday should be saying is that there is nothing he can say. And when we cannot speak., we must not speak. On this holy ground, we can only be silent.

Trinity Sunday should make contemplatives out of us; people, that is, who are not afraid of the demands of silence, who are as ready to be as to do, who are at home not only with earthquake, wind and fire but also with the still small voice. Religion, if it is anything, is about the practice of the presence of God, about discovering and discerning the signs of that presence in life. It is about exploration and awareness, about finding meanings and making connections, about celebrating what is yet to be in the face of what already is. To do that, we need to learn how to be quiet, become more present and attentive to life, to see what is there, and love what we find. Pascal said that all our troubles derive from one basic fault: our inability to sit still in a room. That is what the contemplatives and mystics down the centuries have always understood. They teach us that when the words run out we become open to God in a new way, because he is nearer to us than our own souls. In a mission-shaped church that is so often busy, hectic and loud, I believe people are looking to their cathedrals to be pools of awareness where ordinary men and women can reconnect with the gift that is in them to know the mystery of God. Trinity Sunday means this.

But those who are most practised in contemplative ways of prayer tell us that we cannot stop there. The Quakers, for instance, whose worship is a weekly celebration of the sacrament of silence - what Christians have been more active in politics and social concern than they? Prayer is not passivity. Trinity Sunday means more than what we can’t say. This ‘more’ is about what we can do, indeed must do, if we are to live as Christians. In the Trinity, we see a pattern of relation­ship that speaks of how we are to be towards others and towards the world. The threeness of Trinity means community, a society of persons moving constant­ly out towards one another in self-giving, living and being in that perfect oneness we call by the name of ‘love’.

‘Love’, as the New Testament understands it, is not so much a matter of the passions as the will. ‘If you love me you will keep my commandments’. To be a Christian is to acquire the habit of living and loving in this commanded, costly way that Jesus acts out historical­ly, and that Trinity embodies eternally. So, Trinity Sunday calls me to the life of active love: love for my neighbour and community, love for my nation and for the world. There is no other way of being a Christian, no other path shown us by Jesus than this if we are to embody God's Trinitarian life in the world. So contemplation and action belong together, as indivisible as loving God and loving my neighbour. The more I practise God's presence, the more I find myself caring about justice and peace, about the world and society. I need to do more more than just pray. ‘What matters for prayer is what we do next’ said Alan Ecclestone, that great parish priest and theologian of Sheffield’s urban east end. But as I immerse myself in the quest for justice, peace and the integrity of creation, the more I need to be rooted in scripture, sacrament and silence, for the healing of the world is God’s mission, God’s quest. What matters for action is what we do next. Prayer, reflection, the examined life, begins and completes the circle.

In this morning’s gospel, the risen Jesus says farewell to his disciples with the words: ‘all authority in heaven and on earth is given to me’. It is the climax of the gospel, the culmination of all that St Matthew’s story has been leading up to. ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age’. It ends as it began – with the angel’s promise to Joseph that the child would be called Immanuel, God-with-us. The narrative has travelled far since then. But the promise is the same: that Yahweh the high and hidden one, who is beyond all words and images, the creator of the world and the holy one of Israel, is in our midst, present to us forever as grace and truth. This is God the mighty and eternal who calls worlds into being and loves us into life. This is God the compassionate and merciful, who bears on his heart for all time the sorrow and pain of the world. This is the God enthroned in majesty who answers the longings of the ages and shows us his glory. This is God who is Trinity of persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit to whom, as is most justly due, be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and to the end of time.

Matthew 28.16-end