Trinity Sunday 2019

Proverbs 8.1-4,22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5:1-5

Trinity Sunday 2019

John 16.12-15

The front of Olivia’s beauty salon in Whitstable is made up of 5 large plate glass windows. Above each of them the owner (presumably Olivia herself) has written a slogan in large letters Fast Tanning Sunbeds, Stand Up and Lay Down, Beauty, Open 7 Days a week, Customer car park at rear. The effect is to give a fragmented picture of the work of the beauty parlour, that a lot is happening, and it isn’t at all connected. I’m no expert, but I thought beauty parlours were serene places; what this advertising makes me imagine is a customer rushing around in a frenetic sort of way demanding, 'Are the sunbeds fast enough for me; should I stand up or lie down; will any of this make me beautiful; and oh, will my car be safe in the car park? Not a great advertisement for a beauty parlour, but not bad as a picture of modern life, that we are all coping with multiple demands, which call us to be very different people, and involve us in quite different relationships and ways of relating.

In the past life was, I guess, much simpler. People were one thing, whether it was a docker or a mother, or a teacher, or a bank manager. And life was straightforward and simple until people went to church on Trinity Sunday and they were faced with the puzzle of how God could be one, the one God who created all the world, and gave it life, and at the same time three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Funny, but our current way of living, frenetic and piecemeal as it is, probably gives us a better understanding than at any other time of how it is possible to be one thing, and at the same time quite another. For instance we know what it’s like, at one and the same time to be someone’s parent, someone’s child and someone’s grandchild. All of these relationships make very different demands on us, and each of them will need a different way of behaving, a different way of relating, maybe even a different vocabulary when we speak. That’s just in the family. When we are at work everyone wants a piece of us, and we are expected to be one person for one situation and quite another for another situation. We may be expected to be compassionate to a member of staff who has lost a loved one in one moment, and hard as nails in closing a deal or making a complaint in the next moment.  What I am saying is that God being Trinity, one God and yet three persons in that one Godhead doesn’t seem that strange. We get it, better than we used to when life was simpler.

But is it good news? It might seem less than ideal to serve a God who is creating the world, redeeming the world and being a forceful presence in the world all at the same time. People who follow other faiths have certainly thought that - Islam grew up as a protest against the Trinity faith of Christians. Perhaps it seemed to them that if God was doing all these things then he couldn’t concentrate on them and hear their prayers; to go back to those slogans on the beauty parlour windows, God might be like the customer worried about the sunbeds, wondering whether to lay down or stand up, wondering if any of this would make them more beautiful and at the same time lying there imagining their car being broken into in the car park behind the shop. 

For Christians Trinity, God as one, and at the same time God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit is good news indeed precisely because all of this focussed on us, on you and one me and we call this single focus ‘love’. It’s a word we use a lot and rather thoughtlessly. We use it when we are talking about what we like, when we are talking about our friends, when we are talking about our partners, when we are talking about our children. And our country. But for God love is about that single focus, focussing on what is good for us, and making it happen, however costly it is. St John’s Gospel tells us that ‘God loved the world so much, that he gave his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him should not die eternally, but have instead eternal life.’ All of God is involved in this gift of single-minded love. God loved the world so much that he gave; Jesus loved the world so much that he came; The Holy Spirit loved the world so much that he empowered Jesus to come, Jesus who was the gift of the Father. We see that pattern often in the Bible, in the Old Testament as well as the New Testament. We heard in today’s reading from the Old Testament book of Proverbs of the Christlike figure of Wisdom cooperating with God the Father in the Creation of the world. The Old Testament is a world before Jesus Christ the Saviour, and there are not quite the words or the ideas to quite convey what Jesus in his time will do. But the beginnings of Trinity thinking are there. For the writers of the New Testament it was easier. They had been formed knowing God as their maker and protector, They had met Jesus and seen at first hand how far he was prepared to go to save the world, even giving his life in the most demeaning way possible, hanging on a brutal wooden cross. Then, on the Day of Pentecost they had experienced, also at first hand, the pouring out on them of the Holy Spirit, and so they summed all of this Trinity Faith, the faith of genuine Christians in phrases like we heard this morning: 

‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’

And 

The Spirit  will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all involved in love for us, up to the hilt, and nothing will distract them from their single-minded love for us. That’s good news, surely?

We can spread that good news a lot further in our world, than we currently do. Unlike God we are distracted by the multiple demands made upon us and it takes a lot of effort for us to concentrate with love on one thing, or one community, or one person and wish and work for their good in the same way that Jesus is prepared to wish and work for our good. But that’s the deal. God loved us so much, and now we are called to love one another so much, focussed on what the other person really needs, not what we would like for ourselves, nor what we are prepared to give, but on that other person’s life, health and salvation. To return to what I said before, nowadays I think we get the multiple demands on God, we understand because we already know what it’s like to be pulled in many directions at once. Where we fail is having God’s one vision, focussed on the people of the world, prepared to do anything, anything for their good and their salvation. Amen