Trinity Sunday

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3 June 2012 : TRINITY SUNDAY : Year B 8:00am and 9:30am Kalamunda Isaiah 6:1-8 : Ps 29 : Romans 8:12-17 : John 3:1-17

It’s Year B, the year of reading through Mark’s gospel, and also Trinity Sunday, the Sunday of the Great Invitation – to anyone except the rector of the parish or the current incumbent; a time to invite theological students and other august visitors to wrestle with Christianity’s wrestling with the nature of the Living God.

Under normal circumstances, one might consider retiring from continuous priestly ministry a rather extreme way in which to avoid writing a sermon on the Most Holy and Blessed Trinity. But this is no ordinary Sunday…

It’s the Sunday following Pentecost, on which we recalled the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the crowd gathered in Jerusalem, ostensibly celebrating the Feast of Shavuot, fifty days after Passover.

What becomes for the Christian religion Pentecost also occurs after a fifty-day period: fifty days after Easter Sunday and the Season of Easter, the Season of the resurrection and glory of Jesus, the only Son of the Father.

We know this.

And now – given that the Living God, the Creator, is always with us – we get to put Father, Son and Holy Spirit together in a relatively late-coming theological doctrine that tries to make sense of what the faithful have experienced, and continue to experience. Namely, the occurrence of the Living God in three distinct ways that nevertheless, we believe, are manifestations of a single reality. In other words, in the classic formula, God is three, yet God is One.

Trinity is a non-scriptural, yet defining article of faith. We struggle to piece together evidence from tantalising clues in holy scripture, but inevitably that evidence seems forced and self-conscious, or is simply a recording of a theological conclusion that has become accepted Church practice, such as the trinitarian formula towards the end of Matthew’s gospel.

Even so, we can find a very subtle reference, not so much to the theology of the trinity, but to the trinitarian dynamic – how trinity operates in our world – in the famous John 3:16. And this, I suspect, is rather more important for our consideration than attempting the impossible task of “understanding” trinitarian theology.

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For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Here we find God the Father and God the Son clearly mentioned. Where, however, is God the Holy Spirit?

The answer is that the Holy Spirit is the power of God that enables us to access the faith that is necessary to experience what is mistranslated as “eternal life”. To paraphrase N T Wright’s observation, we’ve grabbed hold of the wrong concept by thinking that “eternal life” equates with “getting into heaven” or “living forever”. What the phrase intends to convey is the notion of a new age, an age of freedom and peace, shared with Jesus, certainly, but an age, or eon, that the Spirit makes possible for us to experience.

The resurrected Jesus is the first example of the new age’s Being, but as Paul reminds us, “[we] have received a spirit of adoption”, and we no longer need to fear death.

But because the Holy Spirit is always setting us apart to continue, among many other things, Jesus’ work of love and compassionate in a damaged and corrupted world, we operate also as heirs of the same trinitarian dynamic. God sends the Son to heal Creation – not just humankind alone, but the entire world – and the Spirit enables us to continue the work, always in the wake of God the Creator’s constant sending and sending forth.

The passage from the prophet Isaiah therefore makes more sense. It’s simplistic – and wrong – to equate three holy’s with a trinitarian revelation apparent in the Hebrew scriptures. But as an example of the sending forth of someone willing to do the will and work of the Living God, it reminds us that this is the constant flow of God’s new age: the One who Sends, the One who is Sent, and the Power that enables the procession – and success – of the task.

Because, from Paul’s viewpoint, our new life is always life “in Christ”, we could a lot worse than seriously reflect on this trinitarian dynamic as that which informs our lives as followers of Jesus.

The Creator sends us who live as followers of the One who was Sent, and therefore in him, who continue his work through power and agency of the Holy Spirit.

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The only real question then becomes: when the Living God asks the people of S. Barnabas’ church in the Anglican Parish of Kalamunda, “Whom shall I send?”, will God hear the creaking of old bones seeking to ferry away reluctant bodies and the coughing of dried-up lungs trying to recycle or conceive another paltry excuse? or will God receive the visionary Isaiah’s resounding, HERE AM I; SEND ME!?

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