Trinity Sunday 30 May 2010

Homily for Trinity Sunday 30 May 2010

Today I always think of as the most difficult Sunday to preach on in the Church’s Year because this is Trinity Sunday, and we have to turn our minds, as best we can, to reflecting on the nature of God – what is God like and what is the life of God? And the technical term for the nature of God is this word Trinity, and once we start trying to explain the Trinity we seem doomed from the start to confusion – that is inevitable in a way, because how can our minds take in God?- and if we are not careful we can get into an awful mess. You know there is a lovely story about Trinity College Oxford that always makes me smile: it has a square tower with four statues on the top one at each corner, and one day an American tourist asked the porter who they were, and the porter looked at him pityingly and said “Well, this is Trinity College isn’t it and there they are, three persons and one god”.

When I was at Oxford I was lucky enough to attend a course on the ancient fathers of the Church given by that great Orthodox theologian Bishop Kallistos Ware, and I remember when we looked at what they had to say about the Trinity, and he kept drawing on his flipchart all sorts of diagrams- three torches giving off one light and one heat, three sides making one triangle, and so on, and then he turned to us and said “But I think this is the best diagram for the Trinity” and turned the page over, to reveal- a blank page! The best diagram because whatever we try and work out, we shall never get it completely right. If we could really totally understand God, God just wouldn’t be God. The way I like myself is the way the great Dominican scholar St Thomas Aquinas explains it in the 13th century, in terms of Love. God is above all a god of love, as the Letters of John tell us, especially chapter 4 of his First Letter, to which I shall return. That most exciting of poets Lord Byron wrote when he was nineteen “I cannot exist without some object of love!” and what was true of the restless Byron is true of us all and true on a far greater level of God. God, so to say, cannot exist without some object of love. St Thomas says God the Father has to love, he loves and in his loving needs an object worthy of his love, and that is God the Son, who is the Beloved Son as we hear God the Father repeatedly call him in the Gospels, at his Baptism for instance, and at his Transfiguration, which we have depicted in our apse here. And the Lover and the Beloved love each other with a perfect love which is constant movement between them, passing from one to the other, and that love is what we call the Holy Spirit. Like all true love, it is not just a question of the two lovers being satisfied and edified, not just what the French call an “égoisme à deux”, but somehow there is always a surplus, always more left over to overflow, in children, in friends, in neighbours, in the whole entourage of a couple, and to sustain and encourage them too – just what the Holy Spirit does in the world, the overflowing love of the Father and the Son irrigates the whole world.

But let us get back to that First Letter of John. John tells us that this great outpouring of divine love that is the Holy Spirit flows into each one of us, he says “he has given us of his own Spirit” (I Jn 4 xiii) and because of this the Holy Spirit is living within us- “we abide in him and he in us”. And therefore we are caught up into the divine life, we are swept up into all this constant exchange of love that is the life of the Trinity, the life of God. Any little bit of loving we manage to do in our own lives will be adding to that great stream of loving, just like our funny little rivers in Lewisham run into Deptford Creek and out into the mighty Thames. Our loving will be part of the loving that God does, and not only will that – nonsense I know- “help” God, but it will also, certainly, help us – it will change us, as we in our loving are doing something that is essentially divine and therefore we bit by bit become more godlike ourselves. St John again: “If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us”, (I Jn 4 xii) and he even goes on to say “in this is love perfected with us….because as he is, so are we in this world”. That is our Christian destiny, to allow ourselves to be caught up in the great momentum of loving that overflows from the Godhead, that loving that is the life of God Father Son and Holy Spirit. And in every act of love that we try to show in our own lives, every impulse of love that we receive from the Holy Spirit, is an invitation for us to do something godlike and in so doing become a bit closer to that image and likeness of God in which we are created.
I close with a prayer from that young French Carmelite from Dijon who devoted herself to the Trinity, which she always affectionately called “My Three”, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity. “O consuming fire, Spirit of Love, come down upon me that there may be brought about in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word, may I be for him an added humanity in which he renews all his Mystery”. O God of Love, live in us and perfect you love in us! Amen.