The Doctrine of the Trinity
Posted by stpauls on May 30, 2010 under Sermons | 
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[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on May 30, 2010, Trinity Sunday.]
There are a few people who reproach the doctrine of the Trinity as too difficult or too ambitious a doctrine to accept. Some preachers find it easier as a result to respond to this accusation by preaching a gospel that cannot be disagreed with, which affirms nothing, and they hasten to apologize for the difficulty of this doctrine. Let it be clear that I have no time for such preachers. Our celebration of God as Trinity is the cornerstone of all that we say and do as a Church.
We will shortly hear a little report about the recent meeting of Synod and its deliberation on mission. The readings set for this great feast remind us that if we want to speak adequately of mission, we have to speak of the Trinity, of God’s life as communion, and for us to engage in mission is for us to be touched by the life of the Trinity, to be touched by what the wisdom of God, that appears addressing us in the first lesson, purposes, reflecting back to God his own generous outpouring in creation.
In our Gospel reading today, we are given a reflection of God’s Communion as a mission of dispossession: God’s sending of Jesus, like the eternal coming-forth of the Wisdom, is a giving-away: “All that the Father has is mine” (John 16:15), all the divine authority is shown in Jesus. But, this authority is shown in Jesus’ complete “givenness” too; for the Spirit “will take what is mine and declare it to you,” yet the Spirit does not give anything of his own either. Jesus, like the Father, holds nothing back, being at the disposal of the divine will to communion, making his flesh and blood the concrete space for community to happen. To belong in the Church’s community is to be involved in an act of giving away: to be at the disposal of God’s will, to give away the life we have, so that God’s life can be given through us. The Church receives the divine fullness in order to give it away.
For us, here and now, this means first that in a society like ours, which is increasingly fragmented, where the rule “you are either with me or against me” reigns, the bare fact of the Church’s presence and gathering at the altar presents a counter social program, that is based on divine communion, which rules and judges the entirety of our lives; there should not be space for competitiveness and hostility here, for the sole rationale of our gathering is the breaking down of divisions, the peace that we have in Christ, which Paul spoke about in the letter to the Romans. The letter to the Romans reminds us that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. This makes us, Paul continues to say, boast, not only of the glory that is revealed, but also of our own suffering.
Jesus’ mission came to a moment of crisis, remember; yet, the cross is where fullness of life is given, where it all ended and started again. So, what this defines is a life (our life, your life, my life) that is also vulnerable to change and betrayal. The actual life of the Church as we know has never been without division and failures. This does not exclude this Church community, or this diocese, or indeed our Anglican Communion. Yet, whenever we stand here and remind ourselves of whose and who we are in word and sacrament, we are making a statement about our mission: we are a provocation to a divided society; because we are acknowledging that our unity is sustainable because of trust in the divine commitment made clear in the Easter event. So, we are called to show that we can make a difference in the world as we seek to live in a community of hope as Paul put it, even if we cannot make all the difference that it requires.
Second, celebrating God as Trinity is not only saying something about God; it is also saying something about human beings. When we hear passages from our readings today like: “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…in whose grace we stand”; or, “when the Spirit comes he will guide you to all truth,” we are reminded that the point of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus is that humanity should look different. Those who are called to stand where Jesus stands are called to display that new humanity.
Our celebration of God as Trinity is telling us that our humanity is simply trapped in untruthfulness, and cannot be restored without God’s grace; we cannot even give to God what it is our calling and our gift to give – loving obedience, mirroring God’s own life in our mortal context. We cannot honour God in the sense that we cannot allow God to be God in our lives, and so we cannot allow ourselves to be ourselves. We do not honour or do justice to God, because dishonour and injustice are about the effort to reduce one another to the scope of our own needs and demands. Honour and justice are about respecting the truth of another’s reality.
Human beings are not good at this and we see it today in our dishonouring of the dignities of many – of the powerless millions coping with the effects of the economic and environmental crises to begin with. We prefer to deny such things and seek easy harmonies. Our own very dear Rector’s warden Richard was himself last weekend in Winnipeg where he witnessed the state of First Nation communities. As far as I could understand of what he said was to the effect that we may claim local friendliness but this is not enough in a society that claims to seek justice. Thus, there is indeed a political witness for the Church, let us not forget, that stems from its firm belief in God as communion, as Trinity.
Before we all stress too hastily our belonging to the assumptions of a liberal society, our celebration today is also a call as a Church to be in Communion with those for whom the most liberal politics of the secular world could not have room: those who simply do not have a “normal” human future to speak of: the elderly; the dying child; those in the so-called developing world, for whom no amount of liberationist talk is going to make a difference in the face of disease, famine and national debt; people with AIDS; the disabled; and so on; for God, in Jesus, has claimed them as his own.
The doctrine of God in Christianity is an invitation, a passing on Jesus’ invitation to be changed, to repent and trust him, to walk with him. This can only begin when we stand where Jesus stands, here and now at the altar. Our peace and our healing are to be found simply and definitively when we pray to the Father in the words of Jesus and so acknowledge the Father’s glory as it deserves to be acknowledged. It is in prayer that we are able to express our faith in who God is; it is not in rational tracts of systematic theology. The implication for us perhaps is that we can never be able to speak properly of God, or of ourselves for that matter unless we pray.
Call me old-fashioned, or indeed conservative if you like, but I do believe that those who do not pray cannot speak properly, whether about God or anything else for that matter. When we say the “Our Father” at the Eucharist right after the consecration of the bread and the wine, we stand with Jesus literally where he is, and say what Jesus says. We put ourselves in the place of Jesus. This is the enormity of the calling of each and every one of us to speak to the Father in Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and let Jesus pray in us.
Therefore, whatever it is that we do in thinking about our mission, we do that which stems out of our trust and joy in the holiness of God that binds us together in voices of praise and the sharing of the gift of Christ that makes us holy, singing and praising: “Holy, holy, holy Lord: The whole earth is full of your glory.”