12^th June 2012

Rev Dr Max Champion at St John's UCA Mt Waverley Sunday 3 June 2012

Lessons - Isaiah 6:1-5; Romans 8:12-17; John 16:12-15

Jesus said, 'When the Counsellor (Helper) comes, whom I shall send
you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, he will bear witness
to me.' (John 15:26)

Bishop Lesslie Newbigin tells of a visit to an old monastery in Yorkshire.
It is worth repeating today. When they reached the ruins of the chapel, the note in the guide-book read: 'Here, every Sunday, the Abbott preached the Gospel - except on Trinity Sunday, owing to the difficulty of the subject.' On Trinity Sunday the faith of ministers and congregations is tested and, hopefully, deepened. It should be a time of joyous occasion to celebrate the unmatched magnificence of God.

Christian worship is marked by adoration, confession and intercession to the triune God. The doctrine of the Trinity gives distinct shape to faith in God in contrast to monotheistic faith of Jews, Muslims and Unitarians ('God is One') and to pluralistic faith of animists, new-age spiritualists and relativists ('Gods are many').

Trinitarian language in hymns, creeds and prayers is familiar - but puzzling. Can any sense be made of 'One in three' and 'Three in one' in speaking of God?

Some think it is optional. Others say that the ultimate truth about God has not been captured in the trinitarian formula or that it is a primitive, outdated 'faith explanation', not 'an actual reality'. Many agree with Thomas Jefferson that we must 'do away with the incomprehensible jargon of the trinitarian arithmetic (and) get back to
the pure and simple doctrines of Jesus'.

It is a pity that profound reflections on the Trinity in the long history of the Church are dismissed as outdated speculative jargon. St Augustine's reflections on the triune mystery of God resulted in 15 books!

Trinitarian language was not developed to 'capture' God in their limited ways of thinking. It was a glad affirmation of the 'reality' of God's immeasurable love for us and a warning against making God in our image. It is a teasing-out of faith in God - as attested in Scripture - to express God's love for flawed people that flowed out of the perfect love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit!

Teaching about the triune love of God was forged in the midst of controversy over the 'reality' of God's presence in Christ. Thinking about the Trinity begins with the Incarnation! In response to beliefs that separated a 'simple' (divine) God from a simple (human) Jesus, Christian thinkers were compelled to give better account of their experience of God's presence in Christ. Simple New Testament expressions of faith in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (e.g. in John 16:12ff; Romans 8:12ff; Matthew 28:16ff) 'cried out for fuller elaboration'. (B Lohse, A Short History of Christian Doctrine, p41.)

Therefore, contrary to what the critics say, the doctrine of the
Trinity is not a human invention to 'explain' God! It uncovers what
is implicit in the Christian's thinking and experience of God's
self-revelation to the people of Israel and in the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus. 'Faced with the choice between an invented God
who could be understood without the slightest difficulty, and the
real God, who could not, the Church unhesitatingly chose the latter.'
(A McGrath, Understanding the Trinity, p151.)

As the Church reflected on God's presence in Christ they were compelled to hold together things that do not go together in our thinking or
experience:

* The 'unity of God' (God is One).

* The 'relationships within God' (God exists in communion).

* They agreed wholeheartedly with their Old Testament forebears that
there is One God, not many gods, and that God / 'Yahweh' (Jehovah)
cannot be fully understood in words and images. God is so utterly
magnificent that God's name can barely be uttered. Orthodox Jews still
sign letters with a blessing from 'G-d'. God's name must never be taken
for granted! Faith in the triune God is a deepening, not a discarding,
of faith in the majesty of G-d! The link between Yh and the Holy
Trinity is splendidly expressed in a line in Bonar's hymn 'Great
Jehovah, Three in One'. (Australian Hymn Book 84)

* They had also experienced the fullness of God's unsurpassable love in
Jesus. So they were compelled to speak of the 'Son' as 'God incarnate'.
In Jesus, they said, we see nothing less than the Creator of all
things. They also knew that the 'Son' and the 'Father' shared a
relationship of deepest love and trust, typically expressed in prayer.
So they also had to speak of distinct 'persons' in God. Likewise, they
experienced the 'Spirit' as the One who opened their eyes to Christ's
divine mission (Mark 1:10ff), united 'Father' and 'Son' in a bond of
love and made the love between them known to the world through the
Christian community. (John 15 - 17)

Thus, as the Church reflected on the Father's presence in Jesus and the work of the Spirit they were compelled to say that 'God is One' and 'God exists in communion'.

This way of thinking about the Trinity is strange to our ears. Ours is an individualistic age. Self-identity is all important. When we think about what it means to be 'a person' we think of 'an individual' with particular characteristics. Thinking about 'God' as a person leads us to faith in a 'Supreme Being' with particular divine characteristics. Naturally we think of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three aspects or faces of the One God.
That is why it so hard to think of God 'existing in communion' without
ending up with three gods!

But what if we were to think of God as an essentially communal being? As the late Colin Gunton noted, some theologians in the 4th Century gave priority to the relational concept of the person in their doctrine of God.

They said that because we only truly exist in relationship, so God only truly exists in communion as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We must start with what it means that God is a 'being in communion'. By re-shaping the language used to speak about what it means to be 'persons', they were able to speak about God as a free and mutual communion of love: 'a sort of continuous and indivisible community . . . a new and paradoxical conception of united separation and separated unity'. (Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many 1985 p10.)

It certainly is not simple to put into words the triune mystery of God's being with us! But is not that a splendid thing - not a 'difficulty' to be side-stepped? On Trinity Sunday we have the opportunity to celebrate the awesome fact that the 'very Being of God' is characterised by the deepest Communion of Love - a Divine Tri-unity of love for which there is no parallel in our experience.

Far from being an irrelevant or optional theory, or a barrier to 'simple faith', Christian teaching about the Trinity is necessary to express the unparalleled breadth and depth of God's free, costly and victorious love.
It expresses the Christian conviction that, in the loving communion between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the very Being of the One God is displayed as Love for people, like us, who often fail to live in communion with God and our fellows.

Belief in the Trinity is not an abstract matter! It is necessary in a world that is very me-centred and insists that God has many names, not only the 'the strong name of the Trinity' (Australian Hymn Book 454). The tri-unity of communion between Father, Son and Holy Spirit is both a critique of our relativistic society, where all gods are thought to be equal and individual identity is valued above all else, and an invitation
to those who yearn for communion with God and others.

Trinitarian language expresses the glorious mystery of God! It does not speculate about an unknown 'mystery' but points to the 'marvellous incomprehensibility' of God's self-revelation as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God cannot be made in our image. The affirmation that the One God exists only in the deepest communion between Father, Son and Holy Spirit stretches our minds and hearts. We should be dissatisfied with belief in a simple God because it does not do justice to the richness of God's self- revelation as the One Person who exists in a true community of love.

The note in the guide-book read 'except on Trinity Sunday, owing to the
difficulty of the subject'. What a pity it did not say 'particularly on
Trinity Sunday, owing to the difficulty of the subject'.

The reward for tackling difficult subjects in any sphere of life can be great, particularly when we let their complexity puzzle us and shape our ways of thinking and acting. So too with the Trinity! If we let our thinking about God be shaped by the magnificent strangeness of God's unity- and-relatedness, our minds will be re-shaped and our lives transformed.
Then we will realise that, as a community formed by the triune love of God, we are compelled to glorify God and to exist for others in the hope that the 'Holy Communion of Love' that exists within God between Father, Son and Holy Spirit may be known by each and every person.

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Rev Dr Max Champion is minister in the St John's Uniting Church, Mt Waverley, Victoria, Australia. Dr Champion is Chair of the Assembly of Confessing Congregations within the UCA.