That we worship one God in trinity and the trinity in unity,
 neither blending their persons
 nor dividing their essence.
     For the person of the Father is a distinct person,
     the person of the Son is another,
     and that of the Holy Spirit still another.
     But the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one,
     their glory equal, their majesty coeternal.

-   Part of the (quite long) Athanasian Creed

 

The joke is, you always ask the theology student or assistant to preach on Trinity Sunday, because it is so easy to fall into heresy.

Modalism, Partialism, Subordinationism… There are a lot of ways to go wrong. Often, the unsuspecting (or even suspecting) preacher ends up ‘blending’ the persons and losing the distinctiveness of the Three, or ‘dividing their essence’ to the point of losing the unity and oneness of God, along with a whole host of other potential pitfalls.

That I have often been away for Trinity Sunday in my time as rector of St. John’s has been complete happenstance!

Truly, I love the Doctrine of the Trinity and the wondrous things it tells me about the character of God.

There is something even in the old joke – whatever you do, get out of preaching Trinity Sunday – that I love and that communicates to me something important about God, as well as myself.

The Trinity and the ease with which we can stumble into heresy when talking about it emphasises for me that God’s very nature is Mystery. As a result, it reminds me of the importance of approaching whatever we claim about God with great humility, knowing, essentially, the inevitability of getting it wrong in some way.  

What a better world it would be if we traded our spiritual arrogance for humility. It might make us a little kinder, a little more curious, kind of like Jesus. Maybe the Trinity can help form us into that Christ-like posture of humility.

Thanks be to God (mysteriously and marvellously three-in-one and one-in-three)!

CG+