In the name of God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Transcription

1 Sermon for Trinity Sunday 2015 In the name of God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen. Well, that s my sermon, really. It s Trinity Sunday; the theme of the service is the doctrine of the Trinity, and that is the doctrine of the Trinity. Christians worship one God, who is three people: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. That s all there is to it. It s completely baffling, but it s also pretty straightforward. As the headmaster says in Alan Bennett s play, Forty Years On. He s preparing boys in his school for confirmation, when one of them says he s having difficulties with the Trinity. The headmaster says: Three in one and one in three, perfectly straightforward. Any doubts about that, see your maths master. So what I want to spell out this morning is not so much the what of the Trinity as the so what. Why do Christians believe this, and why do they think it matters? To answer that, I m going to tell you a story from the early church. Because they had a big problem: Who is Jesus? They worshipped him as God; and yet 1

2 they also believed he is the Son of God; and that there is only one God. It was very confusing and it didn t seem to add up. They looked for answers in the Bible. And if the Bible was clear about anything it s that there is one God; and the Bible calls Jesus the Son of God; and yet the Bible calls Jesus God. So it was still confusing and it still didn t add up. Then in the fourth century, a man called Arius came up with an answer. And he started a theological world war. He was a minister of a church in Alexandria, in Arius is smacked by St Nicholas (of Christmas fame) at the Council of Nicea. Egypt, one of the greatest cities in the world. He said: OK, I ve got it, this is how it works. We call Christ God, but it s a bit of an exaggeration. God, the Father, is the creator of all things; so, if the Son was God too, there would be two creators of all things and they would have to have created each other, which sounds a bit crazy. So, (said Arius), first of all there was God, the Father; then further back in time than we could possibly imagine, he brought into being the Son. And the Son is a Godlike spirit, so far above human beings, so like God, that we call him God, but strictly speaking he is not the same as God. Arius s idea, that Christ is not God, just godlike, was very popular, and very controversial. He was great at PR and promoted his theory with songs hit songs with lines like The essence of the Father is foreign to the Son. You don t get songs like that any more. The whole Roman empire divided into theological factions. The theologian Gregory of Nyssa said: Everyone s arguing 2

3 about it. Clothes traders, money changers, food sellers You ask the attendant, Is my bath ready? and he replies, The Son was made out of nothing. Just like today in Glasgow you have a Catholic soccer team and a Protestant one, different chariot racing teams, the blues and the greens, were divided on their opinions about who Jesus was. In the end, the Church decided that Arius was wrong, and that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all equally God. And the person who persuaded them was a young man called Athanasius, who also lived in Alexandria. Athanasius said: The problem with what Arius is telling you, is that his Christ just isn t enough, he isn t what we need. The Father sent Christ into the world for a reason, to do a job, and Arius s version of Christ isn t up to the job. As Jesus says in our Bible reading today, he came to bring life to the human race. The Son descended from heaven, the Gospel tells us, in order to ascend again and raise human beings up with him. Like the bronze serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness for the healing of the people of Israel, so the Son brings healing, wholeness and an unquenchable spring of life to human people. So, says Athanasius, the problem that Jesus came to save us from, is not God, because, as Jesus says here, God loves the world that s why he sent his son, not to condemn but to rescue. Our problem is ourselves. For all our differences, we all share the same tendency to break things, and to 3

4 brokenness. We are in our different ways damaged people, and we damage other people in turn. We break important promises, we break important relationships, we break things that we can t mend. And that s who we are. Our very nature is one of breaking and brokenness. What we humans need from Christ, said Athanasius, is not good advice, or spiritual teaching, or a righteous example, but transformation, a power that can change who we are, make a change in our nature. We need God. God is wholeness, God s very nature is healing, and wholeness and life and mending and light and drawing people into the light, where our nature, as Jesus goes on to say later in the passage we read, is to be drawn into darkness, our nature is to be hurt and to hurt. So here is the remedy for the human race, Athansius said: we need a transfusion of God s nature into our own. Christ came to give us what God is, so that our nature can start to share in that healing and wholeness and life and light, that is God s nature. He brought into human brokenness the wholeness that is God. But who can share God s nature with humans other than God himself? Who can repair the image of God in people, except God? How can Christ give us what God is, unless Christ is God? Athanasius 4

5 Let me quote Athanasius himself: Who was capable of such grace and such restoration as we needed? Who, but the Word of God himself, who in the beginning made all things out of nothing? He alone could bring the corruptible to incorruption, because he was able to recreate, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father He assumed a mortal body, so that in its death, death might once for all be destroyed, and that men might be renewed He was made human that we might be made God. I started off by saying I was going to talk about the so what of the Trinity. I hope what I ve said helps to explain why it has become seen as a central teaching of the Christian faith. I d like to finish by pointing out that there is a challenge here, and a promise. The promise is that the Christian faith offers us not rules on how to live, but the power to change. As the Gospel reading said: If we allow it to happen, God the Holy Spirit transforms us, and we are being reborn, by a transfusion of God s nature of wholeness into our nature of brokenness. If life is a struggle, we do not fight alone. So that s the promise of the doctrine of the Trinity. The challenge is to ask: If this is all about transformation, is who I am changing and growing and improving? Am I moving in the right direction? It s one thing to stand here and talk about the 5

6 doctrine of Trinity or to sit there and be talked to to affirm it in creeds and prayers. But that s not what it s for. The point of it is that in Jesus, God himself became what we are, that we might become what God is. Is that happening? I m going to offer a minute of quiet to reflect in that challenge and that promise, before I close in prayer. Father who gave us life, Jesus who shares our brokenness, Spirit who breathes new life into us, work in us, Holy Trinity, we pray. Make the dark places light, and the broken places whole, and the rotten places fresh, and the weak places strong. Amen. 6