It's all provisional

The Revd Hannah Cartwright
Trinity Sunday

10.30am

Choral Eucharist

Romans 5.1-5          John 16.12-15

May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

There we go: that was your sermon for today, we can all go home now!

Or at least it should be your sermon for today because it’s probably going to be the most orthodox thing I say this morning.

In fact, everything after that statement will risk being at least mildly heretical… and it will almost certainly be ‘provisional’.

There’s a bit of an ongoing joke amongst clergy that we all draw straws as to who has to preach on Trinity Sunday and it inevitably falls to the most junior to try and unpack the impossible… so it’s good to see the University Church continuing this noble tradition!

Because the Trinity is one of the most notoriously challenging doctrines to try and explain and any preacher inevitably falls into one of several heresy traps.
They might fall into the trap of:

Modalism: That there is one God who acts in 3 different roles or ‘modes’

Tritheism:  That there are in fact 3 god’s who work together as one …or…

Subordinationism: That God is organised into a hierarchy of persons with
                                   the Son & the Spirit being lower down in the pecking order

And that’s to name just three of my particular favourite heresies, other heresies are available…!

There’s also the well-intentioned, but frequently mis-judged attempts to liken the Trinity to items one finds in creation which each have three elements comprising the whole; such as eggs (with its yolk, white and shell), water (found as ice, liquid and steam), three leafed clovers and even fidget spinners.

Humans are incredibly creative in the way we use language poetically to try and grasp at the truth. But ultimately, that’s all we can really manage this side of the end of time: simply to grasp at the enormity of universal truth.

Whatever we say about God will only ever be provisional until that day when we see God face-to-face.

So the question remains:

‘What can we say about God?’

If I asked you:

“what can you say about love?” or “what can you say about hope”?
How would you answer?

How do you describe or define something so vast and amorphous and conceptual?

I don’t know where I would begin.

But if I asked you:

“what is your experience of love or hope”

I’m confident that you could each give me hours of eloquent and moving testimony about how you have experienced love and hope (or even a sense of the absence of those things) in your life at different times.

And, in the process of sharing your experience, you would reveal to me some deep and powerful truths about their nature.

So it is with the Triune God.

Words always fail. And that’s ok – because we are human.
Although we have an incredible capacity for imagination, we are limited creatures too. And God knows this, so God gives us Jesus, woven temporally and eternally into the rich tapestry of human experience of the Divine to teach us what God is really like. And we come to know God most-fully, through relationship with him.

We are unique people with unique relationships with Jesus. We do not all experience God in exactly the same way. But we do all experience God in some way and we each have a story to tell about our experience of God.

Some of us experience God predominantly intellectually, some of us have a more ‘felt’ or emotional experience, some of us know God’s truth deep in our bodies and use them expressively in worship or through the creative and performative arts, and others experience God profoundly through meditation, silent prayer or through song.

However we each encounter the Divine Trinity: we will all have an experience to share about the God who is both One and Three which, if we listen well to one another, will help and challenge ourselves and others to broaden and deepen our own experience of God too.

We do not need to be afraid of other’s experiences of God, or to see them as a threat to our own, but we should be able to both honour the person and their experience and also to interrogate that story for universal truth – truth that all humanity can hold onto as revelation of God’s Triune nature and personhood.

Jesus says to his Disciples in the Gospel of John ‘I have many more things to say to you but you cannot bear them now, but when the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you into all truth.’

Those first Disciples encountered the living God in the person of Jesus Christ in an incredible way. He walked among them, ate with them and taught them about God the Father in Heaven to whom he would be returning. But he also promised them the gift of God the Holy Spirit – not only to comfort them, but also to lead them into all truth.

Jesus preached a Triune God but he didn’t try and explain it all to our limited human minds. Instead he promised the gift of the Third Person of the Trinity: the Spirit, to lead them in all truth.

Answering the question ‘what is truth?’ is probably beyond the scope of our time together today, but it is the question which gathers us Sunday by Sunday, day by day and keeps us searching after God.

Some of us gathered may have had profound and life-changing experiences of God that convicted us of the truth of God’s existence and of God’s love for us… some of us have a quiet and persistent trust and come to this place seeking more of God as we worship and learn together. And some of us cannot point to God with any certainty, but we know we are seeking after truth and we sense, deep in our bones, that it might just be found here.

We need eachother on this journey of discovery and we need our forebears of faith and the wisdom of their experiences and collective discernment too.

The Councils of the Church which named the truths we profess today in the Creed, wrestled with one another – with eachothers ideas about and experiences of God, and found in them common, deep and lasting truth revealed to us through relationship; relationship with God and relationship with one another.

None of us have all the answers but humbly acknowledging the paradox and provisionality of what we can conceive in our limited humanity, we can still proclaim the truth that has been revealed to us.

In the Creed we collectively affirm that we know God as both One and Three; as Almighty and yet intensely personal; as vast and unknowable yet also as intimate and revealed to us in Jesus.

The God who is Tri-Unity constantly breaks our nice neat categories, but it is as they break open, that there we find truth.

Today we pray, that the Spirit might lead us into all truth.
Amen.