Trinity Sunday 2009

Sermon at Cathedral Evensong, with Installation of Peter Sutton as Honorary

Canon. 

Readings: Ezekiel 4:1-10, 22-28a/Rev 4. 

Unlike Easter, which is the very foundation of the Christian faith, Trinity Sunday is a comparative latecomer. Although some of the prayers we still use date from around the year 800, it was not for nearly another four hundred years that today came to be observed – about the time that the earliest part of our Cathedral was being built. But one thing is to pray about and worship the Trinity. It is another thing altogether to preach about it. One of the religious orders – the Cistercians – were keen on the feast, but in 1230 decreed that there should be no sermon – ‘propter difficultatem materie’ – because of the difficulty of the material. 

Well, we clergy are in the talking business, and if a sermon (as I was recommended years ago) should be ‘about God and about ten minutes’, let me press a little further. It is easy to preach about what the Church should be doing, and even to agonise about the latest issue or national problem. It is more difficult to say something about God, not only because he is beyond words, but because everyone’s experience of him is different. When I think of the Trinity, I tend to use two different starting-points, both of which are rooted in the Bible. There are the three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Germs of that approach are spread through the New Testament – reinforced particularly by St Luke, who ends his gospel with the ascension of Christ into heaven, and who begins the Acts of the Apostles with the Ascension (again), and then leads on to the first Christian Pentecost. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Not three influences or ideas, but three persons, working together in unity – a challenge to human individuality, going one’s own way, and even to the attractive cult of personal autonomy. 

The other approach is to start with the unity of God, the divine nature, as it’s often called. The Lord our God is one Lord, as Jesus taught with his Summary of the Law, when challenged by a religious lawyer. There are not many gods, like Thor, the Nordic god of thunder, who is etched into our culture through the name of Thursday. Nor is there a good of wealth, or greed, or lust, or sloth – as in the traditional list of seven deadly sins. There is one God only – whose human face is Jesus Christ, and who is at work in the world (not just in us, or the Church) all the time, through the Holy Spirit. 

Three Persons, one God – who does, and who is. To illustrate this, let me share two unalloyed pleasures. The first is that the two set readings tonight, from Ezekiel and Revelation, happen to be among my favourites. Those strange four ‘living creatures’, the man, the lion, the ox, and the eagle, in the opening vision of the prophet Ezekiel, surround a chariot that expresses God’s unique ability to move in any direction at one and the same time. The living creatures were taken from other religions, and they symbolise the created living order: we humans may be the ‘crown of all creation’, as a modern prayer puts it, but we are also part of something much larger, and mustn’t forget it. The same creatures reappear in John’s vision in Revelation of what he sees when he peers into heaven. Here we find not movement, as in the Ezekiel vision with that chariot, but stillness – worship offered to the one true God. The busy-ness and bossy-ness of contemporary worship, with everything explained, and little time to take anything in, is challenged by this scene. And rightly so. God does, but he also is. You could say, therefore, that God is a noun as well as a verb. Perhaps we see ourselves exclusively as verbs, primarily doing and achieving, but hardly ever as nouns, being things, being ourselves – in God. 

The other unalloyed pleasure is when a bishop offers an honorary canonry to a priest. In one sense, it means nothing, but in another sense it means a great deal – because it is about strengthening the mutual relationship between the Cathedral and the other parishes of the diocese. When I wrote to Peter Sutton, he replied in characteristic vein by suggesting that this might mean a link of prayer with the Cathedral. Nothing about his new stall, or the badge on his black scarf – about which I suspect he is delightfully indifferent. And he brought in the Gosport Deanery’s link with the Abbey of Mondaye, in Normandy – which is served by a community of Premonstratensian Canons. A bit of a mouthful, that name, going back to the original mother house in North France. These Canons live by a version of the Rule of St Augustine, like the medieval Canons of Titchfield Abbey - as well as the Austin Canons of the original Southwick Priory, who, of course, were responsible for building the original part of this Cathedral, and probably for serving it as well.  

It is all connected – like our life together – like the three persons of the Trinity. And the foundation of it all is prayer. But that should not be a surprise, because the doctrine of the Trinity only emerged, not to keep the theologians at it, but for ordinary Christians to know how to pray to the one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

+ Kenneth Portsmouth