Homily For Trinity Year B - 2009

Trinity Sunday – Eucharist – 7.vi.2009 (Isaiah 6.1-8; Romans 8.12-17; John 3.1-17) Some words of Jesus from today’s Gospel reading: “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit... no one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man… God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”

What we are as spiritual beings depends on who God is. And we speak of God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

This is what distinguishes Christianity most markedly from other religions to say of God that he is “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” And it’s not just a matter for theological speculation. Christians have fallen out with each other over their understanding of the Trinity – of how Father, Son and Holy Spirit relate to each other and to our humanity. And they’ve felt it to be so central to their faith that they’ve rioted in the streets, excommunicated each other, Churches have gone into schism, and Christians have called each other heretics – all for a failure to agree on their understanding of God.

Most people find it hard to see what there is to get worked up about. When some of us from St Cuthbert’s and other local churches went to visit a mosque we received a warm welcome. And the man who spoke to us began by saying, “We can agree on this, that we believe in God and that we regard Jesus so highly. Christians believe that, and we Muslims believe that.” If

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only Muslims and Christians could be seen more often to make a common cause! But a Muslim would go on to say that while Jesus is a great prophet, his place needs to be seen within a succession of prophets which reaches its fulfillment in Muhammad. Christians say rather more than that Jesus is a great teacher and prophet. And Jesus is much more than being “a good man” which is where so many people get to. In our own still largely nominal Christian country perhaps most people are closer to being Muslims than to Christianity in terms of what they really believe. And I can understand why… For a start it’s easier to say just what a Muslim believes than a Christian. Sunday by Sunday, Christians recite the Creed – it takes up at least a page of the service book, and we generally say it at such a pace that there’s no way you can take it in. The Muslim statement of faith is so much simpler: “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.” That’s it. No worry about how we can believe in God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit – who is not three Gods but one God, who is three persons yet one in Being, indivisible yet at the same time not confused with one another. And that’s just a start... It took Christians three centuries to work out the basics of what we call the Creed – and still more time to argue over the details. It took Christianity more than three centuries before it gained anything like widespread acceptance in Europe, and then it needed the backing of the Emperor. But the message of Islam, proclaimed by the prophet Muhammad, spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa in just a few short years of the seventh century – and there’s little doubt in our own day who is clearer and more fervent about their faith between Muslims and western Christians. You can understand why. Muhammad lived in a society of many 2

tribal divisions where religion was a mish-mash of animist beliefs on the one hand, and some rumours of dispute-riven Christianity on the other. Muhammad could take up the basics of a religion where God had spoken to Abraham. He could accept the general truths of the Teacher called Jesus. But the simple genius of his message was the single thrust that God is God alone, and the truth of God is to be found complete only in the Quran as he himself enunciated it. Believe in God, believe the words of the Prophet. It’s a simplicity which perhaps many people in today’s world are seeking. When people say they believe in God, when they talk about Jesus and the truth of his teaching … but then can’t quite work out how to make sense of the teaching or how Jesus could ever have expected people to put it into practice. Christian teaching as such is just not that clear. The Bible is not like the Quran so that you can open it up and apply it at face value to the situation in which you find yourself. That’s not to say people haven’t tried to do this. Mormons have tried – and have ended up with an appendix, the Book of Mormon, which they need for their interpretation of the Bible. Christian Scientists have tried – and have ended up with a faith neither Christian nor scientific but making life itself rather unreal. Jehovah’s Witnesses have tried it – but in seeking to hear the voice of God they have reduced Jesus to being less than God so that the clear teaching they seek to give depends so much on their own particular interpretation. Christians have a lot to learn about other religions. And on the whole we’ve a lot to learn about our own religion – and it’s not as easy as others. At least our Creeds and doctrines are not as easy, because Christian faith cannot be reduced to a few simple doctrines, and the Christian way is more than simple 3

commandments and teachings you can put into practice. The Christian way is faith revealed in Jesus Christ. We look upon this man and see God: “All that the Father has is mine,” Jesus tells the disciples. He shares the fullness of our human life, but when he comes to people in their need, when he touches them to give healing, when he speaks to crowds and individuals, when he weeps for a dead friend or joins in celebration of a marriage, then people know they have been touched by God. This is the reality people know from which all our doctrines grow. The doctrines are doctrines, but the experience of God in people’s lives is real. What people find happening in their lives when they meet with Jesus is simple – it’s putting it into words which is so difficult, and why people are put off wrestling with doctrines and theology. But the very complexity is in a way important – it says, you can’t reduce Christianity to simple statements, you can’t wrap God up in just a few words. What we find in the experience of God working in our lives is real, and not easy to talk about.

It would be easier to talk of one God in his heaven, remote from our world and judging it according to commandments which have been enunciated plainly by a chosen prophet. But that is not the way of the Christian God, who comes to us in human flesh, who knows personally the complexity and contradictory ways of human nature. It is because Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the Son of God, shares our humanity while bringing to us the fulness of God’s divine nature that we can say God knows what it is to be human. The judgement he brings upon the world is not condemnation but redemption. In Jesus – God and Man – he brings us to the heart of his divine nature; he takes us to heart.

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And God’s work is on-going, not just a matter of history. “The Spirit ...will guide you into all truth,” we read last week at Pentecost. God’s Holy Spirit is as close and real to us as the breath we breathe - God at work in our lives, here and now. So it’s important to recognise him as God: not far away but close as close can be; and leading us as one who is all that God is. Father, Son and Holy Spirit – not one of them is less than the fullness of God, never working alone, not just ways of experiencing God, but not duplicating God either, because each person is the whole Being of God.

On Tuesday of this coming week, the Church celebrates the Feast Day of two great Christian saints. One is Columba, who left his native Ireland to take the Gospel to Scotland, founding the abbey of Iona, proclaiming a message which before long found its way to our own Northumbria. His name literally means “dove,” so he may all the more readily be seen as a means by which the Holy Spirit worked. But this was God at work with a man who bore the guilt of complicity in tribal feuds – a man whose following of the teaching of Christ had been compromised. The fact that God could work with him bears testimony to a faith which is rich, which can’t wrap God up in matters of right and wrong, but which speaks of the experience of divine forgiveness in Christ, and of the power of the Holy Spirit to lead the less than perfect towards the truth.

The other saint is less well known in this country, St. Ephrem of Syria. In his writings and disputations, Ephrem worked hard in the fourth century to defend the emerging Orthodox Christian understanding of God. He saw how heretics spread their message by putting it into popular songs and worked against them by composing Christian songs and hymns of his own. He is 5

known to the Syrian church which still sings those hymns as "the harp of the Holy Spirit" – some of his words are found amongst the hymns we sing even today in our own church. What Ephrem recognised is that words on their own – even words about God – are sterile things. Our whole being needs to engage with God – our worship and song lift our souls to God, and show us something of his divine glory. Of Ephrem’s writings there remain 72 hymns, commentaries on the Old and New Testaments, and numerous sermons. But scholarship and worship are not enough – and while Ephrem sought God for part of his life by living as a hermit in a cave, he also recognised his responsibility to his neighbour. He frequently went back to the city to preach. During a famine in 372-3 he worked distributing food to the hungry, and organizing a sort of ambulance service for the sick, eventually working himself to exhaustion and death.

This hymn, written by Ephrem, shows something of his understanding of the divine mystery of God who comes to us in Christ – and it speaks of God’s engagement with our fallen world: From God Christ's deity came forth, his manhood from humanity; his priesthood from Melchizedek, his royalty from David's tree: praised be his Oneness. He joined with guests at wedding feast, yet in the wilderness did fast; he taught within the temple's gates; his people saw him die at last: praised be his teaching. The dissolute he did not scorn, nor turn from those who were in sin;

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he for the righteous did rejoice but bade the fallen to come in: praised be his mercy. He did not disregard the sick; to simple ones his word was given; and he descended to the earth and, his work done, went up to heaven: praised be his coming.

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