News

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

That’s one of the traditional ways of beginning a sermon.  May my words and all our thoughts be in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Here and in many Churches, the opening words of the Eucharist are ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.’

And each day, at Morning and Evening Prayer, when we say the Psalms or the Benedictus, or when we sing the Magnificat or Nunc Dimittis, as we shall do at Evensong this afternoon, we end with the words ‘Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.’

And at the moment of Baptism, the water is poured, or the person is dipped, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit – as all Christian Baptisms in all denominations are done.

And the instructions to do this come from Jesus’ words at the end of Matthew’s Gospel: ‘Jesus came and said to [his disciples], ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.  And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’ [Matthew 28:18-20]

As Christians, everything we do is done in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Someone said, ‘On Trinity Sunday, we try to talk about God.  That’s very difficult’ [John Pridmore, Sunday’s Readings, Trinity Sunday, Church Times, 24/V/07].  This is not helped, of course, because the concept of the Holy Trinity is a tricky one – Three Persons in One God, Trinity in Unity, and so on.  And ‘Trinity’ is not a word which is found in the Bible.  So, where to start?  There are many different starting points, but two or three spring to mind.  In Community News this week, Canon Andy started from ‘Encounter’ – God’s encounter with us, and our with him, and that’s a good place to start from.

We could start with Doctrine, with Systematic Theology, that process of careful thought about the structure and meaning of our faith, which has been pursued with great vigour and dedication since the earliest days of the Church, and especially vigorously in the 4^th century.

If you root around in your Book of Common Prayer, just after Evening Prayer, you’ll find the ‘Quicunque Vult’, usually known as the Athanasian Creed.  Very bravely, Canon Andy included a portion of it in the Epiphany Eucharist this year.  It is a marvellous piece of writing, not often used these days, but well-worth a read.  Near the start – it is quote long – near the start, we read:

And the Catholick [that is ‘Universal’] Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons: nor dividing the Substance.  For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son: and another of the Holy Ghost.  But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one: the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.

The Athanasian Creed is often explained by this image.

We could start with Doctrine, and that would be a very good place to start.  But I’d like to focus instead on prayer.

In Community News today, you will find George Herbert’s wonderfully packed and dense poem, ‘Prayer (I)’, which contains 26 metaphors for prayer.  These include ‘Prayer… God’s breath in man returning to his birth… Heaven in ordinary’, and ends with ‘Something understood’.

Prayer is ‘Something understood’.  The Church’s developing understanding of God as Trinity in its first centuries came as much from its practice of prayer as from its theological reflection.  Doctrine and Prayer go hand in hand.

As the early Christians experienced their new faith, prayed about what they had been taught by Jesus about God as their Father, about what they had knew about Jesus’ birth, life, death on the Cross and resurrection on the first Easter Day, about how they had experienced the Power of the Holy Spirit descending on them at the first Pentecost; as they thought about all of these things, they came to realise that in their prayers and in their lives, they knew God as Father, and as Son, and as Holy Spirit, as ‘Creator, Redeemer and Inspirer’ [John Pridmore, ibid.], as the Father who made all things, as the Son, Jesus the Christ, who brought them into a new relationship with God, and as the Holy Spirit who continually breathes the breath of life into them.

It was a remarkable discovery to make, a huge leap of the religious imagination to think about God in this way, to pray to him in this way, especially for those early Christian Jews who had been brought up to think of the absolute Unity of God.

And through this picture language which we use about God, as all language about God is picture language, we learn that God himself or herself is in a relationship of love.  There is ‘the One who loves (‘the love of the Father’), the One who receives and returns that love and reveals it to us (the grace of the Son’), and the love between them (‘the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’) [Michael Mayne, The Enduring Melody, p.224, see My Book of Words, 173g].  God is in a relationship in himself, the Three-in-One, and One-in-Three, a community of love.

But this is a community of love which pours out into the world; which, through the power of the Holy Spirit, is poured out into our hearts; which gives us the capacity for love, and which calls us to love those around us.  Truly, love is what makes the world go around.

And it is God’s love which calls us into a relationship with him – we often begin our prayers, ‘Let us pray to the Father, through the Son, and in the power of the Holy Spirit’. God is always calling us to him, just as he called the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament Disciples, and women and men and children throughout the history of the Church.

And he not only calls us to him in love, but he sends us out in love as well.  We are sent out into the world to share the overflowing love of God with all those whom we meet, and to ensure that they know something of the love which God has for each of them, and to call them into a loving relationship with him.

That is our mission, that is why we are called together for worship in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and then sent out into the world, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  That is why we baptise those who come to him in faith, and send them out into the world.

As we pray in the name of the Holy Trinity, so we are invited to experience God as Trinity, and one of the many ways in which the Church has tried to encourage that experience is through the use of icons.

This icon, the most famous of them all, was written – the proper term for the painting of icons – it was written by Andrei Rublev, in Russia, in the early 1400s.  It is based on the story of the Hospitality of Abraham, in Genesis 18, a fascinating story, well worth a read, very mysterious and puzzling.

And it has been interpreted many times – this very lovely example is by Valentina Samoilik-Artyuschenko, a Ukrainian artist, born in Crimea in 1981.

Icons are windows into heaven, images intended to draw us into prayer, into love for God, in the case of these icons, into the life of the Holy Trinity, the Three-in-One, the community of Holy Love which is our Father, Son and Holy Spirit God.

Worship, Service, Fellowship – distinct but inseparable parts of our Christian life together, both here in this Cathedral Church, and in the wider Church in this area.  Worship of God the Father, Service in the name of Jesus the Son, and Fellowship in the Holy Spirit.

In our worship, our service and our fellowship, we are called to model that perfect communion of the life of the eternal Trinity.  ‘God is love, and those who live in love, live in God’ [I Jn 4:16].  God lives in an eternal community of love within Godself.  God calls us to show that love to the world, and to model the life of the Holy Trinity in all that we do.

So, let the whole of our lives be in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.