Trinity Sunday sermons: never easy. I never was much good at either numbers or theology. But here’s an idea I came up with a few years ago for a family service on Trinity Sunday. It’s about names for God, and the first of those names is for God as Creator and Father and King. We read how God in the Old Testament formed the children of Abraham into a nation, leading them by Moses across the wilderness to the land he’d promised. His names are holy and not to be spoken out loud, but in scripture we find his name written down as the Hebrew letters YHWH. Our Bibles express that as “The Lord”, but the name itself was translated Jehovah, or for modern scholars Yahweh. So our first name for God is Yahweh, and I’ll write down a Y for Yahweh..
The Gospels of our New Testament show us another image of God: God born among us and living alongside us, God known and revealed in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Prophets of old had said that God would send his chosen one, his Messiah, to set his people free, and one name they gave him was Emmanuel, which means “God with us”. So let’s take that as our second name for God, and write the letter E.
Perhaps you can see where this idea is headed. We now look beyond the New Testament and into the history of this thing called Church, born on the Day of Pentecost. We think of God inspiring, directing, enlivening, and enthusing his people today; God present among us as wind and fire. We might sing “Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.” Jesus told his disciples that though he was going from them, they would receive the gift of the Holy Spirit to lead them into all truth. So our third name for God is Spirit, giving us the letter S.
It won’t have escaped your notice that those three letters together give us the word ‘Yes’. For me, God is the ultimate “yes”. His yes in Creation brings all things into being. His yes to the way of the cross lifts from us the burden of our sins. His continued yes to all of us inspires and enthuses and enables his Church in mission and service.
I could stop there, but bear with me as I say a bit more about this great little word yes. Yes is a releasing word that allows all kinds of possibilities. Contrast it with no: no is a shutting down word, a word to deny potential, a word that refuses to dream dreams. Yes may be a risky word, not all the possibilities it allows are going to work; but the God we believe in is a God who takes that risk. This is God saying yes to us even though we may make mistakes, even though we may go against his will, even though we may even deny his existence. For me God is that yes that releases us to be ourselves, that allows us an independence we can use or misuse.
Yes is a relationship word. Christianity, Judaism and Islam share a history and a scripture, and we worship the same God, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. All three faiths speak firmly of the one true God, and the Islamic statement that ‘God is one, and beside him there is no other’ would be echoed both by Jews and Christians. But we Christians wish to say more than that about God; we wish to say that God is not only one, but also three. That’s a difficult concept to understand: how can God be three and one all at the same time? St Patrick used the shamrock leaf as an image of Trinity; others have used images like ice, water and steam, three forms of the same substance.
But no image of that sort can ever be enough; all of them fall short of what Trinity tries to express about God. Anything that tries to define God tends to fit God into a box, but the real God isn’t boxable or safe, and can’t be contained. That’s why the name of God in the Old Testament is never pronounced: to name God would be to claim to control God, but God is not to be controlled. Christians can sometimes seem to be saying that the doctrine of the holy Trinity somehow sums God up, is somehow the last word on God: not true - nothing we think or say can define the indefinable God. All the doctrine of the Trinity can ever be is our attempt to say what it is God has revealed of himself to us. We encounter him in these three distinct ways, as Father, as Son, as Holy Spirit: in three different ways of saying ‘yes’. And Father is not separate from Son, and Son is not separate from Spirit: that consistent ‘yes’ is one God. And Father, Son and Holy Spirit form a moving trinity of relationship, in which all three are fully and deeply interdependent. As Jesus says to Philip: ‘Do you not know that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?’
God reveals himself to us as Trinity; and in doing so God invites us to participate in that relationship. Jesus prayed that his people might be one, their unity a witness to the world of the eternal commonwealth of love that we call God in Trinity. We are one in Christ, we belong to one another as we belong to God-in-Trinity; our witness to the God who is Trinity must itself be Trinitarian - a oneness that transcends human barriers, that transcends the boundary between church and chapel, between here and the other side of the world, between wealth and poverty, black or white, language, culture and tradition.
The Archbishops of Canterbury and York called for a wave of prayer with mission in mind, between Ascension and Pentecost but onwards too into this long season of the Sundays after Trinity that begins today. Trinity speaks of three persons and one God, a dynamic interplay of love in which Father, Son, Spirit belong together, and each one is that wonderful word yes expressed to us and to the world in its own distinctive way. Reflecting on what they had seen and known in Jesus, the first apostles said (in the words here of Paul) that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” Reflecting on what they had been gifted with on the first Christian Pentecost, the apostles knew that, though their Lord Jesus no longer walked alongside them, his Spirit was with them always - again, as Paul said, “We have the mind of Christ.”
Today on Trinity Sunday we celebrate all of that; and, yes, we rehearse a theological theory, a brave attempt to define the God who is one and yet more than one. More than that, though, we affirm God’s ‘yes’ to us and to the world, his yes that sets us free and empowers us. Our mission prayer should be that people encounter for themselves the yes of God to them. And that we may also offer our own ‘yes’ to God in response to God’s yes to us: yes, we shall live together as God’s people, yes, we shall do our best to build and maintain relationships that bear witness to God’s self-giving and creative love, and yes, we shall both serve and proclaim the one we honour as Father and Son and Holy Spirit, as the three persons, three revelations, who together are love in action, the one true God.
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