Trinity Sunday
Service Date:
30 May, 2010
John 16:12-15
When I was doing my A levels, there was a Scottish dancing class at school. Now I'd only gone to that school for A levels, whereas all the others had learned all the way up the school. And I looked at the result, how they knew exactly which way they were going, and what their legs should be doing at which point, and I decided that never in a thousand years was I ever going to learn how to do that, even when they were calling the moves which should help, so what was the point of trying? Later, when I was studying in Edinburgh, there were a lot of foreign students like me around, and we none of us knew how to do Scottish dancing. But someone took my hand and drew me into the dance - and then what the caller was saying started to make sense. I'm still pretty bad at dancing, as those of you in the Caledonian Society will know. But now I know from the inside what it's like to dance, so it makes sense to try, even though I don't always get it right. It's the same sort of thing if you're trying to get to a place you've never been before, with someone else's directions: till you actually get there, you won't understand what the instructions mean. Or if you're trying to learn how to use a computer, know what I mean. The instructions will make sense, but only once you dare to try it out.
It's the same sort of thing listening to the reading we've heard just now, Jesus trying to explain to his friends about how the Trinity works. Just now, he tells them, you're not going to get it. But when the Spirit comes, you'll start to understand what I'm telling you, because the Spirit will remind you of all the things I've already said to you but you didn't understand. The Spirit knows everything about me, because it's God's spirit we're talking about, the connection between God and me, so it's through the Spirit you'll find out everything God wants you to know.
You can imagine them thinking, I thought I knew what you were talking about, Jesus, but now I'm completely lost! And of course events caught up with them, Jesus' trial and death and resurrection, and they had other things to think about. But then, after the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, things started to make sense - because they were starting to understand what it feels like to be on the inside of God's dance of love, not looking on from the sidelines.
So how do we get off the sidelines into the dance of the Trinity? One way is through prayer. For it's God we're praying to, it's Jesus who helps us pray, and it's the Spirit who prays in us. Sometimes I wonder if people are as worried about praying properly as I used to be about dancing properly; if we're tempted to think we've got to have the right words to say or God will take no notice, just as I stayed on the sidelines because I thought I'd not get the steps right. Yet God doesn't worry about our grammar. I'll share with you three prayers I often use. When I'm about to meet someone, I ask God to be with us and to be the love between us. When I'm tempted to feel that nothing's working out right, or that I'm useless, I ask God to protect me. When I don't know what to say or do,
I just say, Help! And my experience is that those prayers are answered. Of course, another way to pray is using the words of our hymns. And we'll do that now, in a round, to remind ourselves of God's dance we're all invited to share.
When I was doing my A levels, there was a Scottish dancing class at school. Now I'd only gone to that school for A levels, whereas all the others had learned all the way up the school. And I looked at the result, how they knew exactly which way they were going, and what their legs should be doing at which point, and I decided that never in a thousand years was I ever going to learn how to do that, even when they were calling the moves which should help, so what was the point of trying? Later, when I was studying in Edinburgh, there were a lot of foreign students like me around, and we none of us knew how to do Scottish dancing. But someone took my hand and drew me into the dance - and then what the caller was saying started to make sense. I'm still pretty bad at dancing, as those of you in the Caledonian Society will know. But now I know from the inside what it's like to dance, so it makes sense to try, even though I don't always get it right. It's the same sort of thing if you're trying to get to a place you've never been before, with someone else's directions: till you actually get there, you won't understand what the instructions mean. Or if you're trying to learn how to use a computer, know what I mean. The instructions will make sense, but only once you dare to try it out.
It's the same sort of thing listening to the reading we've heard just now, Jesus trying to explain to his friends about how the Trinity works. Just now, he tells them, you're not going to get it. But when the Spirit comes, you'll start to understand what I'm telling you, because the Spirit will remind you of all the things I've already said to you but you didn't understand. The Spirit knows everything about me, because it's God's spirit we're talking about, the connection between God and me, so it's through the Spirit you'll find out everything God wants you to know.
You can imagine them thinking, I thought I knew what you were talking about, Jesus, but now I'm completely lost! And of course events caught up with them, Jesus' trial and death and resurrection, and they had other things to think about. But then, after the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, things started to make sense - because they were starting to understand what it feels like to be on the inside of God's dance of love, not looking on from the sidelines.
So how do we get off the sidelines into the dance of the Trinity? One way is through prayer. For it's God we're praying to, it's Jesus who helps us pray, and it's the Spirit who prays in us. Sometimes I wonder if people are as worried about praying properly as I used to be about dancing properly; if we're tempted to think we've got to have the right words to say or God will take no notice, just as I stayed on the sidelines because I thought I'd not get the steps right. Yet God doesn't worry about our grammar. I'll share with you three prayers I often use. When I'm about to meet someone, I ask God to be with us and to be the love between us. When I'm tempted to feel that nothing's working out right, or that I'm useless, I ask God to protect me. When I don't know what to say or do,
I just say, Help! And my experience is that those prayers are answered. Of course, another way to pray is using the words of our hymns. And we'll do that now, in a round, to remind ourselves of God's dance we're all invited to share.
Hymns:
R&S 34 is a hymn specifically for Trinity Sunday written by Bishop Reginald Heber, based on the vision in Revelation of God at the centre of creation's praise. The tune Nicaea, named after the famous council of the Church where 300 bishops affirmed the doctrine of the Trinity, was written by J.B. Dykes for these words.R&S 29 is a simple hymn, yet sung thoughtfully its words can inspire to prayer. Both words and tune are by Terrye Coelho and were first published in 1972.
R&S 36 is first known from a manuscript of the eleventh century CE, with a direction for singing it dating from 690CE, but there is a firm tradition of its having been written by St Patrick, in other words in the fourth century. Mrs Alexander, the hymnodist who penned ‘There is a green hill far away' and ‘All things bright and beautiful', made the translation we will sing this morning. It is unusual in that the hymn changes metre and tune in the middle verses, from
St Patrick to Clonmacnoise, both Irish traditional melodies.
R&S 586 is another translation coming originally from Joachim Neander, a seventeenth-century minister who died young at 30, and translated by Robert Bridges, a 20th-century poet and writer. The tune Meine Hoffnung means ‘My hope'.
Sermon:
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Ps 8; John 16:12-15; Romans 5:1-5Those verses from Proverbs I read just now are among my favourites in the Bible, because this reading grounds our experience of God; it makes connections between God's creative power and our experience of the world. You'll remember from the beginning of John's Gospel, that carol service reading that starts ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God'? Well, in that reading, that way the Gospel writer reflects on the deep connection between God and the Word, between the Creator and Jesus of Nazareth, didn't come out of nowhere. It was founded on readings like this one, drawing the link between what we know of the natural world and the God whom we believe created it in love.
Many of you will have been to amazing parts of the world, and seen natural wonders which can help you to sing and to pray, too: My God, how great thou art. Yet, if we are truthful, we must admit that the world is not only a wonderful place. This weekend, Harry Langford is suffering the results of a serious stroke on Thursday evening. Gordon, one of the men who used to attend the Broomhall Breakfast every week, is dying of cancer. You will know of people suffering in various ways, sometimes through their own fault, sometimes not.
So we cannot unambiguously say, with Louis Armstrong, What a wonderful world. Wonderful it is, but terrible too.
Our psalm this morning touches on that theme. Great and wonderful is God, the psalmist muses, and in comparison to God and to God's world, even with our 21st century technological might, we human beings are small and frail and vulnerable. Yet the contention of our reading from Proverbs is that even as the universe came into being - though it doesn't really work trying to think of a poetic passage in terms of physical time - God's wisdom, God's word, was already rejoicing in the world and in human beings. Our reading argues that at root, the world is a God-filled place and a friendly place; that when we reflect on our world and our lives, from the very beginning we can find the patterns of God's activity, whether we look at us human beings, or at all that lives.
How could we test out this claim? Can we check out my argument in the theme introduction that we are intimately invited into the dance of God, the shared love which we call Trinity? What sort of facts would count in an argument like that? Two sorts: the record of scripture; and our own life experience.
I've started building my case already by appealing to your experience of the natural world; yet here in Sheffield I can remind us not only of nature but of engineering as we look again at that passage from Proverbs. For God like an architect or a civil engineer is portrayed as establishing the heavens, separating sea from land, digging the earth's foundations; and God's word, the master worker, is portrayed as putting God's plans into practice. If we add that passage from the beginning of Genesis about God's spirit brooding over the waters of chaos as the Word let there be light! is spoken, we can see constructive action as a Trinitarian as well as a human activity. And that in turn means that when we build - not only as engineers but as friends or partners deepening their relationship, as parents bringing up a child, as students constructing an essay, as musicians creating a performance, we are showing God's characteristics. And that in turn means that though since we are mortal our work will necessarily be imperfect, it matters; it is worth our doing it well.
Our psalm echoes that sentiment: God has given us frail humans the power to dominate the earth. It is up to us, then, to mirror God's care for creation rather than yielding to the temptation to damage or destroy what we have not the wisdom to understand. And that in turn can help us reflect very practically on how we should use the natural resources at our disposal, whether it's how often we should fly or what pesticides we should use in the garden.
As you see, this business of reflecting on the world and on God, and how we relate to both, isn't a sum that we can do once and lay aside with relief once it's come out right. It's more like a long-drawn out conversation, growing deeper and richer through the whole of our lives, as we allow our Creator's habit of construction to become our own creativity, God's Spirit to inspire our thoughts; God's master-worker to work with and through us.
But am I dodging the issue? As well as creativity, in which it is easy to see God at work, we are inevitably dealing in this world with death and destruction: how can I claim to see God there? We know that suffering, for example, is common to human experience; given what happened to Jesus, it seems unreasonable to expect otherwise. Yet can our suffering speak to us of God?
Remember the links of the argument Paul uses in our reading from Romans? Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and that hope is not deceptive, but points to God's love for us, generously poured into our hearts through the coming of God's Holy Spirit.
This is a dangerous argument; you may have come across people, as I have, for whom suffering has been corrosive. Yet Paul, who knows a thing or two about it, with his record of beatings, stonings and shipwrecks, deserves that we should consider his claim.
How, then, can suffering teach us of God's love? Here we return to our theme introduction: Jesus trying to explain to his friends how the Spirit would eventually make sense for them of the experiences they could not grasp at the time. While at the time his death seemed to be the end of everything, in retrospect the Spirit could interpret his resurrection to them as a sign of God's unstoppable love, a love which will never abandon us, however bad it gets. If we can glimpse that pattern of new life reflected in our lives and the life of the world, we can indeed have hope - not hope that nothing will ever go wrong, but that life is stronger than death. And with that hope, we can play our part in healing our damaged world. I'm not just speaking to the healthcare workers here today, for those of us with no medical background can also be healers: through giving attention to someone whom others reckon to be unimportant; through breaking down barriers between people; through forgiveness when we have been hurt.
In great matters of the universe, in tiny decisions no one but we will ever know, the dance of the Trinity never ceases. From the sidelines it can look impossibly complicated. But if we take up our invitation to join the dance, if we try out steps of creativity, hope and restoration, our partner will not let us fall.
