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| SERMONS Sean Gilbert – Christ Church Trinity Sunday 2009 When talking with Charles this week, he asked me – with a wry smile on his face – if on this coming Sunday I was going to “explain” The Trinity to us. My spontaneous laughter probably said it all, but even now a certain temptation remains; one I will try to keep well and truly in check (you’ll let me know if I don’t, wont you?). Jesus was no Trinitarian theologian. In fact, so focused was he on God’s Kingdom (the recreation of the world, as Hans Küng aptly puts it), that formulas and doctrines about God were but mere abstractions, rhetorical side shows and certainly not the main event. Still, a common golden thread does exist between his world view and that of the great pastors and thinkers of the 3rd, 4th, & 5th Century who eventually arrived at the Trinitarian vision of God we still celebrate today, albeit not without indifference and even protest. The thread being the utter incomprehensibility, unpredictability and ineffability of the Spiritual Presence at play in our midst. A mouthful I know, but a wondrous mystery, known not by intellect or by sight, but through encounter and ultimately by participation; a self identification, no less. Matters ultimately of the human heart and spirit, often escaping, if not fleeing, from our careful attention. The question before us then, is not a speculative one and certainly not mathematical! More to the point is the question of how might we be changed before this Mystery. “You must be born anew,” said Jesus, and not in a simplistic, once off event. But by virtue of the drawing, enlivening and full symbol of love, that God is, how are we to be taken from places of brokenness to integrity, places of interior cold to a warmth of relationality, from anxiety to calm, from fear to courage, from bitterness to liberation, from falsehood to authenticity and from isolation to mutuality? For these are the direct implications of a Trinitarian faith, practiced not solely in the mind but in the midst of community, fueled by open and searching prayer, enacted in the sharing of bread and the wine. I may have mentioned it before, but this icon – Rublev’s Holy Trinity – was blue-tacked to the wall in front of my desk when I wrote my Masters Dissertation in the stairwell of our apartment all those years ago in Massachusetts. And what it kept inviting me to do as I slaved over research and phrasing, was not just to speak about the mystery of God in some knowledgeable fashion, but to speak out of the Mystery itself with due reverence and humility. So by that I mean, it was to be no mere description of God; detailed, clever and possibly bamboozling to the unsuspecting reader, rather, a lived experience, wonderment, gratitude – a speechlessness even. Not the stuff of normal academic, empirical enquiry! And when I try to honour that work this time of each year with a cursory reading, I’m staggered by the clarity and bravdo of that younger, more naïve and far too wordy, Sean M. Gilbert (I guess some things haven’t really changed).
I was on to something vitally important: God cannot be fully explained, for God in such fullness of grace, mystery, beauty, energy and compassion can but be enjoyed (enjoined to). It kind of takes the airs out of the tyres, doesn’t it? You mean to say, that’s all there is, an enjoyment of God? What about the hard yards, the complexities to unravel, the fights needed to be won over who is right and who is wrong, who is in and who is out? My growing experience of this living symbol, this living poetic reality, is that abstracted concerns, such human strivings – such malcontent – are diffused, even absorbed by the love and goodness embodied here. They are rendered unimportant. For what is important are the pressing matters of heart and spirit, potentially, daily transformed by an open hearth of love that no knows no doubts, no fears, no impediments and no prejudice; an inclusive, dancing, believing and healing love that will continue to change every thing, if we so allow it to have its way with us. So, friends, with this promise and willing presence in our hearts, we gather again around this table of grace. And it is from here we learn – in the tasting and seeing – to live and speak out of the [glad] mystery that is God; for us and the recreation of the world. Because in the end, that same mystery unfolds within us and urges us to go and be likewise: people of depth, compassion, spirit and truth. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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