This year Trinity Sunday is on the 15th of June …

Dear Friends,

This year Trinity Sunday is on the 15th of June.  It’s traditionally the Sunday on which the Vicar of the parish asks their curate to preach the sermon because the curate is the one most recently out of theological college and therefore the one most likely to be able to ‘explain’ the nature of the Trinity!  Holy luck Stephen!

This of course is an impossible task, for as Isaiah writes about God, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

The Trinitarian nature of God may not be easy to explain, but then God shouldn’t be easy to explain.  As soon as he can be explained he is no longer God – we have, in explaining him, reduced him to our level and he no longer can be God.

Adopting a belief in the Trinitarian nature of God seems perhaps to make any understanding of him even more complicated and difficult than it might need be, especially when we consider that the word Trinity doesn’t even appear in the Bible!  It was first used in the second Century and not adopted by the church as an official doctrine until the 5th century – but an understanding of God as three persons in one substance is entirely biblical.  Think of Jesus’ baptism when God the Father spoke to the Son and the Holy Spirit came like a dove.  Even in the book of Genesis there is a reference to the Trinitarian nature of God.  Genesis 1:26-31 says this, ‘Then God said “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” Notice the plurality of this statement – let us – according to our…   And this is why it’s so important for us to have some understanding of the Trinity because we are made in the image of a Trinitarian God.

The international bestseller, The Shack, tells the story of a man (Mack) who spends a weekend with God (the Trinity) in a shack following the abduction and murder of his daughter.  In his anger and grief he has much to ask of God including with regards to God’s confusing Trinitarian nature.

God said, ‘What’s important is this: If I were simply One God and only One Person, then you would find yourself in this Creation without something wonderful, without something essential even.  And I would be utterly other than I am.’

‘And we would be without….?’ Mack didn’t even know how to finish the question.

‘Love and relationship.  All love and relationship is possible for you only because it already exists within Me, within God myself.’

We love because we are made in the image of a God who is love – a God who exists in an eternal relationship of love.  We were made in love, to love, and to be loved – it’s hard-wired into our very being – the Trinitarian nature of our God tells us so.

Yours in Christ,

Simon