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The Taste of Trinity 

I wonder what it would be like if a branding company got hold of the Trinity. 

‘Trinity College, Trinity Hall, Trinity Square, the Holy and Undivided Trinity’ – a more solid and institutional image would be hard to find, up there with Churchill Insurance and the Bank of England. 

The trouble that the Trinity has got, if the divine Godhead will pardon me saying, is that the Trinity seems even to some loyal supporters to be just a formula, Three-in-One and One-in-Three, a theological conundrum which you just have to accept if you are going to fully buy in to Church dogma. 

But the Trinity is no more of a formula for the divine life than H2O is for water. Here are the sorts of models we had at school: 

and here a some which say the same thing, bigging up the role of electrons. 

And here are some diagrams of the Trinity, which remind me of those annoying puzzles in Christmas crackers. 

And lastly, here’s a really whacky modern icon of the Trinity, which presents two gods sitting on a bench, with a surfboard for lumbar support, and with a holy duck marching across the top. Not an entirely successful representation. 

Models and icons fare no worse than words: scientists could tell us that H2O is an inorganic compound comprising two hydrogen molecules bound to one oxygen molecule by covalent bonds at an angle of 104 degrees, and theologians can tell us that the persons of the Trinity are consubstantial and coeternal, but so what? 

Neither the diagrams of the H2O or the Trinity leave you thirsty to know the realities they stand for, to be washed or refreshed by them – unlike, say, these images: 

They seek instead to provide a theory, a way of stepping back from our various experiences of water, or of God, to give them a degree of coherence. 

The vision of the Trinity unites a lot of seemingly different experiences but requires us to have no special experience for it to be proven true. Rather, it offers a spiritual reality beyond all experience which defies easy articulation. but which reveals itself to us in our hearts, at the core of our being, sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly. 

The New Testament bears witness to this reality, quite explicitly in several passages. It took 500 years for the Church to come to the elaborate philosophical formulations we now recite, but even in its early days Christians were beginning to talk about God, and our relation to God, differently from in the Jewish Scriptures.  

In our first lesson from the epistle to the Romans, written only 20 years or so after the death and resurrection of Jesus, St Paul talks about a sort of teamwork going on in God. Just before the bit we heard, he calls the Spirit ‘the Spirit of Christ’: not the Spirit of God – which would have been quite conventional – but the Spirit of Christ, who draws members of the Church into Christ’s body – the Spirit who dwells in believers and gives Christ’s resurrection life to their mortal bodies. 

It’s as if we can exchange our old life for Christ’s new life, exchange our filthy rags for royal robes of righteousness. 

And in our lesson, Paul is encouraging the church in Rome to live differently; he talks about the Spirit enabling life to arise out of a death – more precisely, out of a putting to death of the deeds of the body. 

If you listen carefully, you can hear how Paul wants to link the power at work in the Church with the power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, as well as to link the power that guided Christ in his earthly life with the power available to guide believers now: For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. The original Greek is more theological if less inclusive: For all who are led by the Spirt of God as sons of God, just as Jesus the Son of God was led. 

This is all very complex, but in summary: 

The Spirt of Jesus enables the community to die to sin and live to righteousness. 

The Spirt of God leads the community forward as children of God, as God’s Son was led. 

Do you begin to hear the interplay between the Spirit, the Son, and the Father, into which we are taken through baptism and faith in Christ? 

Finally in our reading, Paul introduces the word at the heart of the Trinitarian life and Trinitarian experience: ‘Abba’ – an intimate and comfortable word meaning Father. 

The Trinity reveals God to be a fully personal reality in whom we can feel totally at home, relaxed and renewed. D H Lawrence expresses it rather hauntingly in his poem Pax: 

All that matters is to be at one with the living God
to be a creature in the house of the God of Life.
 

Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace
and at one with the master of the house, with the mistress,
at home, at home in the house of the living,
sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the fire.
 

Sleeping on the hearth of the living world
yawning at home before the fire of life
feeling the presence of the living God
like a great reassurance
a deep calm in the heart
a presence
as of the master sitting at the board
in his own and greater being,
in the house of life. 

Of all the experiences one can have of the Trinity, the experience of intimacy with the living God is the mainstay. If we reverse and double-back over the ground we’ve already covered, we’ll understand that the Spirit’s ability to lead us is based on the intimacy he brings with God. 

When we do not know what to say, think or do, or how to pray, the Spirit reaches godwards with sighs too deep for words, and God, hearing the groans of the Spirt, responds to this pleading in our hearts. By his impulse are we led. 

And when we are locked in our habits and compulsions and feel there’s no way of becoming a better or more worthwhile human being, that we are too old or weak to change, we need not despair: God the Spirit dwells in us, inviting us to plunge more deeply into the risen life of Jesus, by allowing the old self to be crucified and a new self to burst from the tomb. Out of the ashes of our failed efforts, he fashions new beginnings. 

Every good experience that comes from God springs from intimacy with the living God; all that the philosophical definitions protect, or proclaim, is the vision of God as Intimate, Eternal Love.  

With Trinity there’s no substance behind the Father, Son and Holy Spirit of distilled, impersonal deity; nothing within the diversity of God’s being which is either inferior or superior – all is an equal and inclusive harmony; and there is nothing taken into God which cannot be made radiant, holy and joyful by being made one with Him. 

In and through the Trinity every good experience is possible. Here are a few of them: being made regenerate in baptism, finding joy in service, being lost in wonder, love and praise, offering compassion for the vulnerable: 

and, by no means least, every manifestation of intimacy and family life: 

It’s all ours from the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. By gift, it’s ours in the super-abundant life of the Holy, Blessed and Glorious Trinity.