St Albans Uniting Parish

Readings

Genesis 1: 1-2:4a

Maurice Andrew says that in this passage the earth is envisaged as being without form or void and yet in that emptiness the spirit of God is moving on the face of the waters and something creative is about to happen.

God says ‘let there be light’ and light brings day and night and with it the progress of time. Thus says Andrew ‘the heavens and the earth, what we would call the environment, is a combination of space and time, with all the potential for their interaction.[1]

Genesis 1 is therefore well grounded in science and happily sits alongside contemporary science as long as we acknowledge the power of myth and story to portray truth. 

Matthew 28: 16-20

In our Gospel reading this morning the Risen Christ commissions the disciples as apostles and directs them to baptise in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a clear Trinitarian baptismal formula.  This particular reading is known in evangelical circles as ‘the great commission’ and was the proof text for the great protestant mission revival, known in Europe as pietism.  That movement spread to Britain through John Wesley to become Methodism. 

However the original Greek translated ‘Go’ in these verses means, as you go about your daily activities, so it is about making disciples as we go about our normal activities and we don’t become better missionaries the further we travel.[2]

Sermon

‘What Image shall I use’ is the fundamental question that the doctrine of trinity sets out to answer. 

It is not a question that bothers many Christians today but in a Roman society that worshiped many gods it was an important question.  It was also an important question for Emperor Constantine who wanted a unified religion to support his authority.

Proclaiming the emperor as god had provided a strong unifying force in the past.  Rome was religiously tolerant and allowed the worship of all the deities of the people they conquered but the Emperor god was obviously more powerful because the other deities couldn’t stop their followers being conquered by his army.

Furthermore emperors like Augustus created peace through total domination, gave safe travel on good roads, encouraged commerce and built great cities with running water and sewage systems.  He also built magnificent civic buildings and sports stadiums.  All the things people might expect from a god. 

But there are always those who feel they would make a better emperor than the incumbent and once again the empire was unified by military conquest, this time by Constantine.  By this time emperor worship had lost its appeal so Constantine looked for a replacement to maintain the unity military conquest had achieved.  Christianity was the most widely dispersed faith in the empire and was at times noted for its opposition to emperor worship because, like Judaism it not only maintained there was only one God, it believed it was a sin to worship any other gods.  In fact early Christians were described as atheists by the Greco/Roman world because they refused to worship and attend the festivals of the other gods in what was a very religiously tolerant society.

However Christianity had already developed factions and as now, theologians were expert at disagreeing with each other.  Therefore to a world used to multiple deities it seemed that Christians worship God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit so they were we just part of the polytheism they all indorsed.

Christians understood they were only worshiping one God and like us probably wondered what the fuss was about.  However when Christianity became the unifying force in the empire the need to prove that Christians only worshiped one God became an issue of imperial security.

The three focuses of Christian worship weren’t just a religious issue, but affected everybody’s peace and security.  That is illustrated by the quotation from Gregory of Nyssa, who was one the three Cappadocian Fathers credited with putting the finishing touches to the linguistic debates that created the doctrine of the trinity.  Bishop Gregory wrote that: 

If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophises about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior;

if you ask, “Is my bath ready?’ the attendant answers that the Son was made out of nothing.’

According to Gregory everybody was interested and everybody had a point of view.  Having mentioned Gregory it is only fair to mention the other two Cappadocian Fathers, Gregory’s older brother Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia and their common friend Gregory of Nazianzuz.

Basil and Gregory also had an older sister called Macrina who Basil refers to as the teacher so we can presume she also influenced the debate but a male focused society did not mention the woman who may well be a Cappadocian mother.

This group argued that three could be one in a single Godhead just as three people hold a common humanity.

However significant understanding had previously been contributed to the debate simultaneously by Hippolytus and Tertullian.  As our reading this morning demonstrates the Gospels also contributed to the debate, particularly John’s Gospel which supplied a number of proof texts. To understand Hippolytus and Tertullian’s contribution you need to turn your minds back to the Indian Ink Theatre Company’s production, Krishnan's Dairy, which had its first performance in 1997.  By the clever use of masks the actor wove together two of the most universal Indian clichés - the Taj Mahal and the corner store.   Krishnan's Dairy, is a love story that unfolds behind the counter with hilarious and deeply moving consequences for the hopeful, vulnerable lives of an immigrant shopkeeper and his wife.

Theatre masks were also used as illustration by Hippolytus who adopted the Greek word for them prosopon to define the different parts of the trinity.  The significance of such imagery was that, like Krishnan's Dairy, masks were used in Greek theatre to allow the same actor to be different characters.  Tertullian, writing in Latin, used that language’s alternative persona which gave wider understanding in a Latin speaking Western Church. 

The three persona, or for us persons, present three different personalities or perhaps characteristics of the same God.  Just as the actor from the Indian Ink Theatre Company could play both Krishnan and his wife by having a mask on his face and on the back of his head Trinity gives us three glimpses of the divine mystery.  In fact Krishnan's corner dairy provided a third identity as both husband and wife were enfolded in that common enterprise.

Understanding the history and importance of Trinitarian Theology in the third and fourth centuries is all very well but we need to explore its value for us in the vastly different world we occupy. 

Just as the first followers of Jesus were unconcerned about Trinity many of us are also unconcerned about defining how we ‘image’ God.  However we also live in a world with an increasing variety of spiritual options and a diversity of Christian understanding.  We also live alongside well-established alternative religions. 

Therefore in an environment where it has become politically and socially important to have some understanding of other faiths the first requirement is to be able to comprehend what defines our own faith.  Furthermore within the diversity our own faith understanding the distinctive way we image God is a useful way of countering some of the aberrations that distort what it means to be Christian that immerge from time to time.

In our Gospel reading the Risen Christ commissions the apostles for mission and commands them to baptise people of all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19)

Bill Loader writes that this is such an important text in the context of Matthew's gospel that there is a danger that its use on Trinity Sunday will lead to too much focus on its tenuous links with the Trinity.’[3]  That is a fair comment but although the Trinitarian image is defined in that sentence although some of the words don’t carry the same meaning in today’s world as they did when Matthew wrote them. 

A father in Matthew’s time was more than biologically linked to his son and very much the patriarch and the head of the household enterprise.  In the temporary absence of a father the oldest son could speak or act on behalf of the father and in doing so represented the whole household.  Of course a son acting in this way would be expected to act in a way that was consistent with the sprit, or ethos, of the family enterprise as indeed the father himself would be expected to do.  Such an understanding of a household enterprise easily transfers to people’s expectation of the household of God were any one image of Trinity is an image of the total household.  In today’s world we have much more diversity in family relationship and members of the family are often involved in a variety of enterprises.  Many people also have very bad relationships with their fathers that make the use of the word father for those individuals an unfortunate and unbelievable metaphor for a loving creator of the universe.

This morning’s use of the Genesis reading focuses our thoughts on God as supreme creator and that is a useful understanding of a divinity that is beyond human comprehension.  Indeed both Genesis and science can be comfortable with mystery beyond creation, a truth we cannot grasp. 

In the doctrine of the Trinity however Christians maintain that mystery can in imaged or imagined by what we can learn about the man Jesus and the effect he had on his followers particularly after his death. 

Christians will also say that Jesus acted and grew in a way that embodied the Spirit of God.  Christians maintain that they are called, empowered and have a relationship with God through the action of that same Spirit.  A Spirit which is both the Holy Spirit, God’s Spirit and the Spirit of the Risen Christ, the essence of the man Jesus.

All three Abrahamic faiths acknowledge that they worship the same God although the names may be different because the languages are different.  Both Judaism and Islam understand their faiths through studying sacred scripture and all three hold the Hebrew texts, or as Christians call them ‘The Old Testament’ as sacred.  Christians however claim that understanding the life of Jesus provides a human persona of God, an image we can identify with.  Certainly we learn about Jesus in our scripture, what we call the New Testament.  But we also claim that through that learning we can form a relationship with Jesus, or perhaps more accurately the risen Christ. 

As Trinitarian Christians we believe that a relationship with Christ is also a relationship with God and the whole process is inspired and nurtured by the Holy Spirit.

We are inspired, nurtured and led by the spirit, informed and given divine insight by the Jesus we hold as Christ and are in awe of the unimaginable creator of all that is.  As Christians we recognise and trust that all three ‘persona’ are the masks in the eternal drama were each persona gives us a hint and speaks to us in different ways to build a relationship with the creator of the drama of which we are a part.

Bill Wallace asks ‘What image shall I use to give a face to God?  Our tradition for a whole host of very good and helpful reasons wisely responds:

‘God in three persons, blessed Trinity’.