Luminous Darkness

Eucharist for the Feast of the Trinity
Sermon preached in the Chapel of Grey College, Durham, UK
11 June 2006

Romans 8:18-27
John 3:1-17

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.  Amen.

Jesus said, “Whom do people say that I am?”

And his disciples answered and said, “Some say you are John the Baptist returned from the dead; others say Elias, or other of the old prophets.”

And Jesus answered and said, “But whom do you say that I am?”

Peter answered and said, “Thou art the Logos, existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His will, being generated, in consideration of the various functions by which God is related to his creation, but only on the fact that Scripture speaks of a Father, and a Son, and a Holy Spirit, each member of the Trinity being coequal with every other member, and each acting inseparably with and interpenetrating every other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but causing no division which would make the substance no longer simple.”

And Jesus answering, said, “What?”

Today is known in the church as the Feast of the Trinity and it of course celebrates the Christian understanding of God as three persons in one substance, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Although the language used above is meant to be amusing, it underlines the fact that the trinity is in many ways just as complex and difficult to understand today as it was in the early church, when the debates about it which threatened the very fabric of the growing church produced that type of precise wording to try and explain the concept.

Today I would like to share two different impressions of the nature of the trinity, with the hope that they will in some way provide a few glimpses towards the ineffable nature of God.  As always when speaking about concepts such as these in our faith, we need to be reminded that Christianity is a faith of paradox and mystery; and the trinity is perhaps the most mysterious thing of all.  How can something be both three things and one thing at the same time?  This is not something that our human minds are capable of comprehending or expressing, but we must try and make some headway even by using our own imperfect language.

My first example comes from a lecture given by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, last November at the Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan.  He was speaking to a group of muslims about basic Christians beliefs and behavior, and to try and explain the person of Jesus Christ he says:

“We call him the Son of God. But we do not mean by this that God has physically begotten him, or that he is made to be another God alongside the one God. We say rather that the one God is first the source of everything, the life from which everything flows out. Then we say that the one God is also in that flowing-out. The life that comes from him is not something different from him. It reflects all that he is. It shows his glory and beauty and communicates them. Once again, our teachers say that God has a perfect and eternal ‘image’ of his glory, sometimes called his wisdom, sometimes called his ‘word’, sometimes called his ‘son’, though this is never to be understood in a physical and literal way. And we say that the one God, who is both source and outward-flowing life, who is both ‘Father’ and ‘Son’, is also active as the power that draws everything back to God, leading and guiding human beings towards the wisdom and goodness of God. This is the power we call ‘Holy Spirit’.  So when we speak of ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’, we do not at all mean to say that there are three gods – as if there were three divine people in heaven, like three human people in a room. Certainly we believe that the three ways in which God eternally exists and acts are distinct – but not in the way things in the world or even persons in the world are distinct.”

The language that the archbishop uses here is particularly interesting because of course to muslims, the Christian doctrine of the trinity seems like heresy or polytheism.  He describes a way in which we can understand how God can act and exist as three distinct persons, but still also act and exist as one substance which flows out and pervades all that is.  The key idea is that God is that source from which everything life-giving flows out, but God is also that which flows out into creation.

The other image is one that I hope might be useful if the first is a bit dense theologically or too abstract to be helpful.  Reflect on the ocean.  If you think about the vast quantity of water in the oceans of the earth, and remember a little GCSE geography knowledge of the hydrologic cycle, you will be aware that in fact the oceans exist not only as the water that is at any moment physically in them.  They also exist as the water vapor in clouds and as the rain that falls from the clouds.  All three, the seas, the clouds, and the rain, are of the same substance, water, but they each exist with distinct forms and through different effects.  The sea, which can represent the Father, emanates his substance through evaporation into the created world.  This takes the form of the clouds that cover all the earth, the Son, and these clouds produce the life-giving rain, or the Holy Spirit, that nourishes life and makes it grow and develop.  In fact, all three elements, sea, clouds, and rain, are essential for life, and all three are, compared to a human time-scale, equally ageless and eternal in our environment.

Although these two understandings are both perfectly adequate definitions of the trinity, the do not really describe how we encounter God for ourselves.  There are many ways that we do this of course from here at our Eucharist or in the waters of baptism.  Or in other sacred activities such as confirmation, which we celebrate particularly today with one member of our college who has been confirmed just this past week at the cathedral.  Perhaps we encounter God in the relationships with our family or in the beauty of nature.  These are all good examples, but I would like to spend a few minutes talking about encountering God in prayer.

The kind of prayer I am talking about here is not the corporate prayer that we engage in together in a gathered congregation, important though that is.  I am speaking about personal, individual prayer in which we give ourselves the gift of some time spent with God.  There are many ways to go about this of course, some would say as many ways as there are people, but the key is that we are all called to be in a prayerful, personal relationship with God.  Prayer is not, as it so frequently can seem, a duty or obligation laid on us by a God with a ledger held up to measure us against a set of divine expectations.  Rather, prayer is a true gift to us from God, and, in effect, we are made to be creatures of prayer.  It is the way  that we encounter God at the deepest level, which is our true calling as human beings.

Though my own prayer in the last few years or so, I have come to more fully understand in a very practical way how it is that Christians understand the trinity.  For much of my life I was content to believe intellectually in the idea of the trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while at the same time directing my prayer towards ‘God’ – some vague, mostly undefined being.  God was ‘up there’ or ‘out there’ or ‘inside me’, but I did not really think about it in much more depth than that.  I suppose in some sense my prayer was directed towards God the Father, as that was the principal image I had in my mind.

Praying to the other members of the trinity, to the Son or the Holy Spirit didn’t really enter in to my experience.  Praying to Jesus was associated too strongly with a kind of biblical fundamentalism or conservative evangelicalism that I was not comfortable with and praying to the Holy Spirit just didn’t seem to make sense.  Besides, I was happy with my prayer life and I certainly believed in Jesus as the Son of God and in the Holy Spirit.

However, I have begun to realize that I was missing out on a major part of what it means to be a Christian.  During a retreat last summer based on the teachings of St. Ignatius of Lyola, I encountered Jesus Christ himself in prayer.  This was not the first time that had happened, but it was the first time that I had really been paying attention to what it might mean for me.  I can tell you that it was an amazing experience to encounter the living Christ since really what was happened was that I was embraced by love, and that is what prayer is all about.  I have since decided to reclaim the idea of having a personal relationship with Jesus from those Christian traditions that have sometimes tended to monopolize it, and so I am fully comfortable with describing my own experience in that way.

I am still at the beginning stages of praying with the Holy Spirit.  I say with, rather than to, since that is more what it feels like to me.  St. Paul is helpful to me in our passage from Romans today where he famously says: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”  Again, I intellectually understand what St. Paul is getting at here, but I still have more work to do to encounter God in this way.

And what do we learn from our prayer?  I can only tell you what I have learned from my prayer, but I think that the words of Jesus from our gospel today speak better than I ever could: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”  Being caught up in prayer is necessarily to be caught up in the love that is shared between the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit, as some theologians put it.  For if we say that the substance of God is love, then we can perhaps understand a bit of how God can be both that substance and that flowing out of divine love into the world.  I find that as I pray, I am learning more and more about the truly amazing capacity of God’s love for us – despite all the things we do wrong, God’s desire is to take them and turn them into something wonderful.

That message of love is profoundly expressed in our Christian trinitarian understanding of the divine.  God loved creation so much that the Father gave his Son to save the world and the Son promised to send us the Holy Spirit as a way to help us live more fully the lives we are called to.  So we are taught to call God our Father, and to pray to our saviour Jesus Christ, the Son, and to do both through the Holy Spirit who knows us better than we know ourselves.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning is now and shall be for ever.  Amen.

Eucharist for the Feast of the Trinity
Sermon preached in the Chapel of Grey College, Durham, UK
11 June 2006

Romans 8:18-27
John 3:1-17

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.  Amen.

Jesus said, “Whom do people say that I am?”

And his disciples answered and said, “Some say you are John the Baptist returned from the dead; others say Elias, or other of the old prophets.”

And Jesus answered and said, “But whom do you say that I am?”

Peter answered and said, “Thou art the Logos, existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His will, being generated, in consideration of the various functions by which God is related to his creation, but only on the fact that Scripture speaks of a Father, and a Son, and a Holy Spirit, each member of the Trinity being coequal with every other member, and each acting inseparably with and interpenetrating every other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but causing no division which would make the substance no longer simple.”

And Jesus answering, said, “What?”

Today is known in the church as the Feast of the Trinity and it of course celebrates the Christian understanding of God as three persons in one substance, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Although the language used above is meant to be amusing, it underlines the fact that the trinity is in many ways just as complex and difficult to understand today as it was in the early church, when the debates about it which threatened the very fabric of the growing church produced that type of precise wording to try and explain the concept.

Today I would like to share two different impressions of the nature of the trinity, with the hope that they will in some way provide a few glimpses towards the ineffable nature of God.  As always when speaking about concepts such as these in our faith, we need to be reminded that Christianity is a faith of paradox and mystery; and the trinity is perhaps the most mysterious thing of all.  How can something be both three things and one thing at the same time?  This is not something that our human minds are capable of comprehending or expressing, but we must try and make some headway even by using our own imperfect language.

My first example comes from a lecture given by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, last November at the Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan.  He was speaking to a group of muslims about basic Christians beliefs and behavior, and to try and explain the person of Jesus Christ he says:

“We call him the Son of God. But we do not mean by this that God has physically begotten him, or that he is made to be another God alongside the one God. We say rather that the one God is first the source of everything, the life from which everything flows out. Then we say that the one God is also in that flowing-out. The life that comes from him is not something different from him. It reflects all that he is. It shows his glory and beauty and communicates them. Once again, our teachers say that God has a perfect and eternal ‘image’ of his glory, sometimes called his wisdom, sometimes called his ‘word’, sometimes called his ‘son’, though this is never to be understood in a physical and literal way. And we say that the one God, who is both source and outward-flowing life, who is both ‘Father’ and ‘Son’, is also active as the power that draws everything back to God, leading and guiding human beings towards the wisdom and goodness of God. This is the power we call ‘Holy Spirit’.  So when we speak of ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’, we do not at all mean to say that there are three gods – as if there were three divine people in heaven, like three human people in a room. Certainly we believe that the three ways in which God eternally exists and acts are distinct – but not in the way things in the world or even persons in the world are distinct.”

The language that the archbishop uses here is particularly interesting because of course to muslims, the Christian doctrine of the trinity seems like heresy or polytheism.  He describes a way in which we can understand how God can act and exist as three distinct persons, but still also act and exist as one substance which flows out and pervades all that is.  The key idea is that God is that source from which everything life-giving flows out, but God is also that which flows out into creation.

The other image is one that I hope might be useful if the first is a bit dense theologically or too abstract to be helpful.  Reflect on the ocean.  If you think about the vast quantity of water in the oceans of the earth, and remember a little GCSE geography knowledge of the hydrologic cycle, you will be aware that in fact the oceans exist not only as the water that is at any moment physically in them.  They also exist as the water vapor in clouds and as the rain that falls from the clouds.  All three, the seas, the clouds, and the rain, are of the same substance, water, but they each exist with distinct forms and through different effects.  The sea, which can represent the Father, emanates his substance through evaporation into the created world.  This takes the form of the clouds that cover all the earth, the Son, and these clouds produce the life-giving rain, or the Holy Spirit, that nourishes life and makes it grow and develop.  In fact, all three elements, sea, clouds, and rain, are essential for life, and all three are, compared to a human time-scale, equally ageless and eternal in our environment.

Although these two understandings are both perfectly adequate definitions of the trinity, the do not really describe how we encounter God for ourselves.  There are many ways that we do this of course from here at our Eucharist or in the waters of baptism.  Or in other sacred activities such as confirmation, which we celebrate particularly today with one member of our college who has been confirmed just this past week at the cathedral.  Perhaps we encounter God in the relationships with our family or in the beauty of nature.  These are all good examples, but I would like to spend a few minutes talking about encountering God in prayer.

The kind of prayer I am talking about here is not the corporate prayer that we engage in together in a gathered congregation, important though that is.  I am speaking about personal, individual prayer in which we give ourselves the gift of some time spent with God.  There are many ways to go about this of course, some would say as many ways as there are people, but the key is that we are all called to be in a prayerful, personal relationship with God.  Prayer is not, as it so frequently can seem, a duty or obligation laid on us by a God with a ledger held up to measure us against a set of divine expectations.  Rather, prayer is a true gift to us from God, and, in effect, we are made to be creatures of prayer.  It is the way  that we encounter God at the deepest level, which is our true calling as human beings.

Though my own prayer in the last few years or so, I have come to more fully understand in a very practical way how it is that Christians understand the trinity.  For much of my life I was content to believe intellectually in the idea of the trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while at the same time directing my prayer towards ‘God’ – some vague, mostly undefined being.  God was ‘up there’ or ‘out there’ or ‘inside me’, but I did not really think about it in much more depth than that.  I suppose in some sense my prayer was directed towards God the Father, as that was the principal image I had in my mind.

Praying to the other members of the trinity, to the Son or the Holy Spirit didn’t really enter in to my experience.  Praying to Jesus was associated too strongly with a kind of biblical fundamentalism or conservative evangelicalism that I was not comfortable with and praying to the Holy Spirit just didn’t seem to make sense.  Besides, I was happy with my prayer life and I certainly believed in Jesus as the Son of God and in the Holy Spirit.

However, I have begun to realize that I was missing out on a major part of what it means to be a Christian.  During a retreat last summer based on the teachings of St. Ignatius of Lyola, I encountered Jesus Christ himself in prayer.  This was not the first time that had happened, but it was the first time that I had really been paying attention to what it might mean for me.  I can tell you that it was an amazing experience to encounter the living Christ since really what was happened was that I was embraced by love, and that is what prayer is all about.  I have since decided to reclaim the idea of having a personal relationship with Jesus from those Christian traditions that have sometimes tended to monopolize it, and so I am fully comfortable with describing my own experience in that way.

I am still at the beginning stages of praying with the Holy Spirit.  I say with, rather than to, since that is more what it feels like to me.  St. Paul is helpful to me in our passage from Romans today where he famously says: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”  Again, I intellectually understand what St. Paul is getting at here, but I still have more work to do to encounter God in this way.

And what do we learn from our prayer?  I can only tell you what I have learned from my prayer, but I think that the words of Jesus from our gospel today speak better than I ever could: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”  Being caught up in prayer is necessarily to be caught up in the love that is shared between the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit, as some theologians put it.  For if we say that the substance of God is love, then we can perhaps understand a bit of how God can be both that substance and that flowing out of divine love into the world.  I find that as I pray, I am learning more and more about the truly amazing capacity of God’s love for us – despite all the things we do wrong, God’s desire is to take them and turn them into something wonderful.

That message of love is profoundly expressed in our Christian trinitarian understanding of the divine.  God loved creation so much that the Father gave his Son to save the world and the Son promised to send us the Holy Spirit as a way to help us live more fully the lives we are called to.  So we are taught to call God our Father, and to pray to our saviour Jesus Christ, the Son, and to do both through the Holy Spirit who knows us better than we know ourselves.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning is now and shall be for ever.  Amen.