ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Trinity Sunday, 7 June 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass

Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

God the Holy Trinity is our friend. The Trinity is at our baptism, we cross ourselves in his name all our lives, and we leave this world in the name of the Trinity. Today is the feast day of the great Christian God who chooses to share His life with us. This is the one Sunday of the year you can be sure of getting a sermon about God. All over England the clergy are struggling to put into words who God is. We divide Him into three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three functions, and then...put Him back together again. Which is great, and it's all in the Creed anyway, but this is not why we come to church. We don't come to church to sort God out. We come to church for God to sort us out, to show us who we are and to show us our eternal life as children of God. The God of our imagination and creation is terribly dull. St. Augustine says, if you understand Him, he is not God. I could try to sort God out for you, and I would tell you all about the doctine of the Trinity, and how it came to pass as a theological peace treaty at the Council of Nicea, and if this wasn't All Saints Margaret Street you would be asleep in two minutes. So let me tell you a little story instead.

I went a couple of weeks ago to Westminster Cathedral Hall to hear Fr Timothy Radcliffe talk about prayer and silence and things like that. After the talk there were the questions. And at the very end the youngest person in the hall stood up. She was a teenage girl sitting in the gallery near me. She was bursting to say something, and it wasn't a question, and it had nothing to do with what had gone before, but she was going to say it anyway. She said, I want to believe in God and everything, she said. But I don't like Him. And I thought, yes, here is someone who is naturally religious, like you and me, but she has been shown a God who is unreal, boring, inhuman, indifferent to suffering, and certainly uninterested in her. Hence the frustration. And it's all our fault. I say that with confidence because I know that it suits me to have an unreal God, because then I can put God into the background and get on with my life. For the past 150 years, the time this church has been standing, we have lived in the age of control. Who's in control? We are, of course. We control the world and we decide who God is. There's a Victorian cartoon of a prosperous industrialist and he's saying, I never used to believe in God until I realised I am He! When God's in the background, I'm big and important. God fits very nicely into my scheme of things, somewhere towards the back because there are so many other things going on. I like God being there, and I still do exactly what I want, can life get any better? But if God were to get big and important in my life, there would be one mighty upheaval. I would become God's friend, with all the responsibilities of love and friendship. I can't cope with that. I can't allow it to happen.

Trinity blows this con trick wide open. Trinity blows the fuse of our intellectual dishonesty. Beware, or perhaps I should say, thank God. Trinity is what we really want to hear. Trinity is the eternal loving conversation of God. This is the still small voice I have tried to drown.

Trinity is eternal. This is God the Father, the creator, with whom I am as one, for ever.

Trinity is loving. This is God the Son, who shows me how to love in my human mind and body, by showing his total loyalty to me in my sorry sad condition. You see, Christianity is a very physical religion. I might have no concept of God from my birth to my death, but I can still be a Christian because Jesus Christ asks me to follow Him day by day. Today's Gospel is about this. Eternal life is for those who believe in the Son of God, those who can see God's work in what Jesus did. We don't need to know it all first. Jesus said I no longer call you servants, but friends. When I start a friendship, I don't know everything about the other person. If I did, and he or she knew all about me, it might bring the friendship to an end right away. A friendship starts, changes, develops, stalls, starts again, and turns, in the end, into love. That's how it will be with you and me and the Son of God. Trinity is not about God, it is about our friendship with God and how it works.

Trinity is eternal, Trinity is loving, and Trinity is a conversation. The Holy Spirit blows where it wills, like a conversation which can go in any direction. We heard at Pentecost last week about the apostles who were understood in every language. The Holy Spirit speaks our language. We have the ability to understand what God is saying. We have God with us, always. Not just us, actually, but everyone, even those who are less religious and High Church than we are. That takes a bit of getting used to. Trinity, the eternal loving conversation of God, embraces all times and places and peoples.

Let me tell you a conversation I had recently. I live in North West London, beyond my last parish of St Cyprian's, out towards Maida Vale, Kilburn, Willesden. You've heard of the Bible Belt. I live in the Bakerloo Biretta Belt. I was out the other day, and I was accosted by a youth. He said, 'Ere, Father, are you a Catholic?' I decided on the short answer rather than the long one, and I said, Yes, I am an Anglican. And he gave me a double thumbs up sign. And he thought for a bit, and he said, Anglican? Anglican? That's everything, isn't it?

I don't know what he meant either, but the answer's good enough for us. Our religion is everything, or it is nothing. God is everything because our God is Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Trinity is the sign of a God who takes me for real. I can now take God for real. I can not have a conversation with a God who is greyed out in the background of my life. O God you have searched me out and known me. Here is a God who can sort us out by asking us to join in an eternal loving conversation which we are now able to understand. I can go beyond my limited self, with all its demands, to a new life with God. There are no boxes to be ticked first. The attraction to God is there, like a physical attraction. Any friendship is based on trust. We call our friendship with God faith. O Trinity, O unity, Be present as we worship thee. They were singing that in the eleventh century. It's our turn now. Let our questioning become our prayer. Our prayer is that the Trinity, the eternal loving conversation of God, will become the song of our lives, through love given and received, beginning and ending in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.