Whaley Bridge Parish
Me and the Trinity 2021
I wonder if you can remember your very earliest experience of God? For me, my first experiences of God were connected up with Grandad. Sitting on Grandad’s lap, as he read me stories and poems, I knew I was totally loved and safe. With Grandad, everyday things became strange and wonderful. As we watered the flowers together in the garden after tea he would point out the apple tree where the jabberwocky lived, and the heffalump pit behind the compost heap. With Grandad, a bus trip into Coventry town centre became a magical journey of discovery. And in church Grandad was always there, celebrating Holy Communion at the altar, talking about Jesus just like he and I did on our own together at home. “God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them” we read in John 1. Because of Grandad, at three I knew with certainty that God was there, and God loved me. That was my first experience of God: living in love.
Trinity Sunday is a day for contemplating the glory that is God the Holy Trinity. It’s a day when we’re invited to stretch our minds and imagination, in wonder at and praise of the God whom we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And yet Trinity Sunday has not got a great reputation with church goers. The God who is Creator, Son and Spirit, three persons, yet one God? Forget it. Too complicated. A God who can be both one and three at the same time? Now that starts to make quantum physics look straightforward! Well, I think making the Trinity complicated is missing the point.
The reason that Christians began to speak of God as Trinity, three persons, is simple: they did so because it chimed with what was true of God in their experience. That’s how the Christian faith works. It doesn’t start from a complicated theory someone has worked out on paper. It starts from lived human experience of God. That’s what the Bible bears witness to. Christians began to talk about God as Father, Son and Spirit because it fitted best with what they knew of God in their experience. So on Trinity Sunday I want to talk about how we know God. How we experience God.
I have found that the way we experience God as Trinity can shift and change throughout our life. How is God most real for you, I wonder? When you pray, I wonder, do you most easily connect with God as the life –giving spirit whom we celebrated last week at Pentecost, or as Jesus, God-become-human-for-us? Or do you most readily relate to or as the Creator God, the life giver and life sustainer? Let me tell you a bit about how’s that’s been for me.
As I said, I grew up in a Christian home and had a strong sense of God’s loving presence from when I was a toddler. I guess you could say this was an experience of the first person of the Trinity, God the Father. The sense of God the Son and God the Spirit came later.
We always went to church, but it was dreary and loveless. There was no sense of faith making a difference to life and little support and care for my family when we went through tough times. When I was sixteen I got fed up with it. My friend Hilary invited me to go with her to a local charismatic evangelical church. The evening service was full of people my age. There was a sense of warmth and devotion there. People prayed before the service began. After the service I joined a group of young people at the Curate’s house. We prayed and read the bible together, something I had never done in a small group before. I had a growing sense of God underpinning all life, of faith in Christ not being something in a box for Sunday but the guiding centre of everything.
This was the time that I came to know God as Holy Spirit. My childhood relationship with God was reassuring, but rather general, a bit vague. Now God came into sharper focus as a dynamic presence, guiding and helping me to grow, drawing together all the different threads of my life. Prayer became much more real.
I found that the charismatic evangelical tradition wasn’t temperamentally right for me, and moved away from it after a few years. But I treasure what I came to know of God’s Holy Spirit from this time.
During my student years I was an activist, for me and my friends the peace movement and social justice were all important. But how did this fit with Christianity? I couldn’t work it out. The figure of Jesus, the Christ at the centre of Christian belief seemed unsatisfactory to me, a bit of a sham. In my childhood Jesus had been presented as gentle Jesus good and mild, a bloodless, inoffensive figure, a pseudo-person, not a real human being. If Jesus was God, then the wounds of the cross didn’t really hurt, did they? He knew it would all turn out fine in the end, didn’t he? A Jesus who was not human like us, who didn’t understand the struggles and heartbreak of life on this planet seemed very un-engaging to me.
After university I came to Sheffield where I got involved with a project called the Urban Theology Unit. It was all about finding the good news of Jesus in and for ordinary people living in an area of urban deprivation. At the UTU I was made to put down the Gospel of John and pick up the Gospel of Mark. I discovered a different kind of Jesus: a restless activist, a builder of community, a Jesus who sits alongside the socially excluded.
Mark gives us Jesus’s cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?” This is a Jesus who is fully human, frail flesh and blood. There is no pretence here.
Only a suffering God can help, as one Christian thinker famously said, and for me to understand finally that Jesus was a frail suffering human being, while yet being God fully realised, finally made the pieces of the puzzle drop into place.
In Mark’s Gospel Jesus was constantly connecting with the least, the lost and the broken. I was working as a care assistant with people with enduring mental health problems who had survived decades of institutional care: they could have walked out of the pages of Mark’s Gospel. Increasingly I realised I was coming to work and finding Christ there: in the relationships I made with residents: in their pain and struggle, in the moments of laughter and grace.
Gradually it dawned on me that all these experiences of God connected. The activist Jesus of Mark’s Gospel shows us God just as the contemplative Jesus of John’s Gospel shows us God. The Jesus who loves the broken people that society ignores is loving them with the same love the God the Father loved the creation into being. He is loving them with the same love the I experienced through the love of my Grandad when I was three. God’s Holy Spirit who prays with us and in us is connecting everything up. We experience God differently, but it is always the same God. Because God is One, Trinity in Unity.
That’s the story of some of my journey with God the Holy Trinity. What about you? I look forward to hearing your stories too. Maybe we can find a place to start telling them to each other over the coming months.
Pau writes in his letter to the Romans:
“When we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
We are children, so we are heirs, inheritors – we inherit from God all that he has to pass on to us in Christ: the grace of forgiveness, the freedom of live lived in his love, now and in all eternity. This is the good news of Trinity Sunday – no dry, dusty doctrines, but a promise of new life. And that is good news indeed.