Woven into God's heart: A sermon for Trinity Sunday, preached at St Mary's Church, Platt.

Trinity Sunday 2025 - A sermon for St Mary's, Platt

Romans 5.1-5, John 16.12-15

Christian faith started with experience - raw, dramatic experience; the experience of those who knew Jesus in the flesh and felt that in him they were meeting the God they already knew as Father and Creator; the experience of those who watched Jesus die, but later met him alive again; the experience of those who felt God’s presence on the Day of Pentecost, a presence they called the Holy Spirit. These experiences were utterly real – experiences always are, by definition. 

The problem with experience, though, is that it can be very hard to put into words.  “You had to be there!” we say of some extraordinary experience we’ve had.  It’s a bit like being in love. You know it when you feel it. It can change your life, set you on a completely different course. But try to describe it and you’ll probably be reduced to syrupy clichés that never really capture the unique relationship you’ve found with that person who is, to you, the most special person in the world.

That’s what the early Christians discovered when they tried to talk about the experiences they’d had. No matter how clever they were, they were never going to be able to sum it up in words – you had to have been there to know what they had known, to feel what they had felt.  

To add to that, they were trying to explain all this across barriers of language and culture.

The first Christians were Jewish by background and spoke Aramaic. But they took their faith out into a predominantly Greek speaking and Greek thinking world. Greek was the language of learning, of philosophy, the language you used when you wanted to talk or write about ideas. The Greek philosophers like Plato had laid the foundations of a world view which was very different from that of those who had grown up in Galilee and Judea. Their image of God was different. The God of Greek philosophy was distant and serene, perfect and unchangeable, with no personal interest in the doings of humans. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures – our Old Testament – was passionate, personal, sometimes seeming to change his mind, so in love with his people that he would do anything for them.

If God was an unchangeable, perfect, complete, serene being in a distant heaven, how could he be present in a carpenter from Galilee, thought the Greeks? How could he learn and grow as a child? How could he suffer and die? How could he move through the world inspiring and enthusing people? How could he be part of our messy reality at all?  And how were the experiences of God as Father, as Son and as Holy Spirit related to each other? What was happening to God the Father when God the Son was dying on the cross? Were they three different Gods, or three parts of one God, or something else completely…? Every attempt to answer these questions neatly seemed to tangle things up further. 

 

Theologians argued for centuries.  The arguments often became bitter and divisive, no more than tribalism. Ironically, and tragically, those divisions undermined the very thing the first Christians were trying to express when they talked about their experience of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the sense of wholeness, reconciliation and peace they’d found. 

The first disciples felt God come close to them in Jesus. “All that the Father has is mine” we hear in John’s Gospel, the same Gospel that begins by telling us that the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. Heaven had been born on earth, and earth was lifted to heaven.  “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” Paul proclaimed in our second reading. The things that had made them feel cut off from God, whether that was the condemnation of others or their own sense of failure or unworthiness, were swept away. God was with them in Jesus, touching those who’d been told they were untouchable and unfit to enter God’s presence. “Look, here I am sitting down to eat with you,” said God in Jesus, “travelling the road with you, laughing and crying with you, sharing the good times and the bad, enduring the worst that human beings can do to one another.” And when Jesus ascended into heaven, they found that bond – that peace that passed their understanding – hadn’t left them, because God was present with them in his Spirit.

As they took that message out into the world, they discovered God was present with them in one another as well. They were drawn together across the divides of their society – remember all those languages they miraculously spoke on the Day of Pentecost. Jew and Gentile, men and women, slave and free were united in one body. They didn’t always get it right, but they tried to live as equals, a radical thing to do in their stratified and divided world, where great gulfs separated rich from poor and powerful from powerless. And they did so because they had discovered that being woven into the heart of God meant they were woven into each other’s hearts as well.

That was a compelling but challenging message then, and it’s just as compelling and challenging now. We live in a world that is deeply divided too. Where differences of outlook and perspective spiral into mutual suspicion and bitterness at the drop of a hat, where if people don’t look like us, act like us or think like us we all too easily see them as a threat. We watch the news and see things falling apart, nations falling apart, communities falling apart. Perhaps we feel that we are falling apart too torn apart by all the competing demands on us, the barrage of information coming at us. 

The idea of the Trinity wouldn’t have arisen unless people had felt there was something important about it – after all, you wouldn’t make it up. They wouldn’t have clung to it and wrestled with it unless they felt there was something in it they couldn’t let go of, something essential to Christian Faith. The tragedy was that they often lost sight of what that important thing was. It wasn’t about providing a litmus test for orthodoxy, a way of tripping up people you felt were heretics, a box to tick to decide who was friend and who was foe.  

The important thing about the idea of the Trinity is that it calls us back again and again to that glorious truth that at the heart of God is a loving relationship, which we are all of us, together, woven into.  

The astronaut Chris Hadfield was once asked what it felt like to go out on a spacewalk. You have to imagine him, floating in space, with Earth shining below him and the blackness of space beyond, as you hear his answer. He said  “It is the most magnificent experience, hanging onto all of humanity with one hand, between Earth’s riot and the bottomless universe.”

That says it for me. To believe in the Trinity is to believe in - and to follow - a God who holds all things, Earth’s riot and the bottomless universe, friends, strangers, enemies, all that has been and all that will be, the whole of me, the whole of you - and who loves it all. 

Amen