The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you (2 Corinthians 13:13)

This is Trinity Sunday. It’s a Sunday I generally approach with a certain amount of trepidation because, truth to tell, I’m not entirely sure I know how the three persons of the Trinity relate to each other. Worse still, what was probably the biggest stushie in the history of the Church was over the relationships between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In 1054 the whole Church split down the middle over the question of whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or whether it proceeds from the Father and from the Son. Between you and me, I’m not sure I know for certain.

I’ve trawled the internet looking for illustrations to try to describe the Trinity. The trouble is, every time I find what looks like a good way of understanding the Trinity, I find another page where some learned theologian rubbishes it as committing some heresy or other. So bear with me in what follows - I may be committing some terrible heresy or other; but I can only understand things as well as my brain will let me. I clearly don’t have the intellectual gifts that allow me to describe, with enough certainty to make sundering the Church in two a worthwhile thing to do, the relationships between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is what works for me.

Maestress! Would you be so good as to play an A around about the middle of the keyboard. Great note A. It’s a complete note in itself. Could you play the E above that A? Again - a great note: one of my favourites. Could you play them together? That’s nice. Two notes together have harmony. Each is complete in itself, but together there’s something more. Yet there could still be more. Could you play just the C-sharp between the A and the E? Nice note! Could you play all three together? Now that’s harmony! That is a complete A-major chord. Three perfectly good notes, but played together they have a sense of completeness; of wholeness.

For me, this speaks of the Trinity. See, we could just believe in God the Father - Muslims, Jews and Unitarians get by fine with that; but I think they are missing something wonderful. You could just believe in God the Father - and why not? This is, after all, the God who has made everything that is - the God who wrote the laws of nature that have fashioned stars and planets from clouds of gas and dust; that have allowed the simple nucleic acids of the simplest life to blossom and grow and evolve into the vast variety of life that teems on this world. Why would we not worship such a God? There is enough there, surely, to make our souls sing.

But we are more than souls. We have bodies: bodies that exist in a limited part of space and time. Tiny beside the cosmos we live in and the eternity that frames our brief lives here, yes we could gaze up in awestruck wonder at the God who made it all, but we could get to feel very insignificant. We could get to think that we are so small and powerless, so unimportant and limited, that we simply don’t really matter. Worse still we can get to think that nobody really matters. Except for this - that selfsame God came into this world in the life of Jesus. He came in the life of Jesus - a human being like you and me, with the same physical needs and limitations as you and me, living the same brief human life as you and me; dying at the hands of brutal hatred and jealous power as all too many of us do. His life - his being here in this world with us and people like us is God’s love song to his children: to humanity. You matter. I matter. Everybody matters.

So could we just worship Jesus? Sometimes we get that way. There’s a hymn book I used to use at what was the Congregational Church in Annan - “Sacred Songs And Solos” - where almost all the hymns are focussed on Jesus. And why not? Jesus is our redeemer. Through the life he lived n Earth; through his death and resurrection we have eternal life. The Cross of Christ and the empty tomb speak of forgiveness and a fresh start when we need it - of all the stupid thoughtless, bigoted, mean-spirited things we’ve said and thought and done in our lives being washed away; of a new creation for each of us whenever we needs it. Why should we not rejoice and worship Christ?

But all that was along time ago. Nearly 2000 years and in a distant country with very different culture and social expectations. You read the Bible with its talk of how to handle an ox that’s fallen into a hole and bridegrooms arriving late in the evening after a wedding and it can all seem very alien. We live in the 21st Century here in Scotland. We need the words we find in the Bible, however alien and strange, to make sense to us. For we are more than soul and we are more than body. We have hearts and minds. We have a sense of purpose and a sense of right and wrong.

Which is where the Holy Spirit comes in. Dwelling within us here and now, touching our minds - if we let it - here and now, nudging at our sense of purpose and pricking our consciences here and now, the Holy Spirit is God within us. It is God living with us and guiding us - allowing us to read the scriptures in ways that make sense for us today, touching our hearts to feel for the needs of others today. That we have the Holy Spirit that can do all that would be enough, surely, to rejoice and worship. 

But Father, Son and Holy Spirit together make up a whole chord - a chord that sings to us in our wholeness. Together Father, Son and Holy Spirit resound in our souls, in our lives, in our hearts and minds. What does that mean? 

For me it means this. God is the biggest thing there is - the most powerful, the most awesome, the centre of everything that is. That same God, though, came to us in Christ to show us that we matter - to show us that each and every one of us, however small or weak or poor or messed-up, matters. That he came to show us that we are all - each and every one of us - his children and what that means. That same God dwells in us through his Holy Spirit and makes that relevant here and now. 

So what shall we do? We live in a world where there is constant temptation to make the world a darker place - to regard those who are different from us, be they Muslims or Rumanians or whoever this year’s hate figure is, as the enemy. We live in a time and a place where the wealthiest members of our society have grown ever wealthier while the poor have become poorer and turned into figures of contempt; where the response to a 75% increase in homelessness was to build spikes into the floors of shop doorways to stop folk sleeping rough there; where the response to spiralling food poverty is to malign the charities that run the food banks. This is the world we live in here and now.

This is the world that needs to hear the love of God. It is a world that needs to hear the whole chord - the love of God the Father, sung to the world with its needs and its pain by God the Son and given the language of our times by the Holy Spirit. This is a world that needs to hear the whole chord that sings out the love of God to the world and to all the people in it, and which needs us to sing it.

Lord, may our whole lives ring out your love for your children. May the teachings of your Son inform our ways and may your Holy Spirit inspire us to do your work in the world.

Preached at Wamphray parish church