May I speak in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
In the name of the Father. And of the Son. And of the Holy Spirit. Those are, with minor variations, the words that I say every single time I stand up to preach. And not only that, they are also the very first words that I say every time we meet. They are the last words that I speak every time we meet too, as you are sent out into the world, taking with you the blessing of God almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Everything we do and say in this place, in other words, is done and said in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Today may be Trinity Sunday, but our belief in a trinitarian God, a God who is three in one, permeates our worship not just on this Sunday but every Sunday, and every single time we meet in God’s name.
Today, though, on this Trinity Sunday, we are invited to contemplate the mystery of the Trinity together, to ask ourselves what it means to worship God in three persons, to try to perform the mental gymnastics that will allow us to conceive of God’s three-ness, without in any way detracting from God’s one-ness… to try and, necessarily, to fail, because, in the end, the mystery of the Trinity is destined to remain just that, a mystery. We can grasp at it, but only in the knowledge that its reality will inevitably slip through our fingers. We can begin to glimpse a pattern… and then, before we can make sense of it, like the beads in a kaleidoscope, the pattern reconfigures itself into something else. We can proclaim it, as we will do shortly when we say the Creed together. But understand it? Not a chance! And if you are hoping that I am going to explain it all to you in today’s sermon, then you are going to be sorely disappointed. If only I could!
And yet, somehow, despite everything, the mystery of the Trinity continually calls us back to itself, calls us to contemplate those ever-shifting kaleidoscopic patterns, not in order to make sense of them, but because they are beautiful, they are mesmerising, they are true – true in a way that goes beyond language or mathematics– but that we nonetheless somehow recognise as truth.
The two short – but deep – readings that we have heard today begin to point us to elements of that truth.
The formula with which St Paul ends his second letter to the early church in Corinth is almost as familiar to us as the trinitarian formula with which I opened. If I were to begin, I am sure you could all say it with me: ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all, evermore. Amen’.
The words are well known to us, and yet this verse has been described as ‘the most profound theological moment’ in all Paul’s writings. Why? Well, because in this short and apparently simple verse, Paul is doing something daringly new.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul had reminded his readers of the one-ness of God, as set out in the most fundamental of Jewish prayers, known as the Shema, from the Hebrew word for ‘to hear’ and taken from the book of Deuteronomy: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God’.
Writing to these new followers of Jesus, Paul insists that the Shema is correct: ‘for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist’. So far, so good. But he continues… ‘and…’ (and already we might be wondering what the ‘and’ is doing there… if God is one, then there can, surely, be no ‘and’… but he continues anyway…) ‘and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist’. God is one. And yet God is both God the Father and the Lord, Jesus Christ.
And Paul’s wording here is not coincidental. For Jewish people the name of God – Yahweh – was considered so profound and so special that it was forbidden to utter it or to write it. Instead, it was substituted with the word that is usually translated into English as ‘Lord’, in Hebrew ‘Adonai’ and in Greek ‘kyrios’. This means that when Paul’s Greek-speaking readers read that Jesus was ‘kyrios’ or ‘Lord’ they would automatically have understood that this was a way of saying that he was also God – not a second God, not some sort of secondary god, subordinate to God the Father, but the same God, called by the name by which they would normally have referred to the one God whom they already knew.
By the time he signs off his second letter to the church in Corinth, though, Paul has gone a step further and has begun to enter into the mystery of the Trinity. He uses the same formulation to refer to Jesus, as he greets his readers not only in the name of God, and not only of God the Father and the Lord (which is to say ‘the God’), Jesus Christ, but now he adds a third point of reference: the Holy Spirit, through which God’s love and grace comes to them and which binds them to God in an ongoing relationship of love and grace.
As we saw last week, right from the day of Pentecost, it is the ‘communion’ or ‘fellowship’ of the Holy Spirit that creates the Church, that brings Christians together into faith communities, as they pray together and remember Jesus in the sharing of bread and wine. But if those early Christian communities are united, holding all things in common, as we are told in Acts, then it is, as Paul intuits, because the Spirit is already a force for unity in the community, or communion, or fellowship that the Spirit shares with the Father and the Son.
And this, I think, is the great insight of this passage. Paul is able to conceive of God – the one and indivisible God – as a sort of community, united but dynamic, sharing and receiving grace and love in unending communion. And that God, who is a God of sharing, of fellowship, of relationship, is a God who longs to be in relationship also with us, to share with us, to draw us into fellowship both with God and with one another.
Which brings me to our Gospel reading, taken from the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, where we see the risen Jesus commissioning his friends for service in his name: ‘Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’.
Jesus sends his friends out, ‘Go, therefore…’, potentially sending them far and wide to ‘all nations’, all peoples… But his mission is not ultimately one of dispersal but of unification. They are to go to all the nations to baptise in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, to draw all nations and all peoples into one community, one family, one communion, one fellowship.
Whenever I conduct a baptism here, I am always humbled to think of those who have gone before me, generations of priests baptising in this same medieval font, generations of babies, children and adults, being drawn into communion with the triune God through the pronouncement of the same formula: ‘I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’. And after the baptism is complete, we remind ourselves that baptism is one of the ways in which we, in our small way, echo the oneness and diversity of the community of the Trinity, as we say: ‘There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism: by one Spirit we are all baptised into one body’.
We echo this oneness and diversity too when we say, as we break bread together, ‘though we are many, we are one body’, and we echo it too, at an even more fundamental level, when we work to build communities here and now, to love our neighbours, and to see the face of God in all of them; even – especially – the least of them. We echo the oneness and diversity of the Trinity whenever, through the grace of our Lord (our God), Jesus Christ, and thanks to the love of God the Father, we allow ourselves, by the unifying power of God the Spirit, be drawn into fellowship with God. We cannot understand the Trinity, we cannot explain it, but we can be drawn into relationship with it, living our whole lives – and not just our times of worship – in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.