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Many of us will have been thinking about historic battles this Trinity Sunday. I'd like us to cast our minds back now beyond 1944, to another battle, a spiritual battle and a battle of the mind but in its way no less momentous than Operation Overlord a battle for the truth about God. It was almost seventeen hundred years ago, in June of 325, that the Council of Nicaea met. This was a gathering of all the great personages of the church the leaders and the thinkers. They got together in Nicaea, a town in what is now Turkey, to thrash out once and for all what they thought about what God is like. Can I just ask you to imagine the world of the time a world where you couldn't travel faster than a ship can sail or a horse can walk, in large part covered in trackless forest. Through this difficult landscape all these men toiled in the early Summer of 325, to meet together in the Turkish heat for a long and impassioned debate.
What brought them to Nicaea? Perhaps you have had the experience of not knowing what you thought about a subject until you heard somebody say something you with which you disagreed. That was what it was like. A few years earlier a priest in Alexandria, by the name of Arius, had put forward an idea about God and Jesus. His idea was that there was God, who created everything. And one of the things God created was Jesus. So Jesus was perhaps like an angel, or a sub-God, half way between God and humankind. We call this idea Arianism, or the Arian heresy. And it isn't an obviously illogical idea. But when they heard it, most Christians thought "no, you're wrong, because Jesus is more important than that". Arius was saying "you can have God and you can have Jesus, but you can't have it that they're the same person" And the church realised "no, that's exactly what we do believe". So they got together at Nicaea to think it through.
One of the great thinkers at Nicaea was another Alexandrian priest, called Athanasius, and he said:
the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God
This is what has come down to us as the doctrine of the Trinity. After a lot of discussion, almost everyone at Nicaea agreed with Athanasius. There followed fifty years of argument and sometimes even fighting until the whole of the rest of Christendom came in the end to the same mind. Today here are three creeds that the Church of England, and most other churches, accept; and two of them as you know are the Athanasian Creed and the Nicene Creed: these creeds were worked out by Saint Athanasius and the council of Nicaea all those tough, passionate believing men arguing and sweating into their beards in Turkey in the Summer of 25. It was after this period that the church put a day in the calendar to celebrate this mystery: and it is that festival, Trinity Sunday, which we are observing today.
What can we say about this strange and wonderful doctrine, that God is three persons and God is one person?
The first thing to say is that it's a good deal more than a merely logical or scientific idea. Logic and science are very good for dealing with the everyday world, but you can't put God in the same box. God is outside logic and science. The truth about God doesn't reduce to a package you can read, understand at once, and forget about. Like most of what's really worthwhile, it has an element of mystery and paradox. For example if you're in love with someone, then when you are parted you're sad; but the sadder you are the happier you are, and you would not wish your sadness any less, because the sadness goes with the love. It's a paradox.
And the greatest mystery and paradox of them all is the Trinity. It's a mystery you can meditate on for a lifetime and never come to the end of it. As St Paul says, in a related context, it's a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. The Jews thought that God is One so it was blasphemy to say God was three persons. The Greeks, the inventors of logic, thought that no thing could be both one and three it's not logical. But as Paul goes on to say, the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom. Only a mystery that we can't fit into our neat little box of logic is going to be big enough to describe the great God we worship. In this sense the doctrine of the Trinity is one of the unique spiritual insights the Christian faith has to offer the world.
At a more mundane level, though, it is also sound theology. As all those bearded perspiring patriarchs at Nicaea found out, it's the only way to make sense of the whole range of what the Bible tells us about God. Take our reading from Exodus. First we read that "the angel of the Lord appeared" in the burning bush. "Angel" here is a translation of a word in Hebrew that means something a bit like Messenger. But then the voice in the burning bush says "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the god of Isaach and the God of Jacob". So burning bush seems to be both God, and God's messenger. Surely you cannot be both?, we want to ask God's answer is: I am both. I am who I am.
Our passage from John is equally paradoxical. Indeed all the Gospels and much of the rest of the Bible - are peppered with strange hints about who Jesus is, who the Holy Spirit is, and who God is, and how they all connect together. At the start of Luke they all appear together
When all the people were being baptised, Jesus was baptised too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."
At the end of Matthew Jesus tells Peter
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit
And later in John's Gospel he says "I and the father are one".
Once you read the Bible with an eye open for these kinds of mysterious hints, you find them at every turn. And the doctrine of the Trinity, that what we're dealing with here is both three people and one person, is a doctrine that makes sense of it all.
What, though, you may wish to ask, does the mysterious idea of the Trinity have to offer us here and now in our daily lives in Fulbourn in 2004? Since it is Trinity Sunday I'm sure you'll forgive me if I pick out from the many different answers to this question three particular observations: the doctrine of the Trinity helps us to know God; it meets a need for mystery; and it tells us something about relationships.
The first is the most general. The doctrine of the Trinity tells us what God is like. So thinking about it will help us pursue the chief aim of the Christian life, that of getting to know God. In this respect I have one practical suggestion, about prayer. I don't set up to tell anyone how to pray, but I take it that when you pray you are praying to someone. My suggestion, which I have found useful in my own prayers, is to pray to one of the persons of the Trinity you don't normally talk to. If you usually pray to God the Father, pray to the Holy Spirit. If your custom is to pray to Jesus, pray to the Father. And so on. Of course, you'll still be praying to the same person: God is One. But you may thereby broaden and deepen your relationship with God by praying to him in all his fullness. And the experience of Christians down the centuries is that a broad and deep relationship with God is not just something we want in order to be sure of our salvation (which we receive freely by Grace anyway) it's what puts our daily lives in perspective, making the painful bearable and the bearable joyful.
As well as helping us in general terms to know God better, the doctrine of the Trinity also meets a need, widely felt, for mystery in daily life. Many people in this day and age turn away from the church because they want something unknowable and wonderful and mystical, but all they find in church is something cut and dried that they think they could easily understand if they could be bothered to try. They turn instead to the New Age or Eastern spiritual practices. And one can scarcely blame them, for the desire for the huge and mysterious is the desire for God. Why do we long for mystery? Because God is mysterious. But the church often sells itself short. Accept no imitations, we should say: if you're looking for something larger and stranger than the everyday, then forget the sound of one hand clapping and all this stuff about lotuses and crystals. The greatest mystery of all time is right here in your parish church: the wonderful, unknowable Holy Trinity.
So the doctrine of the Trinity helps us to know God; and it helps us to open up our churches to people who turn away from them in search of a larger reality that we fail to proclaim. My third observation is that the doctrine of the Trinity tells us something about relationships. What we notice about God when we meditate on the Trinity is that God is the perfect union of three distinct persons. And this gives us a hint about where our priorities ought to lie. Imagine I've made a tactless remark to someone. Then I've got a choice. Either I can stiffen up the sinews and summon up the blood and go and visit my friend and say "I obviously said the wrong thing and I don't know what it was but please tell me because I'm very sorry", and generally make the effort to say this in a way that's pleasant for the other person to hear, and then listen to what they say and not what I think they're saying. And all this is a big effort that makes me feel foolish and vulnerable, and probably just gets thrown back in my face. On the other hand I could have a gin and tonic, read a book, do the garden, catch up on some work And the question is, what's the best way to spend the next half hour? Well if I'm meditating morning by morning on the doctrine of the Trinity, that question answers itself. Relationships are what matter. Probably in the long run putting relationships at the top of our list makes everyone happier. But even without making that kind of calculation we can see that relationships are central to our lives, and we are warranted in putting a good deal of effort into knowing and being on good terms with the people around us. Because God is a relationship.
In the week to come I commend to us all the holy mystery of the Trinity. I pray that this doctrine, derived from scripture, worked out in detail by the faithful members of the council of Nicaea, hallowed by the wisdom of the church down the centuries, will be for us a way to know God better, a way to show God's mystery to the world, and a light to guide us in our relationships with one another. Amen.