Jesus as Holy Wisdom: Sermon for Trinity Sunday Year C

+ ‘How shall I sing that majesty, which angels do admire’
These opening words of John Mason’s poem and hymn which we will sing at the end are appropriate for Trinity Sunday. How can you talk about God, who is beyond all understanding; and how can you talk about a God who has told us that God is three and one at the same time? And finally how, in an increasingly secular and Godless society, might this be good news to share with our unbelieving neighbour?
For a start, there is no Christianity without the Trinity. The doctrine may have been worked out later, as in the Creed we will say together in a minute which was written in Nicaea and Constantinople in the fourth century. But looking at the readings from Romans and John, Trinity was just the way the first Christians thought about God. They naturally speak about God the Father, Jesus his Son and the Holy Spirit who pours God’s love into our hearts.
For the Jews God was One, so how did this come about. Well, let me introduce you to someone called Sophia. In the first reading from Proverbs we meet ‘the Wisdom of God’ and Sophia is Greek for Wisdom. She was with God in the beginning ‘like a master worker’, rejoicing in creation. She was there when he ‘drew a circle on the deep’. John Mason’s poem speaks of God’s own knowledge being the only thing that can ‘sound so vast a deep’ as God’s own nature, Sophia is that knowledge. Before Christ, the Jews knew they could say more about God than simply ‘he is One’. Have you ever been to Istanbul? At its heart is the Great Church of Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, now sadly desecrated as a mosque. It was dedicated by the Emperor Constantine to Christ as the Wisdom of God. Jesus is Sophia.
When the first Christians saw Jesus say and do things that revealed that he was God, they had a language to understand this from Old Testament texts like our Proverbs reading. It was the same when they found this mysterious Holy Spirit Jesus spoke about doing God-like things. The Spirit leads us into all truth, including truth about God, that God is three and one.
If God is one but not three then our religion would have a different shape. It is not without reason that Islam has no developed idea of love, even if it does have a strong sense of mercy. Our God is one because God is a communion of love and that love freely overflows into creation.
Last Thursday was St Columba’s day, the patron of the ancient parish of Cramond in which we stand. I’ve said before that our Church is on a Roman road which was probably used by monks travelling from Iona to Lindisfarne. There was no such thing as ‘Celtic Christianity’, just normal Latin Catholic Christianity lived by people who spoke Celtic languages. It is good to hear from some of them today, both Columba and Patrick, whose great Trinity hymn we will sing. In speaking of God who is three in one, Patrick, like John Mason, swiftly moves to creation, both the animate creation of angels and men and the inanimate creation of ‘the stable earth, the deep salt sea, around the old eternal rocks’. The same is true in our first hymn, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. Angels and saints praise the Trinity, as we do here today, but more than that ‘all thy works shall praise thy name in earth, and sky and sea’.
How can you talk about God, who is beyond all understanding; and how can you talk about a God who has told us that God is three and one at the same time? That same hymn says that God is hidden in darkness but ‘though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see’, we imperfect humans can still use the language about God that the Bible and Liturgy gives us, and we can still worship God in and with the rest of creation. Creation is the overflowing of God’s love.
Finally, how, in an increasingly secular and Godless society, might this belief in God as Trinity be good news to share with our unbelieving neighbour? Well, waving the Nicene Creed in their face and saying ‘you must believe in this’ is not going to work. You will only believe in Christian faith if you think it is true, but we are not talking here about mathematical or logical truth, though it is important to show our faith is reasonable. I mean faith must speak to the truth in the heart of your being – it must connect with what is most real in you.
As humans we desire to love and be loved. Love takes us out of ourselves to seek the good of the other. I say, as a Christian, that this is because we are created in the image and likeness of God. Not a cold, solitary God, but a God who pours himself out in love towards another, whom we call God the Son, and whose love is so powerful that it becomes a third person, the Holy Spirit. This love of the three needs nothing more, but freely pours itself out in an excess of creation to form the visible and invisible worlds. This God, by being Trinity, shows us who we really are and gives an answer to the mystery at the centre of every human heart. In our knowledge of the Holy Trinity we have a gift to share with the world and we have a doctrine that should shape our lives.