Three in OneBy the Revd David Burgess
My father was a man who had a very straightforward and sincere faith; a faith which he gained in his late twenties and early thirties through the Billy Graham rallies of the late 1950s and membership of his local parish church, which had a late flourish in the two or three years before he died. He had one problem, though, about which he confided in me one day. “You know, David, I just can’t get the hang of the Holy Trinity.”
Well, you and me both, Dad; I don’t think anyone can. We can get close to the truth; we can illustrate it, imagine it and interpret it from the Bible; but it will always be part of the mystery of God.
We celebrate the last major festival of the church’s year on the first Sunday in June – Trinity Sunday.
At one level, the doctrine of the Trinity is a part of Christian theology; something to try and get our minds around. But theology is also about experiencing God. The principal at my theological college, one of the top New Testament theologians in the country, stated this on my first day there. Our future calling was to be in using our theology to help others to know Him.
The doctrine of the Trinity began when everyday people – fishermen, tax collectors, even women of the night – encountered a man named Jesus. They experienced him acting like God – teaching with authority, healing, raising the dead, changing people and transforming lives. Yet they experienced him speaking to the one he called “Abba, Father” – the one they had always known as the God of Israel. Finally, they experienced the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
It was to take the church 400 years to hammer out the details of this experience. But it began with the relationship with Jesus. The truth of the Holy Trinity is a truth that every generation of Christians must experience for themselves. And like the first experience it begins with Jesus.
At the end of Matthew’s Gospel is Jesus’s Great Commission. Jesus sends out the eleven disciples telling them to baptize in “the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. This isn’t just a formulaic saying. To baptize in this way means to baptize with the love, authority and power of the Trinity itself.
If we’re called to live in the name of the Trinity, then we must know and experience that Trinity at the deepest level of our beings. Perhaps the key factor in deepening that experience is prayer.
We can give thanks to God, the Creator, when we create by gardening, cooking, painting or writing. We can give thanks to God the Son when we give or receive the grace of a gift totally undeserved. We can commend to God the Holy Spirit relationships that need strengthening, works that need empowering, lives that need more joy.
Our God is both mystery and as close as our own breath. As we pray in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit may those words wrap themselves around our hearts. And may “the grace of our lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” be with us all.