Resources for preaching on Trinity Sunday
Once more than we come to Trinity Lord's day. With the various debates about this on social media over the last few years, I dare to hope that the preaching on this Sunday is now better than it used to exist—simply I worry that I am mistaken here. It is worth reminding ourselves of some cardinal things to hold on to on this day.
Outset, this is non a day to explicate the Trinity! If your preaching has not been Trinitarian all through the year, then you are a heretic! If it is annihilation, and so it is a focal moment which asks yous to check how Trinitarian your preaching has been. If you are in any doubt about this, just stick with preaching on the lectionary passages (or whatever other biblical readings y'all are using this Sunday).
Secondly, nosotros take during the year focussed on various aspects of the work of the Father. More recently nosotros have (in Lent and Easter) focussed on the ministry, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. So we have celebrated the giving of the Spirit. So it is quite natural now to gloat the Trinity. This is non a separate subject; rather, it is a drawing together of the different threads with which this story has been weaved. This reflects the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity in Scripture: it is not explicitly taught (though some texts in Revelation come pretty close), merely information technology is the doctrine without which we cannot make sense of the narrative of Scripture itself.
Thirdly, this is definitely the time to avoid crass heresies, such as modalism ('water, ice, steam'), tritheism (The Shack) or social trinitarianism ('We are called to live in perichoretic community').
Then rather than another new posting, I offer hither some resources from previous years which I hope will encourage you not simply this Sunday, merely in all your Trinitarian preaching.
First, I was grateful to share the sermon Mike Higton, Professor of Theology and Ministry at Durham, preached on terminal year'south Trinity Sunday. To demonstrate that this was non complicated, he preached (almost) the whole sermon in words of one syllable. He concludes:
And so there is God, the one to whom nosotros pray, the one to whom nosotros wait, to whom we call out, the one who made the world and who loves all that has been made. Then at that place is God past our side, God once more the i with whom nosotros pray; God in the life of this man who shares our life, this man who lives the life of God by our side, and who pours out his life in dear for us. So there is God in our hearts, God in our guts, God one more time, the stream in which we dip our toes, the stream in which nosotros long to swim, the stream which filled the Son and tin can fill us as well, and behave us in love back to our source.
The life of the one God meets us in all these 3 ways, and all that we meet in these three ways, has its roots deep, deep downwardly in God'due south life –all the way down in God's life –in ways that our minds are not fit to grasp in ways that intermission our words to bits. One life, one love, one will, works through these three to meet us when we pray, to grab concord of united states, to bear us upwards – and to take the states home.
And that'south why our words for God need to stretch; one-bit words, it turns out, will not do on their own. Nosotros phone call the source, the i to whom we pray, God the Father. And we phone call the one by our side, the one with whom nosotros pray, God once again, Jesus. And we call the one in our hearts, the i in whom we pray, God one more time, the Spirit. And that is why we call this God – the God nosotros meet when we pray, the God we know when nosotros pray – that is why we call this God 'iii in one'; that is why we phone call our God Trinity.
I have also shared insights from three other, quite different Trinity Lord's day sermons, and we find a similar shape in the moving determination to one-time Dean of Durham Michael Sadgrove'south sermon:
In this morning's gospel, the risen Jesus says bye to his disciples with the words: 'all authorization in sky and on world is given to me'. It is the climax of the gospel, the culmination of all that St Matthew's story has been leading upwardly to. 'I am with y'all ever, to the cease of the age'. Information technology ends every bit it began – with the angel's hope to Joseph that the child would be called Immanuel, God-with-u.s.a.. The narrative has travelled far since then. But the promise is the same: that Yahweh the high and hidden one, who is beyond all words and images, the creator of the world and the holy i of Israel, is in our midst, present to united states forever as grace and truth. This is God the mighty and eternal who calls worlds into being and loves usa into life. This is God the compassionate and merciful, who bears on his heart for all time the sorrow and pain of the world. This is the God enthroned in majesty who answers the longings of the ages and shows united states his celebrity. This is God who is Trinity of persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit to whom exist all might, majesty, dominion and power now and to the end of time.
Turning to the text of the New Testament, I previously shared my theological comments on Revelation 4 and 5, which offering possibly the clearest narrative articulation of the Trinity in the Bible:
The language of worship here does a remarkable thing in identifying the lamb equally equal with the one on the throne in deserving of worship and adulation—in a text which implicitly refutes the claims of the homo figures to exist deserving of such obeisance. Because of this, it is reasonable to claim that it offers us the highest possible Christological understanding in the whole New Testament: what we can say of God in worship, we can say of Jesus. The two figures of the i seated on the throne and the lamb are thus characterised as God the creator and God the redeemer. These figures are never quite merged, and remain distinct within the narrative of Revelation and, unlike the association of the Word with the work of creation in John'due south gospel, their roles also remain distinct. But in the final hymn of praise, the worship is given to the two every bit if they were one.
The placing of these scenes of heavenly worship following on from the regal proclamations to the assemblies in the seven cities has a powerful rhetorical impact. The followers of Jesus might be facing item challenges and opportunities, located within their own cultural and physical contexts—withal the context for all their struggles is this cosmic vision of the praise of God and of the lamb. Where they might feel as though they are 'swimming against the tide' in terms of dissenting from the cultural norms of their society—in their participation in the merchandise guilds with their associated deities, in their moral stance, and in their reluctance to participate in the imperial cult—the juxtaposition of capacity 4 and 5 offers a startling reconfiguration of their world. All of cosmos is caught up, non in obeisance to the emperor, only in the worship of the God and Father of Jesus, and of the lamb, and any who are non taken upwardly with this are, in fact, in the minority. It is an extraordinary cultural and spiritual counter-claim to the bulk perception of reality. And in its emotive extravagance, this vision of worship is not offered as a rational fact, but as a compelling phone call for all readers to bring together in themselves.
Three years agone I published a paper by Kevin Giles on Evangelicals and the Trinity. Kevin'southward primary focus is the consequence of the human relationship of the Male parent with the Son, but his exposition of the Nicene agreement of the Trinity is worth reading as a helpful and clear summary. He comments:
When it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity we are not discussing a theological question where one side tin can assert something and the other side the opposite and resolution is not possible. In this instance, at that place is admittedly no uncertainty as to what constitutes trinitarian orthodoxy. No other doctrine has been more conspicuously articulated by the great theologians of the church building across the centuries and none more conspicuously and consistently spelt out in the creeds and confessions of the church.
The Nicene Creed is the definitive account of the doctrine of the Trinity for more than two billion Christians. It is binding on all Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Reformed Christians. These 2 billion believers hold that anyone who denies what is taught in the Nicene Creed stands outside the catholic faith, and any customs of Christians that rejects what the Nicene Creed teaches is past definition a sect of Christianity. On this footing, we practice non accept Jehovah's Witnesses every bit orthodox Christians because they cannot confess this creed, fifty-fifty though similar united states of america evangelicals they uphold the inerrancy of Scripture.
Be assured, I do not identify this creed or any other creed or confession higher up Scripture in authority or on an equal basis with Scripture. For me, and for 2 billion Christians, this creed expresses what the church has agreed is the teaching of Scripture. I believe every single statement in this creed reflects what the Bible says or implies. In my view, nosotros take in this creed the most administrative interpretation of what Scripture teaches on the Father-Son relationship.
This takes us back to my starting time article on the Trinity, where I draw on the writing of Stephen Holmes at St Andrews and agree with him that the Trinity is non our social programme.
Holmes points out that there is something of a problem in this way of moving from the relationships within the Trinity to relationship between people, as shown by the radically different conclusions theologians come to nearly the implications of this move.
For Zizioulas, the monarchy of the Begetter, every bit cause of the Son and the Spirit, leads to a monarchical view of the function of the bishop, and they strongly hierarchical, and tightly ordered, church building. For Boff,perichoresis is the decisive principle, and it is completely mutual and symmetrical. (p 26)
And then the life of the Trinity is either egalitarian, or information technology is hierarchical, depending on your viewpoint. The sceptical reader might, at this point, wonder whether this doctrinal discussion is piddling more than a projection of the theologian'southward prior viewpoint on to the bare screen of speculation about God's inner life. But the discerning reader might too recognise Zizioulas' hierarchical determination in some other, rather surprising, context. Conservative evangelicals have also read hierarchy in the relationship between Begetter and Son, and since 'the head of every adult female is man, and the head of Christ is God' (one Cor 11.3) and then the hierarchical ordering within the Trinity is expressed not so much in the specific bureaucracy of the bishop over the people but more often than not in the hierarchy of men over women. In this manner, debates virtually gender roles and women's ordination are elevated to central questions about the nature of God, and are therefore 'primary'. It is odd that this argument tin ever be applied to ministry only, rather than to society in general, though possibly non as odd as evangelicals beingness in logical debt to a Greek Orthodox bishop.
Whatsoever you say tomorrow, may God the Begetter direct you, God the Son equip you, and God the Holy Spirit empower yous and breath life and grace into your every word.
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