02.06.2012
Sermon Preached by Archbishop Michael Jackson on Trinity Sunday in Christ Church Cathedral
Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, Trinity Sunday 2012
Isaiah 6.1–8; psalm 29; Romans 8.12–17; St John 3:1–17
Isaiah 6.3: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.
The fiery and fearful picture of the Lord offered in Isaiah’s prophecy sets before us a version of reality which no longer sits easily with us in the life of today’s church. It is a picture of the Lord God modelled on an Eastern ruler, an ancient potentate. After all, he is referred to as the Lord of hosts, that is, the Lord of armies. Such a person pronounces and is not argued with. Such a person has a presence before which others quake and quiver. Such a person remains inscrutable but is, in a fascinating and disconcerting way, strangely accessible. But in our society today, we are no longer good at being disconcerted. Manipulation of others today, all too often and sadly, masquerades as the quest for clarity. The Ronseal principle is well known to us all:
It does exactly what it says on the tin – but all the time we are pushed further and further into the unknown and the uncharted parts of reality by what we experience. We need constantly to be doing things which are quite different from what the contents of any particular tin were ever designed to do. And herein lies the problem. The world is diverse and exciting, and betimes dangerous. One size no longer fits all. I suspect that in the past we somehow made everything to fit one size. Some of the time it worked. But more often, it might have been tight and painful, like shoes we hoped would adapt to the shape of our feet, yet somehow they never quite played the game our way and now live, sulkingly and triumphantly, at the bottom of a wardrobe.
Breadth of opportunity opens up possibilities which are exciting and which make living today particularly enriching. We are members of a generation which is heir to a tremendous and a terrible memory. There are people who carry, as part of who they are, the lived experience of parents and grandparents at a time when what we call: history was a succession of daily occurrences of violent and destructive proportions. They had no idea of how it all might turn out. They did not have the luxury of retrospect. Whether it was the Titanic, the 1916 Rising, the Battle of the Somme, the Foundation of the Irish Labour Party or the Dublin Lockout, to name but a very few – the memory of each affects those who experienced it first hand and those who heard of it from them. The much–vaunted Decade of Commemorations – whatever else it might do – ought to open up the space for such conversations across the generations, if there is the willingness for such conversations to be honest and true. It ought also to rescue history from inhabiting the theme–park of heritage and the massage–parlour of distortion.
And in a different sort of way, surely that it what the Scriptures do for us – every Sunday and particularly on a Patronal Festival. They put us back directly in touch with our inheritance and ask us to take it further than it has had to go before. They lift us out of both literalism and sentimentalism. They bring historical memory face to face with institutional memory in such a way as to enable us to live life creatively, traditionally and Biblically. On a day such as this, we look for a memory which will not only underwrite our common membership as Friends of Christ Church Cathedral but will bind us to the name of the Trinity in a very loving and active way. In this cathedral church of all places we are bound to the Trinity. Our dedication to God the Three in One and One in Three is perhaps concealed to many beneath the name Christ Church which, of course, was a dedication favoured by the Vikings. We are here now in continuity with one of the most fascinating and exciting locations of Viking invasion and settlement, Wood Quay. Both Waterford and Cork have their dedications of Christ Church also, located strategically on the East and South coasts as they are. This patronage of the Trinity holds us in the love of God and the Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The bellowing God of Isaiah is in fact more than a caricature of an Eastern potentate. This God asks questions: Whom shall I send…? and already is very inclusive, in using the plural: …and who will go for us? The person who presides over everything in the being of this God does not stand aloof but engages with his creation, the seraphs, in what we can only call the liturgy of holiness. The prophet, conscious in the extreme of his uncleanness, receives from God the equipment and the empowerment to go forward and to go out in the full strength of this All–Powerful God. The All–Powerfulness, we ought to note, does not prevent God from embracing someone who feels unworthy or from sending him out to do the work of God. Now this is the Trinity in action: cleansing, reviving, sending; or if you prefer different language: holiness, baptism, embassy.
Too often and too simplistically, we see holiness as an abstract, a commodity rather than as a concrete experience in giving and receiving. Unlike what happened to Isaiah, which is terrifying and liberating, this level of misunderstanding of holiness itself is frightening and destructive. It is so precisely because it is too easily read off the page without any respect, or – dare I use the word? – affection, for memory. Constantly Holy Scripture shows the Holy Spirit using those most dangerous of elements – fire and water – for holiness and healing. We have become very shy and coy about the drama of God and of own part in that drama. The point was made only recently by the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London speaking in the context of the 350th Anniversary of the 1662 Prayer Book. Their common point was that elements of the Book of Common Prayer now may seem antique, quaint or inaccessible were and remain dynamic, startling and carved out in hard times. The language may be brutal and direct but its content responds to the human condition of frailty, request and grace.
On Trinity Sunday we celebrate and receive life itself in its fullness and its abundance. God gives life because God is the source and the being of life itself. Receiving life from God – this takes us into our second and third Readings, that is from The Letter to the Romans and St John’s Gospel. As so often St Paul starts with a contrast which draws us into conflict. Once you understand that this is his way, you can see where he is going and, I hope, go with him. As with so much of the way in which we take to our heart the Trinity, St Paul is talking about the power of what we call baptism. The key give–away in Romans 8 is the word: adoption. Just think back to Thomas Cranmer and 1662 once again, and go straight to the Collect for Christmas Day: …Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit …our baptism – regeneration, adoption and grace – gives us the strength to respond to Christmas Day. And so the argument of St Paul continues with ever–quickening pace. We join our song with the Song of the Spirit; adoption gives us belonging and inheritance. The gift is freely given. Baptism is the place where the water of revival flows. We are the children who are called to be friends and heirs.
Maybe too much of the concentration in reading St John chapter 3 – whether it be here in Christ Church Cathedral on Trinity Sunday or on a Sandwich Board on any of our streets is laid on: JOHN 3.7: Ye must be born again … But, as Oscar Wilde told the NT Greek Examiners in Magdalen College, Oxford as he was translating the story of St Paul’s shipwreck from Acts and it was perfectly clear that he knew how to translate from the Greek original: Oh dear, I do really want to read on and find out what happened …. be patient and go a little further and what you will find is quite revolutionary. It goes like this: And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
The sandwich board sound bite, therefore, is not so much a threat of damnation, but it is an invitation to receive healing through the self–sacrifice of God in the Son. And so we can make sense of another sound bite: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
It is this healing we now recognize first and foremost which enables God to make demands, to give a commission, to send people like Nicodemus out to be carriers of God in the lives they live. We have to take heart that St John 3 features so prominently in our celebration of Trinity Sunday. It connects us with parts of our faith and of our tradition which many of us often fail to enter because we have eaten the caricature and have decided to spit it out. This is a mistake.
And on Trinity Sunday in particular it is a specific mistake. Trinity Sunday is the great festival of community, the community of God and therefore the community of life lived in God’s image and in God’s love. We cannot afford to construct or to continue caricatures. We cannot rubbish the principles of others and dismiss them as prejudices. Justice and advocacy demand respect of others as well as commitment to our own causes. The sustaining of community is what a stable and a liberating society is built on. It is the open–ended challenge which God the Trinity offers to us on Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday gives voice to the healing power of God’s holiness. Let us together celebrate something so glorious that we are not ashamed to be numbered among those who are: born again.