Trinity A 2023

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.

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The 1998 film Shakespeare in Love begins with the theatre owner Phillip Henslowe being lightly tortured by the goons of a moneylender called Hugh Fennyman, to whom he owes some 16 pounds. Henslowe manages to extricate himself from the goons’ ministrations by promising the moneylender a part in the William Shakespeare’s next play, a comedy titled Romeo and Ethel the Pirates’ daughter.

In response to the inevitable shambles that the play’s production becomes, the moneylender becomes despondent that it will ever be produced and he will ever receive his reward.

Henslowe replies, ‘Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.’

When pressed on what can be done, Henslowe says ‘Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.’

‘How?’ Fennyman asks.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘It’s a mystery’.

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Every year, on this day, the Sunday after Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, preachers all over the world stand in pulpits and attempt the impossible: to explain in 12 minutes or less the mystery of the Trinity, the central, most distinctive teaching of the Christian faith, upon which almost all of Christian theology depends, most difficult and indeed impossible to understand.

Much better, I think, if, with the venal, bumbling, incompetent Philip Henslowe, when confronted with the question of how are we to make sense of the Trinity, the preacher says, with an open heart and open hands: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

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It’s not very satisfying if you’ve come to a sermon hoping to achieve a new, intellectual understanding of the nature of God.

It certainly wouldn’t pass muster on an exam paper, if you were sat in your sub fusc and asked to discuss the Doctrine of the Trinity.

But it has the virtue of being honest.

Unknown forests of paper have been consumed in delineating the right language to use in describing the Trinity, but much like the theatre business, the theological project of understanding the meaning of the words “God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ is characterised by insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. It always falls apart, not because we have not tried hard enough, not because the object of study is uneliable or imaginary, and certainly not because the nature of the Trinity is shrouded in mystery by a jealous and secretive God.

Rather, the project of understanding the Trinity is doomed to fail because the Trinity is not an object to be undertood.

God has revealed herself in a Trinitarian way, in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the invitation is not to grasp this knowledge as one grasps a difficult theory of interpretation or a complex startegy for treating disease. Rather the invitation is to join in the ongoing, always-already relationship of Father and Son and Holy Spirit, what theologians have called perichoresis or co-inherence: an interpenetration echoed in the movement of bodies in dance, and a dance, a song into which each of us is invited to join.

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Before I came to Oxford, I worked as one of the chaplains at Stanford University. For those of you who don’t know, Stanford is situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, roughly equidistant from the offices of Facebook and Google.

And like the task-oriented, engineering culture that surrounded them, the students at Standford were excellent at solving problems. It’s too bad, though, that not everything is a problem to be solved. Some things, like grief or disappointment, cannot be ‘fixed’ or ‘solved’, but must rather be lived through, experienced by the body.

Likewise, there is no instrumental approach to something like falling in love or being inspired to create.

These are realities that must be lived, not intellectually understood.

This, I believe, is something like what we mean when we talk about the Trinity. The language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exists to name something, rather than to provide an explication of its meaning.

We experience God as Trinity in the sacraments of the Church, in the life of faith, in the act of prayer, in the decision to trust that however alone we may at times feel ourselves to be, there is love at the root of all things.  Never to be satisfied with what we think we know God to be, to be willing, always willing to be surprised by a God who is at once familiar and strange, beautiful and wonderful, as disorienting as falling in love.

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Trinity Sunday comes as the final mark of punctuation at the end of the long poem that is the liturgical year, from Advent, the season of expectation, through Christmas, the season of Incarnation; to Lent, the time of introspection, through Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter, the season of death and Resurrection, all the way to Pentecost, the festival celebrating the wind and fire of God’s Holy Spirit, still moving among us.

It is a poetry evoking the miracles of creation and salvation, a story shot through with love and life and grief and great joy.

And rather than end the poem of the liturgical year with the exclamation point of Easter or Pentecost, it closes with an elipsis…

The elipsis which represents an omission, an unsayability, but also the elispsis which indicates that there is yet more to come.

I still have many things to say to you, Jesus says, but you cannot bear them now.

The story of God’s work with her creation, with her children, with us, is not over yet. There is more yet to say, about human life and human bodies, about love and about reconciliation. The Spirit continues to move us, sometimes kicking and screaming, into new avenues of generosity and care for one another and for the whole of God’s creation.

As we listen, we might just be surprised by what we hear. Not because God has changed, but because we have changed. By the help of the Spirit, we can bear them now.

What will we hear? I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

Amen.