Trinity Sunday

If I asked you to name the most powerful people in the word you would likely choose the president of the United States, Xi Jinping in China, you might mention Bill Gates or Ban Ki Moon, secretary general of the united nations. When we think of power we tend to think of people who have the ability to make other people do things either by force, through the ability to politically shape lives and political circumstance or through financial ability to pay them.

This might seems like a strange place to start a sermon on Trinity Sunday but today I would like to invite us to consider power differently. I would like us to briefly recap what God as Trinity means and then to see how God as Trinity claims power is something very different from a smash and grab sort of mentality.

Describing the Trinity involves a sort of suspension of common sense and exploration of the things which we cannot rationally explain. For God to be three in one and one in three, and for God always to have been that way is not a thought which we will readily entertain – it does not really make proper sense to us, no matter how willing we are to assign it as truth. But this is the claim of the Christian Church – we hear the three parts of God coming through quite clearly in Johns Gospel and the letters of John, in the persona of Lady wisdom and in the writing of Paul as God is poured out into believers in the person of the Spirit.

We have come up, over the years, with many pictures of to describe the Trinity – ice, water and steam – all the same substance but in different forms, three candle flames in a dark room – all seen distinctly but the substance of their list is the same – the list could go on. I think I have mentioned the friend who ate a Big Mac meal during his sermon – burger, drink and fries – but all one meal. None of these examples fully explain or encompass the Trinity but they do she some light on a difficult concept. The problem with most pictures is that when we analyze them beyond the level of snapshot we will very soon find ourselves tipping over in heresy – the best piece of credal writing on the Trinity is the Athanasian Creed which wanders around and is rather long for liturgical use but tries to put this idea of Trinity into some sort of coherent words.

The important thing to grasp as we move on is that the Trinity was not invented by one part of God which got bored or lonely one day and made the other two bits. The Trinity is how God is and this is very important when we come to Jesus – that Jesus is a full part of the Trinity, fully God and fully Human. If you can grasp this enough to pause with it for a while it is an amazing thing that this humanity, which we all struggle with from time to time, has really been lifted up into God in the person of Jesus.

Jesus life on earth, then, reflected that He was both full God and part of Trinity. Jesus life reflected that he was a God of a community of being. God in community is cooperative and ever moving.

Because Jesus is God he must have had every possibility of coersive power. We know in the Gospels that He had disciples who were ready to fight but he does not take this option but instead remains true to who God is – not a God who forces but a God who seeks cooperation and in doing so he changes hearts and minds.

Hannah Arendt, the German political theorist, makes this point when talking about political power. She is living in a post war world where suddenly pointing a gun at people makes no difference to them. Students in the sixties in America faced all sorts of official sanction and threat when protesting but did not choose to enter an arena of force on force but instead said that the threat on individual life did not affect their choice. From a non-Christian standpoint Arendt comes to the conclusion that there is now in the world no real power in co-ercion but power rests in agreement and cooperation. This should be profoundly familiar to us from the message of the Gospel.

Since that time we have seen many wars in our world, but we have also seen succesive movements where people stare down violent force and say that it will not change them. When people let go of the fear of death power is open to become of God. Jesus himself was not afraid of death, of allowing the powers of the world to apparently hold sway, because his agenda was something so radically different – his power was of a different place.

So what does this mean for us, the Church?

There is certainly no clue that it means that we should simply avoid confrontation or hide in a corner until we drift quietly to glory. There is no idea either that we should collude with the power structures of the world when we know them to be wrong or that we should simply build – as in fact we have done – a para-structure of our own to rival the political power of the world – and in some stages of our history to actually take over from it. The political power of the church may be waning because for too long we have thought that we have a part in instruments of coercion – the threat of hell or exclusion from society is a powerful weapon, not winning hearts and minds to cooperation with God but threatening individuals into acceptable behaviour.

So this is where we are, the keepers of a crumbling edifice of wordly glory which points, if sometimes oddly, to a God of Trinity. What do we do with this?

If God is Trinity and if Trinity is about cooperation and communion then our true being is to be found in communion. In this Eucharist we see a foretaste of what communion and cooperation might mean but our history is rooted in the future fulfilment of who we are becoming and we do indeed see through a glass darkly.

Where do we start. Well, first of all we have to take the issue of power seriously as one which surrounds our lives. We have to notice what is going on in our world and the different uses of co-ersion and cooperation. The Fair Trade movement with which we are all familiar might be an example of a movement from worldly to Godly power – away from the coersion and in many cases oppression of the multinationals to the cooperation of local people who control their income.

Secondly, cooperative power does not come from the other side of a room, to win hearts and minds we have to go to those hearts and minds and listen as much as we talk. When we listen we have to be prepared to take on board the changes that listening might require of us – the Church is not Jesus, simply His representative, we can make mistakes and we certainly do sin.

Perhaps this is the third point, I think we need to get back to a more solid understanding of sin. Not as something which drags us into depression but as a fact of life. Everytime we use power against another in order to build up ourselves that is a distortion of the face of God. Cooperative power is not naïve, Jesus was not a political lightweight, he simply held greater and different power than those who felt so absolutely threatened by him

We are people who are called to change – called to move from force to faith, from co-ersion to cooperation, from disjointedness to communion. When Paul talks about God pouring himself out in Philippians it is easy to think that God must have been giving up a part of God – but if God is cooperative and longs for us, not because God needs to but because God wants to, the pouring out becomes a pouring into, an invitation to share in life and life without fear because our life is rooted ahead of us and we see only branches in this current reality.

Do we dare to embrace this sort of power – a power where each is and each works together perfectly? A power which is ultimately expressed not in my ability to do but in our ability to do, our ability to be in communion with God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, perfect in unity.