The Gray Monk

“God said to Moses, I am who I am.”

+In the name of God, Father Son and Holy Spirit,
Amen

1. Quicunque vult salvus esse, ante omnia opus est, ut teneat catholicam fidem:
2. Quam nisi quisque integram inviolatamque servaverit, absque dubio in aeternam peribit.
3. Fides autem catholica haec est: ut unum Deum in Trinitate, et Trinitatem in unitate veneremur.
4. Neque confundentes personas, neque substantiam seperantes.
5. Alia est enim persona Patris alia Filii, alia Spiritus Sancti:

I think most of us view with dread the rota which assigns us to preach on Trinity Sunday, and I confess that I was tempted to simply read the Athanasian Creed in Latin and then sit down …..

However, my Latin being very sparse, as you will have gathered, and my pronunciation of it probably unintelligible, I will refrain from inflicting the rest of it on you.

Have you noticed how God frequently chooses as his instrument someone apparently unsuitable? Look at the Old Testament – it is full of some of the most dodgy characters you could wish to meet. Moses, a murderer and runaway, Jacob the thief of his brother’s inheritance, David was certainly no saint and neither was Solomon, yet God uses them to bring the nation that became the Israelites into an understanding of his purpose. Read on into the New Testament and we find the collection of disciples is a far from perfect group of individuals. Matthew the tax collector – in first century Judea synonymous with fraud – Peter, James and John fishermen and by definition hardly the sort of people we would welcome sitting alongside us on the bus, among the rest, several Zealots and members of way out sects and the list goes on. When we consider the early church Augustine of Hippo was something of a playboy and certainly not what anyone would have expected to become a man of God!

Yet God not only calls to them, but provides them with the energy, the courage and perhaps even the means to carry out the task he has set them. And he does so through HIS grace and power - not our own! It is in the strengthening power of the Holy Spirit that we are able to carry out the work of God, just as the Son, our saviour gave us the Word of Life in the Gospels. In the power of the Holy Spirit even the most unsuitable and sinful can become the instrument of God.

Last weekend we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the assembly at Jerusalem, an event of inspiration and some power, since, as we read then, it provoked the cowed and frightened group of friends into getting out into the street to proclaim the gospel to a skeptical crowd. New wine in flawed and decidedly iffy wineskins. Small wonder the reaction of many was to pour scorn on them proclaiming that they were already drunk at nine in the morning.

My text, taken as you know, from our first lesson, has to be one of the most frustrating and enigmatic statements in the Bible. “I am who I am.” As an explanation it certainly lacks detail, yet it does encapsulate our understanding of God. God is, as God is.

He manifested himself to the Israelites in several ways, as the burning bush to Moses, as the fiery pillar or as a pillar of smoke, as a voice heard through Prophets or in dreams and we have parallels of that with the later Christian era in the accounts of various saints. And he continues to manifest himself to us even in our own age, when we will stop our noise and listen or open our eyes and see. Throughout the Old Testament He made himself and his desires known though all these channels and many more – when mankind was prepared to listen and sometimes when we were not. He certainly has ways of grabbing our attention when he wants it.

The doctrine of the Trinity has caused many finer minds than my own to agonise over the nature of God. It is this aspect of our faith which has given rise to the controversies of Docetism, Gnosticism and the Cathars. It is this aspect of our Faith which Islam regularly misrepresents and attacks and it is probably the least understood part of our faith of all the doctrines of the Christian credo. Yet, it is both Biblical and central to our faith. Father Peter once remarked that to preach on the Trinity is to commit heresy, well, I hope to avoid that. In doing so I want to take you to three of Christ’s own statements. In the first he tells his disciples John 6. 46

“No one has seen the Father, except the one who is from God. Only he has seen the father.”

Later he tells the disciples openly, John 16. 28

“I came from the Father and entered the world; now I am leaving the world and returning to the Father.”

In the first he tells us that he has seen the Father, ergo; he is from the father, and in the second; that he is returning to the Father – that he is the incarnation of God. In his third statement he tells the disciples that, unless he goes to the Father, the Holy Spirit will not come upon them. Yet we should not imply that the Holy Spirit is therefore somehow a mere replacement, one we cannot see, for he (or as Julian was fond of provoking us – she) was and is with God from the beginning.

As Athanasius tells us:

1. So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God.
2. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.
3. So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Ghost Lord.
4. And yet not three Lords, but one Lord.
5. For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity: to acknowledge every Person by himself to be both God and Lord,
In part this sums up a small fragment of what Jesus is trying to explain to the amazed Nicodemus. That in order to attain everlasting life we need to undergo that rebirth by water and the spirit, as our reading says:

“I tell you the truth, no one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless he is born by water and the spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the spirit gives birth to spirit.”

In Acts we are told that the Holy Spirit was sent as a “Comforter” to encourage, uphold and to guide, yet we also know that the Holy Spirit has been at work in the world from the first – Christ himself tells us this. One can almost pity Nicodemus as he listens to Jesus and finds that what he thought he understood he no longer understands at all.

I began this evening on a slightly irreverent note, reading the opening of the Athanasian creed in Latin. I would like to close with the serious suggestion that we do need to understand at least the intent of that creed if we are to defend our faith against an increasingly agnostic world. It is all too easy to misrepresent the Trinity and to fall into the trap of dismissing the central figure, Jesus, as a mere man, quite a powerful prophet, but just a man. To do so is to fall into a serious error in understanding him.

I can put it no better than to use St John’s opening words – In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

That Word was Jesus Christ, son of God and God made manifest as man. Not a mere Prophet, as some would have Him, but the very Word itself, the one who told Moses in the desert; “I am that I am.” That is what he tells us himself in the three examples I have given, that is the statement of faith we make Sunday on Sunday in the creeds.

The pre-medieval church stated in it’s version of what we today call the Nicene Creed:

For there is no other God, nor ever was, nor shall be hereafter, except the Lord, the unbegotten Father, without beginning, by whom all things have their being, who upholds all things, as we have said; and His Son, Jesus Christ, whom, together with the Father, we testify to have always existed before the origin of the world, spiritually with the Father, ineffably begotten before every beginning; and by Him were the visible things made—was made man, death being overthrown, in the heavens. And he hath given Him all power over every name of things in heaven and earth and hell, that every tongue should confess to Him that Jesus Christ is Lord, and whose coming we expect ere long to judge the living and dead; who will render to every one according to his works; who hath poured forth abundantly on us both the gift of His Spirit and the pledge of immortality; who makes the faithful and obedient to become the sons of God and coheirs with Christ; whom we confess and adore one God in the Trinity of the holy Name.

So:

In the Father we have all things that are,
In the Son we have salvation and the promise of everlasting life
In the Holy Spirit we are provided with the grace and power to do that which God sets us.

Three person in one God, Trinity in Unity and Unity in Substance.

Amen