Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Trinity A – Ex 34 1-8, Song 3YM 29-34, 2 Cor 13 11-13, Matt 28 16-20

Kids in a class answering each other’s names disempower a new teacher. Names are power!

I noticed when Adn Sam visited us how he prayed in the Name of the Trinity – Creator, Redeemer and Life Giver. Those were his words the Name of the Trinity, then Creator, Redeemer and Life Giver. God creates us; God restores us when we stray, and God gives us spiritual life. But Adn Sam’s first word was Trinity – God is Trinity; triune; three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, yet one God. So the Trinity precedes creation as a community; as a relationship which is Scripture reveals to us as creative, life-giving, restoring and loving. What this community creates is intended to reflect those qualities; their image and likeness.

Reading through scripture, we can see the Father, Son and Holy Spirit each creating, restoring the lost, and giving life, and so much more: love; peace; balance; harmony. Father, Son and Spirit are in perfect harmony with one another.

So we experience the Trinity like we hear beautiful harmony in music, or see a perfect, graceful dance, or discover the mesmerising symbiosis of Nature. And more than that, we experience Trinity like participants in music-making do, or like dance-partners do, or as carers of life-sustaining forests and oceans do; as part of something much greater. And Trinity is far more than just what we experience.

Yet we try to describe Trinity; we label things. We try to classify creation to seek to comprehend it. We even say a thing doesn’t exist if we can’t measure it. We break things down into categories we can handle. Often, we talk about the Trinity using words that suggest only God the Father specialises in creating, and then delegates repair work to Jesus, and fine tuning to the Spirit. We may not mean it to sound like that. But with time, phrases like Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier sound as if we’re replacing the relational Names, Father, Son and Spirit, with a set of functions: Creator = Factory, Redeemer = Repair Workshop and Sanctifier = Online Firmware Upgrade. Not who God is at all!

We sometimes forget when we use names to describe the three persons we know as the one God that we’re only making associations; like I did with music, dance and nature. The names we use may hold very rich associations and significance for us. But none of them can ever be complete. At times, one name is more helpful than another. Later, another name might suddenly light up with new meaning for us. But we can’t let ourselves forget that these are all associations that we’re making, and they can’t define who or what God is.

That’s probably why silence is so powerful.

What does help is to remember that the names God has chosen to give us in scripture are primarily associated with the intimacy of belonging – of family. Knowing that helps us see how some associations are just dead ends. Knowing that also helps us to identify those associations which might truly open us to life together in the living embrace of the Trinity; in the community of the Trinity.

To do that, scripture offers us the image of a loving family inviting us in and transforming us. Jesus, the Son showed us as a human how compassionate and gracious the Father’s love is for the world. Jesus is also the perfect image of the character the Holy Spirit works to nurture inside each of us. Think of those words of Jesus to his friends that we just heard in Matthew’s Gospel: I am with you always, to the very end of the age. We experience that presence within and without.  

To show us how a person might embrace Christ being with us, and to describe its effect, I’ve asked that today we sing together St Patrick’s ancient baptismal hymn, I bind unto myself today the strong Name of the Trinity. One of our study group observed on Tuesday how this hymn comes from a world where spiritual danger was a constant anxiety. The majority world is still conscious of this danger today. Our society seems to sleepwalk through it.

This hymn describes our baptism as a choice to bind God the Trinity to ourselves as a shield. This binding protects our spirits absolutely from the danger of being possessed by the evil forces at work in the spirit world, and what we call the real world. The verse we just sang to prepare for the gospel describes that baptismal binding. It is an expository prayer invoking Jesus’ words when he said I am with you always, to the very end of the age. So we sang – Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger. Speaking with Fr Donald yesterday, he was very moved by the way it can be a stranger who articulates that belonging. This verse is a prayer to plunge into Christ’s presence.

In a few minutes, we’ll sing three more verses of this hymn. In the first, we swear allegiance to the Trinity, and claim protection in the power of the Name. This declaration echoes our first reading today when the Lord passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. In verse 2, we proclaim our faith given through Christ’s birth, baptism, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and second coming, and claim what he has done as our protection. Then in the third verse, Patrick proclaims the wonders of creation itself as daily revelation to him and to us of God’s eternal power and divine nature. Rom 1.20

Our own life-experiences and the associations our minds come up with shape our faith. So faith is a changing, maturing process, and we mustn’t get it bogged down into words that can stop us growing. Our dance with the Trinity evolves us and deepens us – personally and as a Church. And that’s the message we’ll go out with ringing in our ears from our thanksgiving hymn. Today we bind to ourselves the power of God to hold and lead … the wisdom of our God to teach, God’s hand to guide, God’s shield to ward, the Word of God to give us speech … the Trinity of whom all Nature has creation, eternal Father, Spirit, Word.

Thanks be, Most Holy Trinity, Amen.