Cirencester Lecture given by the revd Canon David Hoyle

The Trinity

A problem with words
Monday 9th July 1917, Dreadnought battleship HMS Vanguard moored in Scapa Flow,
late, on what witnesses said was a quiet night, the ship exploded.  843 lives were lost. 
midshipmen in cutters, with buckets to search the beaches at Flotta, Kipling wrote

They have touched a knowledge outreaching speech (1)

That’s where we start – note to myself, I am going to get this wrong.

Before preaching, George Herbert:
 How shall I dare to appear before thy face, who are contrary to thee in all we call thee?

Augustine:
When the question is asked ‘what three?’
Human Language labours altogether under great poverty of speech.
The answer however is given ‘Three persons’ not that it might be spoken, but that it might not be left unspoken’ (2)                

St. Ignatius, who had so much to say,
Deeply persuaded of the importance of silence. 
Letter to the Ephesians
 
It is better for a man to be silent and be [a Christian], than to talk and not to be one. (3)

We keep getting this wrong
Archbishop quoting Forster poor chatty little Christianity
Orthodox tradition quieter
Would have us meditate on an icon

A God we do not know
Can’t describe God in his glory and holiness and power.  Moses could not look on his face,

Moses said, "Show me your glory, I pray."  19 And he said, "I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, 'The LORD'; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.  20 But," he said, "you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live." (4)

Isaiah saw just the hem of his robe, Daniel fell on his face before one of his angels

…and Jesus insisted:

 [No one] has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father.                                                         John 6:46  

Theology is important, but there are moments when it leads into prayer John Donne

Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light:
To see God only, I go out of sight. (5)
  
God is not like us
So a lot of theology concentrates on what we don’t know
Christians are people who do not know God
What God is not – the via negative or ‘apophatic’ theology

So, for example we want to say that God is Father
It is helpful
But as soon as you begin to explore the idea it soon gets you into trouble
He is not a Father as I am a Father.
He doesn’t cheat at Cluedo.
He isn’t suddenly angry, or occasionally affectionate

All the words we use are limited
We are all agreed that God is love
But it is not love as we know it
God does not love as we love husbands/wives/children
If someone says ‘I love my gerbil’ we might think them a little odd
But that is closest we get
God is not like us

That is the most important thing we have to say
God is a creator, not a creature
God is not part of his own creation

This is the truth that most often ties us up in knots
God does not sit on a cloud up there
God is not peering into this room from outside

And – most importantly – God does not march in and move the furniture
If the weary Curate in Oswaldtwistle prays that his Vicar will take to his bed
God does not suddenly say ‘good idea’ and make that happen
God does not whip up a tsunami.  God does not plot the collapse of sterling
God is not a creature

God is eternal; in him there is no history at all. 
We do not have a story about God
As though he does different things at different times - He is changeless 
God is omnipotent – nothing has power over God
By the same token I would argue God does not suffer

Making it too complicated

Graffiti at the US seminary

Jesus saith unto his disciples ‘Who do you say that I am?’
And the disciples answereth him saying, ‘You are the kerygma of God and the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being’.
And Jesus answereth unto them and saith ‘What?’

We make it so complicated
Jesus is the glimpse of God we can see. 
I think we sometimes fail to get the measure of that
We think of Jesus teaching
We think about long words to do with justification
We think that Christ was a moral example
That is much less than the truth. 
Jesus was God, ‘he who has seen me has seen the Father’. 
What you see in Christ, in his compassion for the poor, his healing of the sick, his raising of the dead, his hatred of sin and his commitment to forgiveness is exactly what God is like.

A  word of explanation
Or, put it another way. 
We are used to hearing that Jesus is the Word of God
In the beginning was the Word
What does that mean?
It means that God has explained himself
That’s what the beginning of John’s gospel is all about
The Logos is an explanation, not any word, cabbage or cabinet
But a proof a definition, God explains himself
And the definition is Jesus
Ours is the only faith in which the explanation is one we will recognise

Michael Ramsey said
‘God is Christlike and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all’ 

We have to hang on to that.  We have to hang on to the mysteriousness of God and to the fact that the mystery has been revealed and is now put into our hands at the altar in communion.

R.S. Thomas another way to say it in a poem;

We never catch him at work, but can only say, coming suddenly upon an amendment,
that here he has been.

Adjustments

Being human
Nothing else to know
Just being human as he was human

We think there are hurdles to jump:
understanding the Trinity, saying better prayers,
knowing your apse from your ambulatory, working out your enneagram. 
Its Gnosticism, it sets real christian living in the distance
The place we will come to in time with a bit more study and bit more effort.

Paul drives a theological JCB through the
What Paul says is that there is one thing only to know Jesus Christ
know that and it is not just that you know enough, you know everything

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers -- all things have been created through him and for him.
Colossians 1:15-16 

We keep making it a story about us

Raphael, Madonna of the Pinks
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/wa/work?workNumber=ng6596
Christ child himself is not obviously majestic or powerful,
the pink, or carnation in Christ’s hand that makes the difference. 
In Greek these flowers are called dianthus, (the flower of God)
a symbol of divine love and healing. 
symbol of betrothal, a sign that two people were committed in love. 
Christ and Mary are betrothed,
Not a mother loving a child, but an infant saviour loving Mary.
When engravers copied this picture, and lots of them did, one of them copied out a text beneath it: 

Dilectus meus mihi et ego illi
My beloved is mine and I am his

from the Song of Solomon

Remember what John had to say, in the First Epistle

In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins (6)
 
Tell a story about us?
No it’s a story about him.

Our God has taken flesh and become a human being. 
Not any human being, just another Tom, Dick, or Harriet;
he is the human being.
Behold the man
The man who stood before Pilate is our true humanity. 
He is what we are supposed to be.  What I mean by that is that he is the one human being who did not try to be more, or less, than human.  Herbert McCabe wrote:

Jesus was the first human being who had no fear of love at all, the first to have no fear of being human’

And that is what the crowd will not accept. Jesus shows us a human body and we reject it

Salvation is here, now, this body
Resist temptation to long too much for something else
‘’Crucify him says Pilate, crucify him says the crowd
 We are tempted: tempted to ask for something else, something more

The rather shocking truth is that there is no such thing as Christian practice,
No one thing because all of it is Christian,
every bit of human life, all that we do with our bodies is Christian living. 

A Creative Spirit
It is the word that gives us ‘spirited’ ‘spirit of adventure’
Its rumbustious, energetic
Creed: Lord, giver of life
Genesis, God divides one thing from another,
the night from the day,
the waters from the dry earth
makes different things according to their kind

God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with (7)

Snow by Louis MacNeice 
Manse, a vase of pink roses on a windowsill and at a snow storm beyond

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink rose against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

 World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

Hopkins pushes the point home:

Glory be to God for dappled things …

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

We ought to see that all things return praise to God for his richness

Praise the LORD from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, 
fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command!   Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! 
Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds! 
Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the earth!  Young men and women alike, old and young together! 
Let them praise the name of the LORD, for his name alone is exalted; his glory is above earth and heaven. (8)
 
Spirit is rich life
Church is rich, various, all those voices at Pentecost
We’re touched by the Spirit when we love life in its variety
We’re touched by the spirit when we learn generosity of heart

But richness can look like chaos

Pieter Breugel Procession to Calvary 1564
http://www.wga.hu/index1.html (and search for Bruegel)
Look to find Christ -  Some going in wrong direction

Annie Dillard (Tinker at pilgrim’s Creek)
Describing Fabre’s work with pine processionaries:

To his horror they march not just an hour or so, but all day.  When Fabre leaves the greenhouse at night they are still tracing that wearying circle

For five days they do it

I want out of this still air.  What street corner vendor wound the key on the backs of tin soldiers and abandoned them to the sidewalk and crashings over the curb?

Spirit is unity, order and purpose – John V Taylor ‘the onward drive’
Something we should trust ourselves to like Columba setting sail from Ulster

I must pray also for the gift of Thy help and compassion, that the breath of Thy Spirit may fill the sails of faith and confession which I have spread, and a favouring wind be sent to forward me on my voyage of instruction. (9)

Were touched by the Spirit if we have purpose, direction and hope Spirit’s purpose is particular:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."  And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."(10)

That is the character of the Kingdom the spirit longs to bring in. 
In a wonderful phrase of Yves Congar’s,
the Messianic spirit is the water which flows to the lowest. 
The Spirit flows towards the poor and the sick and the victims of injustice.  .

The Spirit is our future
It is God bringing us and all creation to completion. 
That is why the Spirit is prophetic

Notice, this Spirit is wind and that is powerful
The English Patient and the stunning passage about desert winds

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives.  There is the africo which has at times reached into the city of Rome.  The alm a fall wind out of Yugoslavia.  The arifi which scorches with numerous tongues.  These are permanent winds which live in the present tense.  There are other less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider ...The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days - burying villages.  There is the hot dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition.

John V Taylor, once the Bishop of Winchester, puts it like this:

...the glory of God in everything is not going to shine out like a gentle nimbus around the commonplace.  To discover it will be more like suddenly catching sight of the volcanic inferno beneath our earth's crust...The Holy Spirit is totally primordial.  His is the elemental force beyond all other forces.

And it is breath, gentle, unconscious
The power of God not felt

Breathing the Kingdom – not trying too hard for something else
That’s the key
Most of us are forever trying to do something
We give everything targets
We don't just go for a walk, we try to exercise
We don't just go to tea, we try to keep in touch or give someone chance to talk
Now the world is not like that - the rose exists without a reason why
Jesus made the same point, consider the lilies of the field
God doesn't try to do things, he just does them
There's a trap in trying and in success, it becomes our only goal
The real reason for doing things is for God, not for ourselves
That is what the meek have found out

Then the Spirit itself witnesses to the new life that is possible and it does this by praying within us.  

Trinity

God as Creator Saviour Sustainer

God as the Explanation, the definition the beginning
God as language, experience
God felt, intimated

God so deep in holiness, too far off to be seen
God who has stood before us, entered our vision
God who breaths within us, so close to us we cannot see