Resource for preaching: Trinity Sunday
Information technology is such a shame that the lectionary now includes Trinity Sunday straight afterward Pentecost, for two reasons.
First, it seduces clergy and other preachers into thinking that they need to preachabout the Trinity, and all likewise many lapse into a course of depression-grade theological lecture (though of class, notyou lot, dear Reader! It's those others who are the problem…). If your preaching has not been Trinitarian all through the year, and so you lot are a heretic! If this Sunday is anything, and so it is a focal moment which asks y'all to bank check how Trinitarian your preaching has been. The Trinity is not a split discipline (and then, unlike Pentecost, should not mark a 'season'); rather, it is a drawing together of the different threads with which the story of Scripture has been weaved. This reflects the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity in Scripture: it is not explicitly taught (though some texts in Revelation come up pretty shut), just it is the doctrine without which we cannot make sense of the narrative of Scripture itself.
Secondly, we have just celebrated Pentecost, and this should exist a season of dynamic excitement at the work of the Spirit amongst the people of God, a time to seek personal and corporate renewal in taking out to the world, with confidence and ability, the bulletin of the risen Jesus and the transformation that he offers. This is not the time to engage in obscure reflections on what many people notice a hard concept!
And so I heartily recommend that you continue preaching as y'all would have done, either following through the theme of Pentecost, and/or doing then by following the lectionary reading for this Sunday, which is John three—and on which I volition annotate in my next post.
But if y'all do make up one's mind to preach 'on the Trinity', here are some useful resources. They should aid you avert crass explanations, every bit well as the nigh mutual heresies, such equally modalism ('water, ice, steam'), tritheism (The Shack) or social trinitarianism ('Nosotros are called to live in perichoretic community'). And, given that all our preaching, didactics, and living should be Trinitarian, these resources might just assistance usa all to be better disciples of Jesus.
Enjoy.
Beginning, I was grateful to share the sermon Mike Higton, Professor of Theology and Ministry at Durham, preached on Trinity Sun a coupe of years ago. To demonstrate that this was not complicated, he preached (near) the whole sermon in words of one syllable. He concludes:
Then there is God, the 1 to whom we pray, the one to whom we look, to whom we call out, the ane who made the world and who loves all that has been made. And so at that place is God by our side, God once more the one with whom we pray; God in the life of this man who shares our life, this man who lives the life of God by our side, and who pours out his life in beloved for us. And then in that location is God in our hearts, God in our guts, God one more time, the stream in which we dip our toes, the stream in which we long to swim, the stream which filled the Son and tin fill u.s. too, and acquit u.s. in love back to our source.
The life of the i God meets us in all these iii means, and all that we meet in these iii ways, has its roots deep, deep down in God's life –all the manner down in God's life –in ways that our minds are not fit to grasp in ways that break our words to bits. One life, 1 love, i will, works through these three to meet the states when nosotros pray, to catch concur of us, to bear the states upward – and to take us home.
And that'southward why our words for God need to stretch; one-bit words, it turns out, will not do on their own. We call the source, the ane to whom nosotros pray, God the Father. And we call the one by our side, the ane with whom we pray, God once again, Jesus. And we call the one in our hearts, the 1 in whom nosotros pray, God 1 more time, the Spirit. And that is why nosotros call this God – the God we meet when we pray, the God we know when we pray – that is why we telephone call this God 'three in one'; that is why nosotros call our God Trinity.
I have also shared insights from three other, quite different Trinity Sunday sermons, and we find a like shape in the moving conclusion to old Dean of Durham Michael Sadgrove's sermon:
In this morning's gospel, the risen Jesus says farewell to his disciples with the words: 'all authorisation in heaven and on earth is given to me'. It is the climax of the gospel, the culmination of all that St Matthew's story has been leading up to. 'I am with you always, to the end of the age'. It ends as it began – with the angel's hope to Joseph that the child would be called Immanuel, God-with-usa. The narrative has travelled far since so. But the promise is the same: that Yahweh the high and hidden one, who is beyond all words and images, the creator of the world and the holy i of State of israel, is in our midst, nowadays to u.s.a. forever as grace and truth. This is God the mighty and eternal who calls worlds into being and loves u.s.a. into life. This is God the compassionate and merciful, who bears on his heart for all time the sorrow and hurting of the world. This is the God enthroned in majesty who answers the longings of the ages and shows usa his celebrity. This is God who is Trinity of persons, Male parent, Son and Holy Spirit to whom exist all might, majesty, rule and power now and to the stop of time.
Turning to the text of the New Testament, I previously shared my theological comments on Revelation 4 and 5, which offer perhaps the clearest narrative articulation of the Trinity in the Bible:
The language of worship here does a remarkable thing in identifying the lamb as equal with the i on the throne in deserving of worship and adulation—in a text which implicitly refutes the claims of the human figures to be deserving of such obeisance. Because of this, information technology is reasonable to claim that it offers united states of america the highest possible Christological understanding in the whole New Testament: what nosotros can say of God in worship, we tin say of Jesus. The ii figures of the one seated on the throne and the lamb are thus characterised as God the creator and God the redeemer. These figures are never quite merged, and remain distinct within the narrative of Revelation and, different the association of the Word with the piece of work of creation in John's gospel, their roles besides remain singled-out. Only in the last hymn of praise, the worship is given to the two as if they were i.
The placing of these scenes of heavenly worship following on from the royal proclamations to the assemblies in the seven cities has a powerful rhetorical affect. The followers of Jesus might be facing detail challenges and opportunities, located inside their own cultural and physical contexts—notwithstanding the context for all their struggles is this cosmic vision of the praise of God and of the lamb. Where they might experience as though they are 'swimming against the tide' in terms of dissenting from the cultural norms of their society—in their participation in the trade guilds with their associated deities, in their moral stance, and in their reluctance to participate in the imperial cult—the juxtaposition of chapters 4 and 5 offers a startling reconfiguration of their world. All of creation is caught up, not in obeisance to the emperor, only in the worship of the God and Father of Jesus, and of the lamb, and any who are not taken up with this are, in fact, in the minority. Information technology is an extraordinary cultural and spiritual counter-claim to the majority perception of reality. And in its emotive extravagance, this vision of worship is not offered every bit a rational fact, merely as a compelling call for all readers to join in themselves.
Some years ago I published a paper by Kevin Giles on Evangelicals and the Trinity. Kevin'southward main focus is the issue of the relationship of the Male parent with the Son, but his exposition of the Nicene understanding of the Trinity is worth reading as a helpful and clear summary. He comments:
When it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity we are not discussing a theological question where one side can assert something and the other side the opposite and resolution is not possible. In this case, in that location is absolutely no doubt every bit to what constitutes trinitarian orthodoxy. No other doctrine has been more conspicuously articulated by the great theologians of the church across the centuries and none more clearly and consistently spelt out in the creeds and confessions of the church.
The Nicene Creed is the definitive account of the doctrine of the Trinity for more 2 billion Christians. Information technology is binding on all Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Reformed Christians. These ii billion believers agree that anyone who denies what is taught in the Nicene Creed stands outside the cosmic religion, and any community of Christians that rejects what the Nicene Creed teaches is by definition a sect of Christianity. On this ground, we exercise not accept Jehovah's Witnesses every bit orthodox Christians because they cannot confess this creed, even though like us evangelicals they uphold the inerrancy of Scripture.
Be assured, I exercise not place this creed or any other creed or confession above Scripture in say-so or on an equal basis with Scripture. For me, and for ii billion Christians, this creed expresses what the church has agreed is the teaching of Scripture. I believe every single statement in this creed reflects what the Bible says or implies. In my view, nosotros have in this creed the most authoritative estimation of what Scripture teaches on the Begetter-Son human relationship.
This takes us back to my kickoff article on the Trinity, where I depict on the writing of Stephen Holmes at St Andrews and concur with him that the Trinity is non our social program.
Holmes points out that there is something of a problem in this way of moving from the relationships within the Trinity to human relationship between people, as shown by the radically different conclusions theologians come to about the implications of this move.
For Zizioulas, the monarchy of the Begetter, as cause of the Son and the Spirit, leads to a monarchical view of the office of the bishop, and they strongly hierarchical, and tightly ordered, church. For Boff,perichoresis is the decisive principle, and it is completely mutual and symmetrical (p 26).
Then the life of the Trinity is either egalitarian, or information technology is hierarchical, depending on your viewpoint. The sceptical reader might, at this bespeak, wonder whether this doctrinal discussion is little more than a projection of the theologian's prior viewpoint on to the blank screen of speculation well-nigh God'due south inner life. Just the discerning reader might also recognise Zizioulas' hierarchical conclusion in some other, rather surprising, context. Conservative evangelicals take also read hierarchy in the relationship betwixt Father and Son, and since 'the head of every adult female is human being, and the caput of Christ is God' (1 Cor 11.3) and then the hierarchical ordering inside the Trinity is expressed not so much in the specific hierarchy of the bishop over the people simply generally in the hierarchy of men over women. In this way, debates about gender roles and women's ordination are elevated to central questions nearly the nature of God, and are therefore 'primary'. Information technology is odd that this argument can ever be practical to ministry only, rather than to society in general, though possibly not as odd as evangelicals being in logical debt to a Greek Orthodox bishop.
Whatsoever y'all say this Sunday, may God the Father direct you, God the Son equip you, and God the Holy Spirit empower you and breath life, truth and grace into your every word.
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