Sermon for Trinity Sunday 2025

preached by the Revd Canon Sue Gillingham

(Proverbs 8:22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15)

Trinity Sunday this year falls exactly in the middle of the entire calendar year. And because the church’s year began in December with Advent, Trinity Sunday also falls close to the centre of the liturgical year as well. So in 2025 Trinity Sunday lies at the heart of the church’s faith. But is a belief in God as Trinity at the heart of our own faith? ‘God as Trinity’ is a real challenge for many Christians.

Yet it’s precisely ‘God as Trinity’ which makes Christianity distinctive amongst all the world faiths. On the one hand, it is different from both Judaism and Islam which both share a central faith in ONE God. The Jewish creed known as the Shema‘ starts: ‘Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.’ The Muslim creed known as the Shahadah starts: ‘I bear witness that there is no God but Allah’. This is plainly and simply a belief in ONE GOD, not, as Christians claim, one God in THREE PERSONS.

On the other hand, understanding God as Trinity makes the Christian faith different from other world religions such as Hinduism, Mahanya Buddhism, Shintoism and African tribal religions, which by contrast confess a faith in many deities - gods of the weather, gods of the home, angry gods, loving gods. Yet Christians believe that there is ONE GOD, made up of equal but different persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – but one deity, nevertheless.

So a belief in the Trinity is what makes the Christian faith distinctive, whether in affirming the ONENESS of God, or in affirming that God is THREE persons. This is why a profession in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is so central in the church’s two main sacraments, Baptism and the Eucharist. Despite all this, a personal belief in the Trinity can be a conundrum ….

We are not alone. It took the early Christian Church some four centuries to work out what we mean when we talk of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and a further three centures before it became a universal practice. Different church councils eventually produced a format which many could agree on, but there was much infighting along the way. A key council, at a place called Nicaea in present-day Turkey, was presided over by the Emperor Constantine in 325, and it produced something very close to the ‘Nicene Creed’ which we say at Mass every Sunday, and which centres on our shared belief in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Just over three weeks ago Christians representing every major denomination made a pilgrimage to Nicaea to celebrate the 1700th Anniversary of the making of this Creed. This show of unity is because the Nicene Creed is still used, at the Eucharist, in every mainstream Christian denomination - by Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians – so it really is a means of uniting our universal church within all its diversity.

Here at St Barnabas, in Lent 2020, just before the first Covid lockdown, we spent several Sundays after church in the Bookbinders pub across the road, looking at the way the Nicene Creed had been put together over those early centuries. We compared it with the Apostles’ Creed, a shorter version which we use at Morning and Evening Prayer, and some of you will remember those discussions about God as Trinity over lunch at the pub. The key thing we learnt was that, despite all the changes in the church’s history through the centuries, and despite all the divisions the church has encountered along the way, Christians all over the globe today still affirm: ‘ I believe in one God the Father Almighty….’ ‘And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God…’ ‘And I believe in the Holy Ghost…’

 But what if some of us still find the church’s faith in God as Trinity difficult to believe in? Is there anything which can help us? Our Gospel reading from John is a vry good place to start. There we heard ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth’… ‘he will guide you into all truth’. Note first that ‘into all truth’ implies this is a journey over a process of time: it doesn’t happen all at once. But in all this the Holy Spirit is key: He is the ‘Spirit of truth’ who helps us understand more about Jesus the Son and God the Father and so brings the whole Trinity to life. Three times in our Gospel reading we heard that it was the Holy Spirit who would ‘declare’ the true nature of God to us: ‘he will take what is mine and will declare it to you’. He is the invisible presence of God, and the now invisible presence of Christ, in our midst. He is that part of the Godhead who opens up our minds, our hearts, and our wills to encounter God as Trinity. Where our own finite minds fail to take it in, then the Holy Spirit can enlighten us, because he is the Mind of God.

God the Father is God present over humankind as our Creator and Judge; God the Son is God present in humankind because he once lived as one of us; God the Holy Spirit is God present with humankind, sent to inspire us and teach us about God’s presence with us. God the Father over us; God the Son in us; God the Holy Spirit with us. Understanding the Trinity is not primarily something we achieve with our intellects: it is achieved with our hearts, as a personal assent through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the more we pray for the Holy Spirit to help us, the more the mystery of the Trinity will make some sense.

We have to be clear, though, that the Trinity will always be in part a mystery. Nevertheless, there are ways in which we can be helped. The first is through prayer and Scripture, as we have seen. In addition, the Holy Spirit can bring us new insights through music - whether through singing or through listening - and we have many opportunities for doing that in our worship today. Furthermore, the Holy Spirit can help us understand better through a work of art, as Mthr Lucie was saying last Sunday in relation to Renoir’s ‘A Gust of Wind’ at the Fitzwilliam Museum. And finally, the Holy Spirit can often show us more of the mystery of the Trinity by hearing poetry, as we let the images behind the words stir our imaginations. ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…. he will take what is mine and declare it to you’.

So in the silence after this sermon, reflect on what you are about to say in the Nicene Creed which will follow. If you still have doubts and questions - and who does not? - pray that the Spirit will assure you, even in those parts you find hard, and vow to continue your search of faith seeking understanding. Then you will be able to affirm what you do believe along with the whole universal church, and you can be confident that this belief makes our faith distinctive amongst all the faiths in the world. But above all what you will be affirming is not initially an intellectual understanding, but a spiritual perception, discovered at the most profound level through prayer and worship, through music, art, and poetry.

I end with a poem on the Trinity by Malcolm Guite. I shall read it slowly to help you to reflect on this mystery:

In the Beginning, not in time or space,
But in the quick before both space and time,
In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace,
In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,
In music, in the whole creation story,
In His own image, His imagination,
The Triune Poet makes us for His glory,
And makes us each the other’s inspiration.
He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,
To improvise a music of our own,
To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,
Three notes resounding from a single tone,
To sing the End in whom we all begin;
Our God beyond, beside us and within.

Amen.