Sermon for Trinity Sunday 2020

by The Revd Preb. Marjorie Brown

To repeat Jesus’ words in the gospel reading: in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Last week Bishop Rob preached to us on the feast of Pentecost about the simplicity of prayer in the Holy Spirit. Prayer can be as natural as breathing in and out the name of God, Yod – He – Vav – He. This sort of prayer helps us still the busyness of our anxious minds and settle us in the loving presence of God. In these months of being housebound I’m sure many of you, like me, have found it vital to just be fully in the present moment, without striving for anything more.

A feeling of helplessness and frustration can so easily make us anxious and agitated. Over the past few days, as the dreadful news from the USA has filled our screens, it has been almost unendurable to hear what is happening in my home country. Minority groups who were already economically disadvantaged, already particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, and already subject to police brutality, have been targeted for a ferocious military response because they have dared to take to the streets and say this has to stop. 

When we are individually helpless to fix a world that is so badly broken, we need to remember that one thing we can always do is to sit quietly in God’s presence and let our own lives be shaped by the love shown in the gospel. That is how the world will be changed, through the Holy Spirit acting in us and through us.

We prayed at Pentecost for the gifts of the Holy Spirit, for the empowering and equipping that we need to make a difference in the world. Today we celebrate the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, God three in one, that mysterious concept that seems so hard to understand or explain, and at first sight may seem to have little to do with our daily life and work.

I’m not going to attempt a theological explanation of the Trinity. It would be bound to fail. What I want to do today, following Bishop Rob’s example, is to share a simple way of inhabiting the doctrine of the Trinity. Not struggling with our minds to make sense of it, but letting it change our hearts and lives.

And I want to do this by using the example of another simple action, not our breath this time, but the ancient Christian symbol of the sign of the cross.

It may or may not be an action that comes naturally to you, but it is one that we use often in church at St Mary’s, and we know from historical records that early Christians used it constantly. They made the sign of the cross as a regular habit as early as the third century. Tertullian wrote around the year 250: “In all our travels and movements, in all our coming in and going out, in putting on our shoes, at the bath, at the table, in lighting our candles, in lying down, in sitting down, whatever employment occupies us, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross.”

Over the centuries this prayerful gesture evolved in different places in slightly different ways. Western Christians touch the forehead, the chest or heart, the left and then the right shoulder, and usually finish in the centre again, or placing the palms together. The sign can be accompanied by the words “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen” but it doesn’t have to be.

Today I want to think how this very old, simple spiritual practice can be a help to consciously placing ourselves in the heart of the Trinitarian God, especially at times when words fail us.

The first part of the sign, touching our forehead, reminds us that God is Father and Creator, the source of everything. We reach up to our mind, where we are filled with awe and wonder as an appropriate response to the beauty and majesty of creation. We heard in the words of Psalm 8 sung this morning: 

I will consider thy heavens, even the works of thy fingers: the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained.

I know that many of us have been feeling awe and wonder at the beauty of Creation in this phenomenal spring season, the sunniest since records began, a season filled with clear skies, luxuriant greenery, glorious birdsong, and resplendent blossom. 

And all this is just pure gift. So we look up in deep gratitude and profound humility, acknowledging the God who is the cause of our wonder. 

We then draw our hand downwards, sometimes just to our breastbone, but we can make a bigger sign, reaching down to touch the centre of our body, remembering that God is the ground of our being. We live and breathe because God made us, like the birds and the flowers. So we can perhaps remember that Yod-He-Vav-He breathing in of God to the very core of ourselves.

Nicholas read us the beautiful words of Isaiah: 

those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, 

they shall mount up with wings like eagles, 

they shall run and not be weary, 

they shall walk and not faint. 

We can do that, we can keep going throughout this time of waiting and not knowing the future, because God holds us in being at every moment of our lives.

Then we touch our shoulders in turn, remembering that Jesus is our brother and has shared our human condition. He has taken all our burdens on his own shoulders – our sins, our suffering, our fears and failures. He invites us in turn to take his light yoke upon our own shoulders.

And we can encounter him in everyone we meet. We are surrounded, left and right, before and behind, by God’s love made flesh in the people he has put into our lives. This experience of lockdown has introduced many of us to neighbours we didn’t previously know. We have met Christ in so many new people. And if we are locked down with family members, then we have spent some rare and precious time with our loved ones - an experience of God’s love with skin on.

And finally, as we make the sign of the cross, we may return our hand to the midpoint between our shoulders, to the place, very roughly, of our heart, reminding ourselves that the Holy Spirit is the gift of God who dwells in our hearts. If we need courage, or patience, or hope, we have only to pray that the God within will give us whatever we need, so that we can turn outwards to the world as signs of God’s love. We might even be inspired to ask for the grace to make a change in ourselves that will have a wider effect in the world, and God knows how badly that is needed right now.

One of the things I have missed most during lockdown is communal singing, especially at church and in the hollow square where I sing American shapenote music. I want to end with some words of the great 18th century hymn writer Isaac Watts that are sung to a beautiful tune in this tradition. They move me profoundly whenever I sing them. They are words that might accompany the sign of the Cross, the sign of our resting in the Holy Trinity.

Within thy circling power I stand, 

on every side I find thy hand. 

Awake, asleep, at home, abroad, 

I am surrounded still with God.

(With the sign of the Cross)

Awake, asleep, at home, abroad, 

I am surrounded still with God. 

Amen.