Trinity Sunday ’24

Here I am send me

Readings: John 3. 1-17 & Isaiah 6. 1-8

Before anything, before sunsets and rainbows, before oceans and forests, before stars and galaxies, before atoms and the concept of time, before ‘In the beginning…’ what was God doing?

Trinity Sunday seems an odd thing to celebrate, unlike other feasts we’re not celebrating an event in the life of Christ or the church like Epiphany or Pentecost. And unlike Saints day’s we’re not celebrating the life of a particular person and reflecting on how their example can encourage and guide us in our walk with God.

So what’s Trinity Sunday for? And why is it now at the beginning of the long stretch of Ordinary Time? Well the answer to the latter helps us answer the first. Trinity Sunday is today because when we look back at the seasons and feasts of the last 6 months, when we look back on our journeying through the Gospel through Creation, Christ’s birth and death and resurrection, his ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit and we ask ourselves who is this God? The answer is Trinity. At work in every event is God the Holy Trinity working in perfect harmony.

Which means today isn’t about meaningless philosophical speculation, debating an idea, a concept which we can so easily dissolve into today. No, it’s reflection on the Gospel we have journeyed through for the last 6 months. And that means that this is completely central to our faith. We don’t serve a god who fits the caricatures of an old man in the sky, or the cosmic headteacher, or an omnipotent Santa giving gifts to the good and punishments to the bad. As we hear Christ’s commission to go and make disciples he’s not sending us in the name of a generic ‘god’, no instead we go in the name of the God who has revealed himself as Trinity.

So back to my opening question. What was God doing before ‘In the beginning…’?

Was he sat there bored, waiting for something to happen? Was he lonely, needed some company? No. Before anything else was, when there was only God, we find a Father, loving the Son, in the joy of the Holy Spirit. 3 persons, 1 God. Now I’m not going to give you analogies for the Trinity, it’s shortcut to heresy. He isn’t a team or a family who are so close together that they look like one from far off; that’s tritheism. He isn’t like water or working under different titles at different times or contexts; that’s modalism.

And to fall into analogies is to miss the point. God being Trinity isn’t a maths equation to be solved, it’s the good news that God is love, as we’ve been thinking about these last few weeks in our series on John’s first letter. If God is singular, then before anything was he couldn’t be love, he could only love once there was something to love, so he could be loving once creation started, but not love itself. But if God is eternally a Father loving the Son in the joy of the Spirit, God is love makes sense. Love cascading down eternally from the Father to the Son, the Son responding in love to the Father, all in the joy of the Holy Spirit. Complete self giving, an outpouring.

And so creation, and us, aren’t created out of boredom or loneliness, it’s the overflow of that love, that self giving. And it’s the work of the whole Trinity. The Father speaks, the Spirit hovers over the waters, and, as we read in John 1, all things are created through the Word, the Word meaning the Son, the one who we know as Jesus. God the Holy Trinity is always working at one with himself, always working together, in harmony and complete agreement. We so often put up little barriers on what different members of the Trinity do. But God is always at work in everything, at one with himself.

One place where we truly need to understand God at work in harmony with himself is today’s Gospel. ‘For God so loved the world that He sent His only Son…’ probably the most famous verse in the entire Bible. But you could if you were being uncharitable read that as Jesus being sent unwillingly, our Lord and Saviour coming to earth having been booted out of heaven to get on with it. But that’s not true at all, instead God the Son says to the Father ‘here I am, send me’. It’s once more an overflow of the life of God.

Those words, ‘here I am, send me’ we heard in Isaiah this morning but they are equally applicable to the Gospel for today. Before the creation of the world, when God existed in perfect union within Himself needing nothing, when He pondered creation, He knew that to do so, to create, and to create us, would be to bring rebellion and pain and rejection, and yet the Son says ‘Here I am, send me’. I don’t think the fall was a surprise to God, God wasn’t suddenly scrambling for a backup plan because it had all gone wrong, God slowly and patiently worked out His purpose in our failings, in the messiness that we created to draw us back to Him. Not in the distant future when Jesus returns or when we die, but in the here and now. God is drawing us back to himself.

And so Jesus comes, he comes to bear upon himself the weight of our sin and rejection, to bear it all down into death. Once again it’s an outpouring, self-giving love to bring the broken and the lost like us back to God. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, that cascade of love pouring down from the Father to the Son is now also poured out upon us. Through the Spirit within us we are drawn into that fountain, that overflow of love, lavished upon us as our sins are washed away and we are set free to live for God.

As we enter deeper into relationship with God we here that call. ‘Here I am, send me’. As the prophets drew closer to God, those who were in such close relationship with God that they knew His heart and followed wherever He led, they heard that self-giving cry at the heart of the Trinity ‘Here I am send me’ and they could only respond by echoing it back, Isaiah hears that cry of God reaching out and responds by offering to reach out.

Our God is a God who reaches out, who reaches out to the poor and the lost, the widowed and the orphaned, those trapped in addiction and those who look like they have everything and yet feel like they have nothing. God reaches out ‘come back to me, come and let me show you how to live, come and let me show you where the lines and boundaries lie, and you will find true freedom, come to the one who is truth and the truth will set you free. Come to me and I will make you new once more, come on, there’s room.’ Our God isn’t mean spirited, he’s an overflow, a cascade of life and love. Here I am, send me.

As Christians we are the ones who have found this to be true, who have found truth, who have found in God true freedom, who find ourselves daily being made new. Who have found the love which stoops into the deepest darkest pit, which pays our debts, washes away our sins and mess and brings us to feast. How can we not share that, how can we not share that we are forever changed, and our lives are daily being drawn up into the infinite majesty of God.

When we open our Bibles for instance, we’re not reading a dry lifeless ancient text. As we read the words we see the Father speaking the Word which is His Son through the inspiration of the Spirit to those writing, and as we read the Spirit opens our eyes to the depth of these words and we are drawn into the life of God. When we pray we pray in the power of the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father. In prayer we are drawn into the life of God. God constantly invites us into the conversation within Himself that we may share in His life. For that is why we were created, even though he knew that we would fall. We were created for relationship with Him. The God who made the universe is drawing us into the very heart of Himself to hear His voice and live in perfect relationship with Him.

As Christians, we are called day by day to be drawn deeper into the presence of God, as we daily are caught up in the conversation of the Trinity in prayer and in Scripture and in Sacrament it is so that we too may hear that cry at the heart of God ‘Here I am, send me’. Our God is overflowing, and he fills us to overflowing that we might go out to share this Gospel, the life and love of God with those we meet.

As Glen Scrivener puts it so well in 321, ‘the Trinity isn’t a maths problem to be solved, it’s the good news that God is love, and you’re invited’.

Amen.