The Trinity (Monday Mail, 1st June)

Hi folks,

This one is slightly late in the day! (Quick notice - there's a meeting at 12:15 on Sunday for all helpers at Holiday Club - let Paula know if you can't make it).

Yesterday was Trinity Sunday, when we particularly remember one of the key doctrines of the Christian faith. It's sometimes seen as being dull and irrelevant, but it's anything but. On Sunday I hopefully showed how it comes from the very first chapter of the Bible into the very last chapter. Here's some of what I said about why the Trinity matters.

The Trinity is Key to Understanding God because it shows us that God is all about relationships. The Bible shows God to be a Trinity, three persons in an eternal relationship of love – always working together, always seeking one another's glory. He does not need anyone outside himself, and yet he is a God who is loving and can make the universe for love not because he is insufficient in himself, but because true love wants that love to overflow. It makes sense to say that God is love only because he is Trinity.

The Trinity is Key to Understanding Ourselves

We see this in Genesis 1:26 and 27.

Then God said "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule." Notice the plurals again – when God speaks about himself, he does so using plural pronoun, not in some pretentious way like Queen Victoria saying "we are not amused", but because God is plural - living relationship is at the heart of who he is. And notice that when he makes people in his image, he creates us plural in his image as well. God doesn't say "let me make a man in my image" - he says "let us make mankind in our image.. so that they might rule". It seems that when God makes people in his image, he does it by making people as community, starting with the simplest community of one man and one woman.

That's why so many people from different backgrounds have come to understand that relationships with other people are the most important thing in life – because that's the way we were made by a God who is himself in relationship.

So being in the image of God isn't just about me or me in relationship with God – it's about me in community with others.

One of the big questions people think or ask is "Can I be a Christian without being part of a church?" And the answer is "not a healthy one".

We are made to be in community with each other by a God who is a community in himself.

That's the point of the Peace in services.Jesus said that if you're coming to worship God and you realise that your brother or sister has something against you, you should get reconciled with them before you worship God. It's giving us an opportunity to forgive each other and show that we are at peace with each other; it's declaring that when we come to God, when we eat and drink with God and when we share in Jesus sacrifice made on the cross for us, we do so not as individuals but as a community, as a family.

It's why staying after church for coffee is so important; it's why being part of a homegroup or meeting up with other Christians during the week is so important, because God is Trinity and made people to be in his image in community, because he is in community.

The Trinity is Key for understanding the meaning of life

But the Trinity is also key for understanding our goal as Christians. God who is love makes us in his image to share in his love.

We are relational because we were made by a relational God to be in relationship with him.

And it's much bigger than that.

God the Father has loved God the Son with a perfect love throughout the whole of eternity, a love that is so immense it defines the very notion of fatherhood. And yet he was willing to give him to die so that we might be included.

God the Son had been perfectly supported and enfolded in that love for ever, and yet was willing to go to the cross where he cried "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" so that we no longer have to be forsaken by God, but can be included in God's divine love.

And now when we trust in Jesus, we have God the Holy Spirit makes his home in us and unites us to God the Son, that we may know God the Father.

The least Christian has the fullness of God dwelling in them, bringing us into the eternal relationship of love between the Father, Son and Spirit. That is our goal in Revelation - we're included in the divine love, safe and protected forever.

There is an old legend about St Augustine of Hippo, the great bishop and thinker who spent thirty years writing a book about the Trinity. He was walking along the beach one morning trying to get his head around the Trinity when he saw a boy in front of him who had dug a hole in the sand. The boy had a little shell and he was running out to the waves and collecting some water and pouring it into the hole. Augustine said to him 'what are you doing'? And he said 'I am going to pour the whole of the ocean into this hole'. And the bishop laughed and said 'that's impossible! The sea isn't going to fit into that hole you've made'. And the boy said to him: 'Well, you can't fit the Trinity into your tiny little brain'.

And then, goes the legend, the boy vanished, because Augustine had been talking to an angel.

It's true – we cannot understand God. We cannot fully get our heads around who he is and what he has done. But what we can see is wonderful and drives us to our knees in worship.

May we know the presence, the power and the peace of the Trinity working in our lives this week!

God bless,

John