Trinity Sunday- Year B- Isaiah 6.1-8- John 3.1-17- Only the outer edges of her glory can be told
Holy Holy Holy, is the Lord God almighty!
Today is Trinity Sunday marking the start to what we have called in the church Ordinary time, the weeks of Trinity. However the season starts in a way that is anything but ordinary and to my mind the intention for that is to ensure that there is no ordinary time in the weeks to come either! We are presented right from the outset with some of the most spectacular mysteries of faith the Christian story could possibly hold. The idea that God the Father is as much God, as God the son is as much God as God the Spirit is God. And if you can get your head around that you should be standing up here.
We struggle for understanding on this day with images of 3 things in 1. Water, ice, steam; clover (never-minding the ones that come with 4 leaves) and all sorts, trying to get our head around things, trying to pin things down, categorise them ever so neatly. Oh we like to have things neat! It is all very Anglican. But I want to suggest that that is the wrong way of handling this day celebrating what is essentially an amazing messy mystery, this Trinity of God.
One word is needed. And it is a word that is deliberately being framed for us this morning, as the backdrop to all the remaining weeks in Trinity season. The weeks of Trinity are meant to be anything but ordinary!
I’ve used the word several times already. Mystery.
That is the word. Mystery. We are not meant to approach the wonderfulness of godself with understanding. Nicodemus gets himself into all sorts of knots when he attempts to use his very learned head to figure Jesus and his message out. It’s meant to be kept as a mystery. For you and I are creature, and part of the relationship we have with the world, with God herself, with each other, is that of being over-awed by the sheer audacity of being more than we can figure out.
The experience of Isaiah, that ancient Hebrew prophet, probably in the middle of some service in the temple speaks to that being over-awed. The Revd John Proctor a very learned man who works with the United Reformed church has penned the experience of Isaiah so well. He says
The presence of God so fills the temple that the air rustles with angels and the ground trembles. Hymns and incense seem to gather the worship of earth into the greater and purer praise of heaven. God himself is scarcely described: only the outer edges of his glory can be told.
We can take a lot from that idea. That only the outer edges of God’s glory can be told. It means we don’t have to have God all figured out, she can be the mystery and in a way- that is deliberate.
Do you remember playing hide and seek as a child? Some of you may also remember playing that with an adult carer or parent. When played like that, it is an even better game than playing it with your friends. That constant need to search, the slight and yet enjoyed anxiety of wondering where your protector is, and the joy as upon being found, the bond between adult and child is strengthened and deepened, stretched into new territories of the heart. The adult doesn’t even have to hide very well! Well, God is not too dissimilar to that experience. We are often looking to God in our journey of life, only to see a glimpse of her coat tail disappearing around a column. We follow, and we wonder where she has gone, we reach the column, and again in the distance another hint of his presence, and we run to that place and sometimes God lets themself be found and the amazing experience of being embraced is ours as our hearts are deepened, our trust stretched to new territories based upon this idea that only ever the outer edges of God’s glory can be told.
Trinity is a day not of figuring out odd things, but of letting be, and trusting, and basking in what is the of the edge of Godself. To be content that a touch of the fringe of her coat is all that we would ever need to be aware that there are half seen, half felt things of God that we will never get to unpack, and yet are somehow present to us.
It isn’t always easy to perceive God in these ways at all. It’s hard to find ourselves able to see the immense glory of Godself and realise its only ever the edges of God that we see. Rather, we often end up tied up and caught in our own thoughts like Nicodemus trying to figure it all out and thereby not getting to enjoy God at all.
Some of us will find it easier to see in God in the crowds of people around us, some of us find it easier within the services of our liturgies- like Isaiah. Others, and I am one of them, find it easier to notice this amazing edge of the mysterious glory of God, by sitting quiet in the middle of nature. It’s a good day today. Why not take a moment and sit on the grass somewhere. Let yourself dwell upon the green that surrounds you, the sounds of human life at a slight distance, the rustle of wind in leaves as though they were angel wings unfurling. And perhaps just perhaps, you might be drawn into a moment like Isaiah’s were the glory of the edge of Godself is hinted to you. And let that embrace stretch your trust in the she, he, and they of trinity.
