A sermon preached on Trinity Sunday 2026
‘‘The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.’
It’s good to be with you all this morning. Our curate Abbie who is on holiday in Scotland told me she was initially down to preach today because there’s a tradition of asking a curate recently out of college to preach on Trinity Sunday. This would be seen as ‘part of her training’. Yet she can’t be here, meaning you’ve got the old geezer in the Team who did his theological studies 50 years ago as your preacher.
Maybe another reason for asking someone recently out of college if that the Trinity is complicated, and therefore should be offered to someone most recently versed in the various theories about it. My theology professor at Oxford who was a small Scotsman with a bald and almost completely round head said in a sermon delivered to our college chapel: ‘You know, the Trinity is a very difficult subject.’ I respectfully disagree. In many ways I believe the Trinity is best understood by someone with very little formal learning but plenty of living.
I was prompted to think about this by our next door neighbour who has come to live on our estate from Ghana, West Africa. This took me back to a study visit I made to that wonderful country 21 years ago and to search out the report I made on it. Having visited it twice in the previous 7 years leading up to this trip I was fascinated by the people, their beliefs, customs and traditions, some unique to Ghana, others held in common by most Africans. In particular I was intrigued by its peacefulness, in amongst many neighbouring countries suffering terrible strife, and despite its different tribes, traditions and religions. In its diversity it had achieved a unity. I checked with my neighbour who confirmed this to still broadly true
I entitled my report, ‘I am because we are’, after the well-known phrase, an expression of the ancient African concept of Ubuntu, a philosophy which recognises that our individual identity and purpose are intertwined with the wellbeing of those around us. I saw this everywhere, not least in people’s attitude ro me. One example: on my last morning I needed to get up very early to get a taxi to the long distance bus from the 2nd city Kumasi to the capital Accra for my flight home. I was staying in a guest house outside the city hosted by my priest friend, who, at the crack of dawn, walked down the drive, woke up the night watchman, who flagged down a taxi driver on the main road who took me to my bus. When I arrived at Accra, I was met by another priest who stayed with me overnight and took me to the airport. Although I travelled alone for hundreds of miles, I was never really on my own. ‘I am because we are.’ A small community of people dedicated to my welfare, replicated thousands of times in other people’s lives. We need to remember this positive as we once again see the tragic side of Africa in the DRC, with its Ebola and civil war.
Ghana, along with much of S Saharan Africa, is a very Christian country, though there is a sizeable minority of Muslims, and most practise elements of tribal religion and ancestor worship too. This faith is in the air, not just in the many churches which dot the country. The bus company was called ‘Kingdom Transport services’; many lorries and businesses have Christian slogans across their frontages. My favourite was the ‘With God all things are possible beauty salon.’ The name of God is everywhere. A lady at airport customs asked me to pray for her when she saw my collar and a man on the bus reading his Bible turned to me and asked me what a particular passage meant, when I wasn’t wearing it. As I wrote in my report, my return to the UK from temperatures hotter and more humid than those of the last week to a cool 14 deg , corresponded to the spiritual temperature which seemed to have dropped by half or more.
So why am I telling you this on Trinity Sunday? Because Trinity Sunday is about God, so widely believed in in Africa, yet virtually unmentionable in this country except in a swearword. I wonder if that’s down to the way God’s believers talk about Him. Maybe we see God as a Thing, our property, the possession of believers. In Exodus 3 God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush as Yahweh- I am who I am, a word that some say originated in human breath- Yah (in) weh (out). God is Being, Ultimate Reality. Yet at the start of John’s Gospel we read that Jesus (The Word) was also ‘in the beginning with God.’ Last week at Pentecost we were reminded of the Spirit, -which Abbie told us is the same word in the Bible as Wind- which Jesus sent to be with us. Also God. God is the Air we breathe, not a concept in a heavy book to study.
St Paul, who was no stranger to heavy books/ scrolls about God, Jesus and the Spirit and can quite properly be described as a theologian, never defined or decribed the relationship between God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The word Trinity is never mentioned in the New Testament and the doctrine was not fully formulated till 325- just over 700 years ago. Yet, as we can see from the ending of his 2nd letter to the Corinthians, it came naturally to him to mention God the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit together, not as a statement but as a prayer. The Grace, the free gift of Christ which Paul had experienced on the road to Damascus, the love of God the creator on which he had been raised and the fellowship or communion in the Holy Spirit present in the church communities he had founded, this was the air he breathed.
It’s the same for us. A lot of people think of God as solitary and distant, presiding over the world as a judge over a court. Yet the trinitarian God is in his very Being a Community, a Unity in diversity. ‘I am because we are’ could be on God’s lips just as it is on many Africans’. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in Him may become His children, drawn into that community of love. Today in Newport and wherever the strong name of the Trinity is invoked may we take a deep breath of Trinitarian air.
In words we’ve just sung by Timothy Dudley-Smith:
In him alone we live and move
And breath and being find
The wayward children of his love
Who cares for humankind
Not such a difficult subject, after all.
Hugh's Views 