TRINITY SUNDAY, Year B: June 7 2009

Preacher: Fr Andrew Greany

How shall I sing that majesty which angels do admire? The first line of our first hymn this morning. How shall I sing? Well, I might get out of it by inviting LSM's heavenly choirs to sing something for me: the Sanctus, for example: 'Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory' they'll sing it to a setting by ...but, of course, the Hymn writer, John Mason, is not speaking of his own or anyone else's musical inadequacies. Entrusting the singing of worthy alleluyas to the myriads of the celestial choir is this 17th century hymn writer's way of saying, as he puts it at the end of verse 1: who am I?

Who am I, in the presence of God: 'How great a being, Lord, is thine, which doth all beings keep' as verse 4 has it; 'thy time is now and evermore, thy place is everywhere'. So 'I shall, I fear, be dark and cold': the fire of love and desire for God burns fitfully and feebly in most of us. Yet, we pray, with the words of verse 3, that we shall 'sing and bear a part with that celestial choir'.

Trinity Sunday is indeed a day on which to acknowledge the wonder and glory of God's being: a day for the Athanasian Creed and its statement about the incomprehensibility of the Holy Trinity: that is, its elusiveness, the impossibility of grasping and catching it as if we were cricketers pouching a simple catch; yet also a day to be strangely aware of the nearness of love, of sacramental presence such as we shall celebrate next Thursday, Corpus Christi. So, overwhelmed by loving presence which yet cannot be contained by our finite minds, it's also a day on which to say who am I, or like Isaiah, woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King the Lord of hosts. On the other hand, it's a day on which, if I may poach the words of a song from another choir, our pre-Junior Choir, to 'chatter with the angels', or at least, to have a lively sense that whatever the quality of our prayer and adoration and singing, it's about that wonderful conclusion to the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer :'therefore with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify God's glorious name', and His being.

How shall I sing, then? How shall I sing the majesty of the Holy Trinity? Mason's question reminds me of that which Nicodemus puts to Jesus, as we heard it in the gospel this morning: 'how can these things be?' Ah yes, if we are to find a part with the angels, if we are to find ourselves caught up in to the community and the love which is God the Holy Trinity, then we must be born again; if you like, we must be re-made in our baptismal condition. And that means a lot more than tuning in to some emotional experience, or enjoying the aesthetics of High Mass. Woe is me, says Isaiah, and painfully, his lips are touched with a live coal. Repentance and purification, confession and absolution, for 'who am I?', who do I think I am, in the presence of the holiness of God. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, we pray in the Collect for purity at the beginning of Mass; for who are we to suppose that we may be in harmony with the angels and their worship, participate in that perfection of community living which is the Holy Trinity? The Trinity has been described as a 'partnership of love in which each person's love gives life and identity to the others'. But this is hardly the character of most of our life in community and relationship; hence our need for the live coal of forgiveness from the fire of God's love, a new birth into a new way of living. That painfulness is echoed in St Paul's words to the Romans, in today's Epistle; when we cry 'Abba, Father', it is the Spirit bearing witness that we are children of God, heirs of God, fellow-heirs of Christ: yes: who are we, who am I? Children, heirs of God — but — provided we suffer with Christ, in order that we may be glorified with Him. Here is another way of expressing Isaiah's 'woe is me'; the cleansing, the touch of the fiery coal, happens through baptismal identification with the suffering of Jesus. This is distinctive Christian experience — but the baptismal reality, new birth, has to be recalled day by day; recalled as we make the sign of the cross in the baptismal water on entering the church — for that isn't 'look at me, I'm doing the correct High Church thing'; it's saying that in the daunting yet wonderful experience of new birth, baptismal birth, I'm called to suffer with Christ, to let go my trust in a way of life which is built on a self-seeking desire to dominate or subjugate my neighbour. The rediscovery of the baptismal state is to be discerned, let us also remember, in the fiery ordeal of personal confession and the restoration brought by absolution.

But as St Paul says elsewhere, we do not lose heart — whether in the painfulness of being honest about our own condition, or in the struggle to be faithful disciples in a cynical world. To return to John Mason and his hymn: 'where heaven is but once begun, there alleluyas be'. Heaven began, we may say, for Isaiah in that smoked-filled temple with its shaking foundations; and the fiery ordeal, the touching and cleansing of his unclean lips was itself part of the experience of the glorious presence of the holy God. That was new birth for him, the release of fear and inhibition, so that he might go and speak of God to his contemporaries. Heaven begins for us in any glimpse of that community of love which is God the Holy Trinity; that glimpse of heaven continues as we recognize our need of cleansing, the recapitulation of the plunge into baptismal waters. And this suffering, and a penitent consciousness of a self, and a church, and a world which so often deny the God who is a partnership of love is prelude to glory: to singing with the angels their alleluias. Enlighten, blessed Trinity, our hearts with faith's light, inflame them with love's fire, that we rejoice and sing to thy glory, now and to the ages of ages. Amen.