I found, as I sat down to write this sermon, that the pervasive use of Artificial Intelligence, AI, had also penetrated Microsoft Word. You may have seen that under almost everything you read online now there are a number of boxes to click asking strangely uninteresting questions of the article you have just seen, which lead you further and further away from any kind of educated insight and more and more into the realms of artificially generated word salads, which moderate themselves depending on who is bankrolling that particular rabbit hole of darkness. Nothing new there, the back pages of magazines used to have Small Ads where you could write off for pamphlets for all kinds of causes and events which would make you feel valued and part of something which exists purely for the benefit of others, much like the last two governments we have lived under.

Anyway, Microsoft Word AI invited me to type in whatever I was looking for and so I typed in ‘Trinity Sunday Sermon’ and it generated, very quickly, a well constructed, simple, short sermon on the Trinity which was accessible, sensible and almost completely heretical, but it was not obviously so – and therefore I predict that in about ten years it will be much more difficult to hear truth grounded in scripture, tradition, the church fathers and scholarship than it is now and the pervasive mindset that ‘it doesn’t really matter’ will be much more insistent and the faith will continue to erode as everything else has. What then do we do about it? Study, read, ask questions, learn more about our faith so that we know when we are being led astray. The wolves in sheep’s clothing we hear about in scripture are closer to the sheepfold than we thought.

And it’s easy on a day like this, when I have to explain to you in about ten minutes the ineffable, unapproachable mystery of the processional relationship of God to Himself to look for an easy solution, because on the whole, we have got used to not really listening, not really studying, not really talking about the faith and not really knowing what to do when it all crumbles away. But today is an important day, it’s the Sunday after Pentecost when, having witnessed the descent of the Holy Spirit and the beautiful sight of the Apostles going out like a flood to the whole world bringing the Good News of Salvation, we ask ourselves ‘what, now do we do about it?’ The answer if given to us fully next Sunday, - we celebrate the Sacraments and receive the Body and Blood of Christ, the Corpus Christi, to give us strength and courage to bear witness, but today tells us what we bear witness to. And it’s love.

God is a love which is completely one. Right from the earliest times, the disciples had a glimpse of the mystery of this Triune love which they encountered in Jesus, as we do as well in our encounter with Him. This is not the belief in some strange divine messy relationship on a remote planet. It is the love which transfigures our own loving. All our everyday ordinary loving is marked with this mystery, that we may love so fully that we become a relationship of love. It is a love which lifts us into equality, as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are equal. Its grace frees us from domination and manipulation. It is a fertile love, overflowing beyond itself and drawing in not just others, but the whole of creation. It draws us into unity with each other and with God, overthrowing divisions between nations, saints and sinners, the living and the dead. Overthrowing our own personal likes and dislikes and making fools of those who hate. Our love is pregnant with the prayer of Jesus, addressed to his Father and ours, ‘that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one.’ It is a Trinity of love which is so utterly one that it embraces everything into itself, into the relentless vortex of creation, life, death and hope and despair and makes it all into love.

Humans run from the God of Love by turning the world or nature or history itself into their god, seeing in him only the reflection of their gradual decay. But there is no world spirit, no ‘Gaia’ god, no great architect, no god you can invoke the name of with others and hope for the best, no impersonal spiritual realm that can save us. There is only the Holy Spirit, the one who is the personal searching, healing and transforming one, who even searches the depths of God and gives life and hope to the world and brings to us the love of God. It may be uncomfortable to us to assert the faith received and believed by the church and given by Christ, and it is uncomfortable because it is the most radical challenge ever issued to humanity and it cannot be blurred around the edges or seen through a different lens, because it is itself the only source of truth and life and if we perceive it through our own chosen lens, I is not visible at all, no matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise.

If God really is this love who is involved with our world and who has embraced us, then we have a choice: we must either in turn love this God and embrace all that he embraces — and then of course, we shall be crucified as the distance we have put between ourselves and God dies away in love — or we must be content to watch the world around us from a distance, imitating the god who does not and can never exist. St Augustine once observed that through the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost we form a temple of the Holy Spirit. It wasn’t so much, he thought, that we each became a temple, but that by virtue of the Spirit, we together form a single living temple of the Holy Spirit. As that temple, as a Church and as a communion of local churches, let us offer true worship to God our Father in His Son Jesus Christ. It is in our being together that we model the Trinity and in our community that we are saved.