Sheringham: St Peter

Today is a special day in the Church’s calendar. It is Trinity Sunday, the day we are encouraged to meditate on and celebrate our Triune God and how the Trinity expresses God’s love and will for us and others. This of course can be challenging and can at times seem futile especially when it seems that once you believe you may have put your finger on a ‘truth’ it is as though God somehow shifts or moves just out of sight again, always elusive to our human understanding. And of course we always run the risk of reducing God’s three-fold expression to sorting boxes, with one each for the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and using scripture to try and work out which one is at work where. As Christians we speak so much of the Trinity in our prayer, worship, liturgy, creeds and sacraments but if anyone was to ask us on the spot to explain our three-in one God, myself included might struggle to know where to start and maybe even end up making it sound like some sort of supermarket deal where you “Buy one God and get two free”. Jesus and the Spirit are not add-ons or an optional extra, they are not an added bonus on the side - they ARE God but how do we make sense of this let alone explain it to someone without sounding like we worship three separate Gods?

Maybe the problem lies in our seeking to understand God as something up there, a God who is removed, a God working alone, much like we feel at times that we work at being human alone. So we pull God’s nature apart logically, analysing from a comfortable distance. Maybe instead we could try flipping the question so that instead of asking what God’s nature consists of, we instead look to find the Trinity’s expression and presence in our own being, our own lives and the world in which we live right now in the hope that God will reveal something of God’s nature that we have yet to discover.

Looking at ourselves however is no easy feat and there lies another risk, the risk that we just end up projecting onto the Trinity our own human condition, quirks and desires. The issue we have with looking at ourselves is that life is messy. Where does one part of life or self begin and where does another end? Where does the individual that is me begin and where do the influences of my mother, father, children, circumstances end? How can we possibly know? So much of it overlaps, so much of our lives and ourselves flow into and out of and through something else.

One thing we can hold onto thankfully is Scripture. We know we are made in the image of God - we are told this various times throughout the Bible. However beyond this lies something even greater, something even more significant. New Testament Scripture tells us that the old has fallen away. God’s personal expression and very being is now to be found in the human body that is Jesus and in Jesus’ companion on earth - the Spirit. The Spirit that was fuelling and equipping the disciples last week at Pentecost and the Spirit that we hear about today in John’s Gospel when Jesus tells Nicodemus “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit”. This new Triune expression and presence of God on earth, with God now personally expressing God’s nature - in three simultaneous and intertwined forms, each one vital to God’s plan and working as a united team, surely brings a new and important insight to our understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to be made in the image of God, which will now also have to change to reflect this new three-fold revelation of God’s glory.

God’s personal expression and presence through the Father/Mother/Creator God, Jesus who we are told in John’s Gospel to be both fully human and fully divine and the Spirit as the movement and revelation in the New Testament, has now become our new three-fold image that we need to be born into and take on, and base our very being and expression on.

As the New Testament Scholar Tom Wright describes it: Father, Son and Spirit come together to create in us a new way of being human which is first revealed to the world through Jesus. We have now become the new generation of Israelites being led out of our own exile by Jesus, working alongside the Spirit and leading us forward into a new and everlasting relationship with God in a brand new way. Now we are to be made as a reflection of the Triune God.

So how do we live out our Triune calling then? How do we work as a team in fellowship with the rest of the world and each other, living out the ultimate ideal that our Triune God shows us in their union and relationship to each other? This very dynamic and social Trinity in a never ending cycle of community and relationship, is a model for us as Church and for us in our everyday relationships. How we need to live and work and love and grow, in communion with each other as we seek to harmonise and align our expression in the world with the Trinity’s expression, drawing others into the loving and saving Trinitarian God as we stand back in awe at the God that is revealed to us through the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which has changed our own image and should as a result change our own reflection and expression of God in the world forever.

Natalie Rees - Ordinand

Sheringham: St Peter

Message from the Minister: Trinity Sunday, 30th May 2021

Act of Worship: Trinity Sunday 30th May 2021

Act of Worship: Pentecost 23rd May 2021

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