Over the last little while we have successfully avoided a ‘proper’ sermon on Trinity Sunday because last year it was a Family Service and the year before that we had the Archbishop of Armagh!

We’re great at skirting around things without ever having to face them head on. It’s kind of an art form and, as Anglicans, I think we’ve become pretty good at it; successfully avoiding the elephant in the room and only answering questions that no one ever asks. We’re great at that. The fact that we can’t really explain the phenomenon of the Trinity doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but it is not a very satisfying situation for a world that doesn’t care too much about it anyway.

Are we paying the price of explaining what we believe by commending it to professors of theology whose deliberations, by word or on paper, disappear into the ether? Most explanations don’t even attempt to scratch where we itch! To call something ‘academic’ usually means to refer to something as wholly irrelevant; or, more accurately, it means that whatever it is, is of theoretical interest only. That’s not much good to a living faith.

One of the best analogies of the Trinity refers to the three states of water; solid, liquid and gas (or steam). Although all three contain the same constituency of water, they exist in three completely different states. One God, but three different persons.

If we are passionate about our faith; we have to know what we are passionate about. The doctrine of the Trinity is central to every major Christian denomination, and a child or an adult can only be called a member of the church if he or she is baptised in the name of the Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It’s that important. To pass it off as something that we just can’t explain is just not good enough, and I think church is paying the price in our modern educated world by falling numbers and all the rest. If we can’t really explain what it is we are passionate about, then we lose out and we are scorned.

You have heard it said, what goes around comes around. People talk of ‘Karma’, the Hindustan belief that beneficial effects are derived from past beneficial actions (and harmful effects from past harmful actions) – it is part of reincarnation belief and the cycle of rebirth. Does this mean that good things happen to good people, by right, and bad things happen to bad people? I’m not sure, and I would have to ask a Hindu expert. It doesn’t often seem that way in life. In fact, it seems to work, very often the other way round, and I’m not sure if it is really what the Bible teaches. There is a kind of reference to this in Luke 6 when Jesus is talking about judging others, “For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you”.

So, are we, in some way, paying for our vacillation, our wavering, for what goes around comes around?

What about this story?

His name was Fleming and he was a poor Scottish farmer. One day, while trying to make a living for his family, he heard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. He dropped his tools and ran to the bog.

There, mired to his waist in black muck, was a terrified boy, screaming and struggling to free himself. Farmer Fleming saved the lad from what could have been a slow and terrifying death.

The next day, a fancy carriage pulled up to the Scotsman’s sparse surroundings. An elegantly dressed nobleman stepped out and introduced himself as the father of the boy Farmer Fleming had saved.

‘I want to repay you,’ said the nobleman. ‘You have saved my son’s life.’ ‘No I can’t accept payment for what I did,’ the Scottish farmer replied waving off the offer. At that moment, the farmer’s own son came to the door of the family home.

‘Is that your son?’ the man asked. ‘Yes,’ the farmer replied proudly.

‘I’ll make you a deal. Let me provide him with the level of education my own son will enjoy. If the lad is anything like his father, he’ll no doubt grow to be a man we both will be proud of. And that he did.

Farmer Fleming’s son attended the very best schools and in time graduated from St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London, and went on to become known throughout the world as the noted Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin.

Years afterward, the same nobleman’s son who was saved from the bog, was stricken with pneumonia.

What saved his life this time? Penicillin.

The name of the nobleman? Lord Randolph Churchill...his son’s name? Sir Winston Churchill.

What goes around comes around?

(Perhaps it is good to mention the like of Winston Churchill today when much of our news bulletins have been about Dunkirk, Operation Dynamo and what Churchill called the ‘miracle of deliverance’)

But whatever our belief in what goes around comes around, our faith in the Trinity, is not something sequential. It’s not because one thing happens, it follows then that something else happens. Also, it is not generational; it’s not that we start with the Father and he gave rise to the Son who in turn gave rise to the Holy Spirit, as if the Holy Spirit was ‘invented’ at Pentecost. That’s not what the Bible teaches and it isn’t what the Trinity is about – and, you see, this is only the start of getting us bogged down!

When people ask about the Trinity (if they bother to ask at all) what they are asking really is about the identity of Jesus himself. That’s it!

All our Alpha Courses started with the same basic question, and Alpha is exactly right to do so, because everything we believe hinges on it.

The question is, ‘Who is Jesus?’ If we get this right, then everything else falls in to place and we will know what we are truly passionate about. Jesus a man whose identity was God.

I’m going to stop now, but I would like you to ask this question to yourself.

What CS Lewis concluded was this, as he expressed it in his book ‘Surprised by Joy’:

“We are faced then with a frightening alternative. The man we are talking about was (and is) just what he said or else a lunatic or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that he was neither a lunatic nor a fiend; and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that he was and is God. God has landed on this enemy occupied world in human form.”