Trinity poem

“He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.”

              C.S Lewis

The template of all reality

"...The template of all reality is Trinity : Trinity that is totally male AND totally female. We are told this in the first chapter of our Scripture.  “Let us create humanity in our image, male and female they were created.” the creation story says [Genesis 1:26]. Within the Trinity perfect love and are perfectly loved. We come to know who God is through exchanges of mutual knowing and loving.

We will always run into trouble when we try to name or describe God with human words. We do not have either genderless or gender inclusive pronouns to use when talking about people. This is a problem for people with gender dysphoria so perhaps some will be developed in coming years.

If Wisdom was present in the beginning as John tells us Christ was; where does Wisdom fit with the Trinity? Was Paul correct in naming Christ the Wisdom of God and has the Body of Christ been severely limited through the centuries as it has ignored this? As we heard earlier, Paul saw Christ as both the Power and the Wisdom of God. If the Church had honoured this image it may well have come to call Christ, the daughter of God with subsequent very different outcomes for women through the centuries.

Total exclusion of women in the Church did not occur until after the Reformation. The Orthodox Church has at least one famous icon that depicts a member of the Trinity as female. The Roman Catholic Church has always had Mary, revered as the Mother of Christ. But after the Reformation, neither men nor women in the Protestant Churches had even one woman to look up to. How much might our portrayal of God as totally male influence male dominance and violence against women? It is surely something to prayerfully contemplate."

Rev Julianne Parker

For full sermon see sermons page

the absurd doctrine of the trinity

From a wonderful sermon by Nathan Nettleton
"As Frederick Buechner puts it, the doctrine of the Trinity is an assertion that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is only one God.

The God whose voice thunders across the chaos in creation, whose very word is enough to bring into being that which was not before, is the same God who sits weeping on a donkey sobbing, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if only you would have let me love you like a mother hen loves her chicks.”

The God who hangs helpless, bleeding and choking to death on a crude wooden execution scaffold is the same God who shakes the earth, bursting open prison doors and shattering the manacles from the feet of the prisoners.

It’s so absurd, so counter to the evidence at hand, that if God hadn’t told us that this was him every time it would never have occurred to us. The mystery of the mighty God of the cosmos, the mystery of the vulnerable God who walked among us, and the mystery of the God nudging and whispering within us are all the same mystery, the same God. And if nothing else, then that means that you’d better not get too fixated on one aspect of the experience of God and start suggesting that it proves other images of God are wrong. God will always be bigger, more diverse and more surprising than you can get your head around.
This is finally what we celebrate on Trinity Sunday: not a centuries old doctrine, as important in the history of the Church as that doctrine is.  Instead we celebrate the story of God's love in Jesus, which restores our broken humanity and our broken creation."
http://www.laughingbird.net/SermonTexts/0197.html

Trinity joke

In New York lived a Jewish man who was a very militant atheist. But he sent his son to Trinity Christian School because, despite its denominational roots, it was a great school and completely secular.
After a month, the boy came home and said casually, "By the way, Dad, I learned what Trinity means! It means 'The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.'"
The father could barely control his rage. He seized his son by the shoulders and declared, "Morris, I'm going to tell you something now and I want you never to forget it. Forget this Trinity business. There is only one God... and we don't believe in him!" 

Trinity colouring page

Something to keep you occupied and thinking about just what it all means really

El Greco Holy Trinity