Trinity 1 (Corpus Christi)

John 6:51-58

Last Sunday was Trinity Sunday, the Festival of the Holy Trinity.  It was the last in a series of great festivals which began this church year back in November with Advent Sunday.  Except that just when we thought we had completed the cycle, some churches on Thursday just past, almost as a PS, had one more - Corpus Christi.  Corpus Christi is also known in the Anglican Church as a ‘Day of Thanksgiving for Holy Communion.  As this longer title suggests, Corpus Christi celebrates the service that is known in Churches by different names: the Mass, the Eucharist, Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, Breaking of Bread, or simply, the Liturgy.  Whatever title is used, the service itself has its origin in our Lord’s Last Supper with his disciples on the night he was betrayed and arrested.

As with other festivals that fall on a weekday, many churches celebrate Corpus Christi today on the Sunday following and we are no exception.  It is appropriate that we are using a Mass setting today that was specially composed for us by a member of our church family, Canon Martin White.  And we would send our thanks and greetings to Martin and his wife, Noreen, this morning.

This year, as many will know, we are remembering what is seen as the symbolic beginning of the European Reformation when, on October 31, 1517, a monk who taught in a university in Germany nailed his ‘Ninety-fve Theses’ to the door of a church.  (At least, this is how the story has come to be told.)  It was a routine way at the time of inviting academic debate.  There was, however, nothing routine about what followed as a consequence.  The Church in the West was to be divided into Roman Catholic and Protestant.  The division is with us still.  As someone who is chronically sick often learns how to live with their sickness so we in the church have learnt how to live with ours.

The division between Catholic and Protestant was over several different issues, but it became focused on the doctrine of ‘justification by faith’.  Ironically, there is little disagreement between Catholics and Protestants over this now.  But the Reformation didn’t just result in division between Catholic and Protestant, equally serious and bitter was the division between Protestant and Protestant.  And that division was over how to understand the service we are celebrating today, and unlike justification by faith that disagreement remains today.  Thankfully, although still terrible, it is normally without the bitterness that often characterized the difference and disagreement in the past.

In our closing hymn, we will pray for ‘our sad divisions soon to cease’.  Sadly, there is no sign at the moment that they will.  Given our divisions, it is easy to forget how much we are actually agreed upon.  We in the Churches are all agreed that Jesus did share a Meal with his disciples on the night before his crucifixion and we are all agreed that he told his disciples that they should continue to do it after he had left them.  We are also all agreed that the Church did continue to do so and that this service we celebrate and give thanks for today is a gift to us from God to be received gratefully and thankfully.

We are, however, a bit like someone who has been given a gift only to unwrap it and say, ‘What is it?’  Because while there is much that we all agree on, there is much that we do not, and at the heart of our disagreements is the question of how to understand the gift we have been given in this service.

The divisions at the time of the Reformation all centred on whether and in what way Jesus was present in the Eucharist.  For Roman Catholics and for Luther, the monk who started it all, Christ was truly present in the bread and wine: ‘body and blood, soul and divinity’.  So that to eat the bread and to drink the wine was really to eat Christ’s flesh and to drink his blood.

For other Protestants, however, this was to take it all too literally and, indeed, to miss the point.  What Jesus meant at the Last Supper when he said, ‘This is my body’ and ‘This is my blood’ is that the bread and wine represent his body and blood.  After all, as a matter of fact, they couldn’t be his body and blood at the time he said the words!

For those who took this position and who take it today, the Lord’s Supper is a ‘commemorative meal’; one in which we remember what our Lord did for us in the past and think on what that means for us in the present.  Of course, our Lord is with us when we do this, just as he is with us when we meet on other occasions to worship and to pray.  The bread and the wine, however, they believe, remain exactly what they are: bread and wine.

Some took a middle way not comfortable with what they saw as the literalness of Roman Catholics and not happy with the ‘divine absence’ of the hard-line Protestants.  Christ might not be physically present in the bread and wine, they argued, but in eating and drinking the bread and wine we are doing more than remembering Christ, we are feeding on him spiritually.

Well, we are not going to solve the divisions of 500 years ago this morning.  I imagine that both those in the congregation here at Christ Church and those of you listening on air or online have your own ideas and understanding.  What I would say, however, is that as Christians we should begin by focusing on what we are agreed on.

And again, we are agreed that our Lord did this and wants us to do this.  In other words, it is important and it matters.  It is hardly conceivable that our Lord would have made this the last thing he did with his disciples if it were not.

All of which brings us to this morning’s Gospel reading.  In it, Jesus says, ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.’

At this point, many, including many Biblical scholars, would cry, ‘Foul!’.  They see it as illegitimate to link our Lord’s institution of the Eucharist with his use of very literal sounding language here in St John’s Gospel.  They argue that the eating and drinking our Lord is talking about here is not the eating and drinking we do in the Eucharist, but the spiritual feeding on Christ that takes place when we believe in him and make him and his teachings the basis of our lives.

And with this understanding of Jesus’ words, I would agree.  At least, this is what I think it means in the first place.  After all, in our reading, Jesus is physically present with those he is speaking to.  How could it mean anything less?  Jesus is challenging the crowd to make faith in him so integral a part of their life that they could not live without him.  Believing in him, knowing him, is to be more important to them than food and drink.

Jesus is challenging them to see him not as an optional extra in their lives, but as essential to their very existence.  They are not to see him simply as some teacher who they can turn to as a guide when they need some help, but as the centre and basis of their lives without whom they cannot go on living.

This is a challenge to all who would follow Christ now as well as then.

But imagine you were hearing these words in John’s Gospel for the first time not on the lips of Jesus during his earthly ministry, but when the Gospel was read during your gathering with other Christians as a Church.  We know that these gatherings, like ours this morning, centred on the Lord’s Supper.  Would it have been possible to hear Jesus saying that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood without also relating his words to what you were about to do?  And wouldn’t St John, the writer of the Gospel, have realized and intended this?

We may disagree as Christians on precisely how Jesus is present in our service this morning, but what we can and should agree on is our need to feed on him.  Whatever our understanding of what happens in the Eucharist, we aren’t simply remembering Jesus this morning nor are we simply remembering all that he has done for us, we are reminding ourselves of our need for him and of our dependence on him for life itself.

But it is not enough for a hungry and thirsty person to be reminded that they need food and drink to live.  They know that well enough.  They need to be given food and drink and that, I believe, is what Jesus offers us in himself and through this service for which we are giving thanks.

There is, however, one more thing that it is all too easy to forget because it seems so glaringly obvious.  All Christians are agreed that, at the very least, the bread and wine represent Christ’s body and blood, that is, they speak of his death and sacrifice: when he gave his flesh for the life of the world and poured out his blood as a sacrifice for sin so that we could be ‘justified by faith’ and ‘have peace with God.’

The trouble is that we don’t always want reminding of this.  We are comfortable with the idea of Jesus as our teacher and guide.  We like that he is our friend and brother, a companion in times of trouble and when we are sad or lonely.  We are not so comfortable with the idea of Jesus as the Lamb of God who was sacrificed for us and because of us.

At the heart of our faith and worship is a bloody sacrifice.  Jesus didn’t just die on the Cross as an event we look back on in the past, he very deliberately put his death at the very heart of what we do in the present every time we meet to celebrate the Eucharist and receive Holy Communion.

Many Christians refer to the sacrifice of the Mass.  At Christ Church and in many churches, we describe the piece of furniture at the front of our place of worship as the altar.  Christians have different ways of understanding how the sacrifice of Christ is experienced by us in this service. But let there be no disagreement over this: without Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, without the shedding of his blood, there would be no forgiveness of our sins, no possibility of us feeding on him or of us being able to follow him.

Christ’s death on the Cross is what makes our life as Christians possible and our worship of God acceptable.

So, this morning, we approach the altar to eat of this sacrifice, to partake in it, knowing that as Christ himself said: ‘Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you.’  But we also know that the ‘one who eats this bread will live forever.

We come then this morning to him who gave his life for us knowing that he will not turn us away.  We bring our worries, fears, problems, needs, and, above all, our guilt and sin confident that the blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin.

As we kneel before the altar, we are reminded that ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.’  And in faith, we feed on him whose ‘flesh is true food’ and whose ‘blood is true drink’.

Trinity Sunday

Today is Trinity Sunday.  This is the Sunday in the Christian year most dreaded by preachers.  As one preacher, not known normally for being lacking in words, said to me this week, ‘What do you say?’  It has been said that if you speak for more than five minutes on the subject of the Trinity, you end up saying something heretical.  As a result, many preachers shy away from talking about the Holy Trinity at all.  While this is understandable if those who are given the responsibility of preaching do this, what hope is there for congregations?  So, conscious of the dangers, this morning’s sermon is about the Holy Trinity.

First, though, a word about the Christian year and the Church’s calendar.  It is, at first sight, a bit strange.  Everything seems to happen in the first six months: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Ascension, and Pentecost.  All these seasons and festivals centre on Christ and what God has done in and through him.  This makes the Festival of the Holy Trinity the odd-one out.  It focuses, or so it seems, not on an event, but on a doctrine.

It is perhaps no surprise then that the Festival has had something of a chequered history.  It was only officially adopted as a Festival of the Church relatively late in the 14th century, although it was celebrated by churches locally before this.  It was often celebrated on the Sunday before Advent, the Sunday we now know as the Feast of Christ the King when we celebrate the founding of Christ Church.

The Church of England, when it adopted its prayer book in the 16th century, numbered the Sundays in the second half of the Church’s year after Trinity Sunday.  This was because it had previously been the practice to do so in the Liturgy used in a part of England.  (This Liturgy is known as the Sarum Rite.)  In the 1970s and 1980s, the Church of England undertook a major revision its Prayer Book and Liturgy, and the ‘Sundays after Trinity’ were dropped in favour of ‘Sundays after Pentecost’.

In the latest revision of its services, known as Common Worship, Sundays after Trinity have returned in the Church of England, although other churches, including Anglican, continue to refer to seasons at this time of year as the Sundays of Pentecost or simply, Sundays in Ordinary Time.  The materials we use for our Sunday School, for example, describe Sundays this way.  Here at Christ Church, however, we keep the old traditional ‘Sundays after Trinity’, even though most churches, both globally and locally in Hong Kong, do not.

So, the question I want to ask this Trinity Sunday is this: is the dropping of Trinity as a season in the Church’s calendar of symbolic significance?  To put it in another, more direct way:  do we still as Christians believe in the Holy Trinity?

In answer to this question, I would suggest that not only have we abandoned the season of Trinity, we have also abandoned the doctrine of the Trinity, and if not in theory, then at least in practice.  Not only do we find the doctrine of the Holy Trinity hard to understand, we are also either not sure whether we believe in it anymore or we are sure and don’t believe in it.  Even if we do still believe in it, we either go easy on it or do not see it as central to our faith.  It may be an interesting theological formulation, but it is not something fundamental to our Christian life.

The reasons for all this are many, but one important reason for this abandonment of the Trinity as the central doctrine of our faith is that it goes against the grain of present day Christianity.  I realize that this is a big subject and that much more needs to be said than can be said this morning, but I would single out three characteristics of the sort of Christianity we want today:

1. We do not want difficult ideas

The first characteristic is best expressed negatively by what we don’t want!  Life is both complex and challenging.  Most of us feel under a great deal of pressure as we seek to make a living and raise our families.  There is much in the world around us that clamours for our time and attention.  When we come to Church, the last thing we need is more complications.

Preachers, then, are under tremendous pressure to keep it simple: to present the Christian faith in an engaging and even entertaining way.  Social media has only served to reinforce this demand.  But whatever the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is, it is not easy.  It doesn’t lend itself to heart-warming quotes on Facebook.

We don’t like doctrines at the best of times.  The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is difficult and complex.  A difficult doctrine is at a double disadvantage.

2. We want a faith that is relevant to us

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is first and foremost about God.  Yes, it does have much to say about the Church and about us as individuals, but first and foremost, it is about God and who He is in and of himself.  The focus of the Holy Trinity is on God.

But we are the ‘me’ generation.  You may have seen the posters: it is all about me.  I saw a fantastic birthday card the other day.  On the front it had: ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY!  Today is all about you.’  Then when you opened it up it had: ‘No change there then!’

We are not too concerned with who God is in and of himself.  If we are concerned with God at all – and it’s a big ‘if’ - it is about the relevance of God to me.

3. We want a human Christ

The Holy Trinity focuses on the relationship between Christ and the Father and the Spirit.  It asks questions about our Lord’s divinity and seeks to give an answer.  Our concern now though is with his humanity and how that affects his relationship with us.

This is, in part, a reaction against too great a stress on our Lord’s divinity in the past. The Church very early on came to the conclusion that our Lord was not only human, but also divine.  The doctrine of the Trinity was, amongst other things, an attempt to work out in what way he was divine.  Over the years, however, the emphasis often fell on his divinity rather than his humanity.  In Christian art, for example, he was often pictured with a gold halo (just in case you forgot and to avoid any misunderstanding).

However, to say that there has been a reaction against this is something of an understatement.  We don’t want someone who is, as St John’s Gospel puts it, ‘one with the Father’. We want someone who is ‘one with us’.  Not someone distant and mysterious, but someone close and relevant.  This is reflected in our worship and the hymns that we sing.  Whereas we used to sing:

‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

in light inaccessible hid from our eyes …’

We now prefer hymns and songs that stress how he is near and can be known and seen.  Hymns such as ‘Shine Jesus shine …’, for example!

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity then, like the season, has been quietly dropped or, at least, made something of an optional extra.  But, I would suggest, the Holy Trinity having been removed as an obstacle, we are - perhaps without even realizing it – witnesses to a reinterpretation of Christianity itself.  Christianity is being changed from a Trinitarian faith into a humanitarian philosophy.

This is to be seen in the way the other Festivals of the Church’s year are being subtly reinterpreted.  Taking the three characteristics of Christianity briefly outlined above, these give the criteria with which we now approach our faith and any aspect of it:

1. It must be easy to understand

2. It must be about us

3. It must focus on humanity and not divinity

So, very briefly, for example, Advent is about us getting ready for Christmas; Christmas is about the reaffirmation of the essential goodness of humanity; Easter is about what can be achieved by human self-giving; Ascension about humanity being affirmed and raised up; Pentecost about celebrating life.  You don’t even need God to celebrate the Festivals, though as we are the Church, we generally think it is perhaps a good idea to include him in the festivities.

Yes, I am parodying, but with this sort of emphasis on celebrating our humanity, there is little room at the party for the Holy Trinity.  We now have a very acceptable religion for today even if it is not quite clear where God fits in.

But we need to step back and see what has happened and, even more seriously, where it is all going:

First, we abandoned the Holy Trinity.  Secondly, we reinterpreted the central features of Christianity.  And now, a third stage in the reinvention of Christianity is underway.  Having reinterpreted Christianity as a religion focusing on humanity and human need, the way has now been opened for Christianity to take its place as one religion amongst many.  For some, it’s the best example, for others, even some in the Church, it is not even that.

Religion, in general, expresses humanity’s search for meaning and guidance as to how to live.  As Christians, we centre on Christ as our teacher, even as God’s messenger, but now that Christianity is also focused on humanity, our faith in Christ does not mean that we shouldn’t also acknowledge other teachers and messengers:  Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, and Krishna, for example.

And what if we do organize services of ‘inter-faith worship’, who but the intolerant and bigoted could possibly object to that?

There is more that could be said, and more that should be said, but then you may feel that I have already said far too much.  So, let me bring this sermon to a close by asking this question:

What is our purpose as a Church?  (And, I ask myself, what is my purpose as a clergyman?)

It is, I suggest, not to manage, to fund-raise, or to maintain.  It is not even to pastor and to counsel.  It is, keeping it simple, to make God known and to lead his worship.  But to do that we need to know who God is: who it is that we are worshipping and serving.  The Church, historically, despite all its many failures and failings, has believed that the God we worship has revealed himself in the life and person of Christ.  We have for the past six months been thinking of what he has done and celebrating it in our Festivals.

Today, however, on Trinity Sunday, we are celebrating what we have discovered in all this about who God is; who it is who has done all this for us.

The Holy Trinity tells us that God is 1 and 3, 3 and 1.  A simple enough formulation, but one with huge implications.  One that tells us that the baby whose birth we celebrated at Christmas was the one who brought creation itself to birth; that the one who died on the Cross at Easter was himself the Lord of life; that the one we proclaim in our message isn’t just a prophet, one messenger amongst others, but the eternally-begotten, divine Son of God in whom, uniquely, we see God himself: the God who reveals himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And this God is worthy of our worship solely for who He is.  Not because of what he has done for us in the past, not because of his usefulness to us in the present, but simply because he is God and beside him there is no other.

This is Christianity as the Church has traditionally understood it.

The Catechism of the Roman Catholic in paragraph 234 has this:

‘The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life.  It is the mystery of God in himself.  It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them.  It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the "hierarchy of the truths of faith".  The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men "and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin".’

St Elizabeth of the Trinity prayed this prayer:

‘O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me to become utterly forgetful of myself so that I may establish myself in you, as changeless and calm as though my soul were already in eternity.  Let nothing disturb my peace nor draw me forth f from you, O my unchanging God, but at every moment may I penetrate more deeply into the depths of your mystery.  Give peace to my soul; make it your heaven, your cherished dwelling-place and the place of your repose.  Let me never leave you there alone, but keep me there, wholly attentive, wholly alert in my faith, wholly adoring and fully given up to your creative action.’

The Anglican Bishop and hymn-writer, Bishop Ken, wrote what has become known as the Doxology:

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow,

praise him, all creatures here below,

praise him above, ye heavenly host,

praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Amen.

May we, this Trinity Sunday and throughout the season of Trinity, begin to rediscover the God we are called to worship and serve.

The God who reveals himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.