Reading:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”
At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

(Isaiah 6:1-4).

Message.

Mathematicians are, by definition, people who love numbers. And there are certain “interesting” numbers which really excite them! Take, for instance, the number 2. It may seem quite ordinary to you and me, but it’s the only even prime number – as it divides into all other even numbers they cannot also be prime. Then think of the number 10. It’s the basis for all our ordinary Western mathematics – although those of us who were brought up in the old Imperial weights, measures and money can quite easily count in base 8 (the number of furlongs in a mile), base 12 (pennies in a shilling), base 16 (ounces in a pound) and even base 20 (shillings in a pound or hundredweights in a ton). Life in the metric age is much simpler and far less interesting!

One number which gets the mathematicians into a real tizz is 1729, known as the Hardy-Ramanujan number after a famous story about the British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visiting his Indian colleague Srinivasa Ramanujan in hospital. Hardy mentioned that he’d travelled in taxi number 1729 and remarked that this seemed to be rather a dull number. “No”, replied Ramanujan, “it’s a very interesting one; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways”. What fascinating facts you learn in church!

There are, of course, numbers in the Bible, some of which are fairly important. We read, for example, that God created the universe in 6 days and rested on the seventh. We know that the nation of Israel was made up of 12 tribes and that Jesus called 12 disciples. We are told that Joshua’s army marched round Jericho a total of 13 times. We believe that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness for 40 days and nights, fed 5000 hungry people, and rose from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion. And, moving into the realms of symbolism and mystery, the book of Revelation tells us that the number of the redeemed will be 144,000 and that the “Beast” is tattooed with the number 666. I’m sure you can think of other numbers we might add!

You’ve probably guessed by now that the number I’m leading up to is the number three, as we think of God as the Holy Trinity. Karoline Lewis, an American theology professor, finds this number particularly interesting, especially when it comes to relationships. For three is awkward from that point of view. She says, “Even numbers promote pairs for conversation. Three is harder. It’s why groups of three are difficult. They introduce a different ethos than those of two or four. What happens? You frequently end up leaving someone out or you are left out, when the two seem to get along better without you, or you get along better with one over the other”. That’s a familiar experience!

This writer goes on: “Our world seems to operate in, or perhaps to prefer, even numbers – four sides to a table; two children (making sure there’s one of each gender) so that each parent can be in charge of one child. Even numbers seem to secure the sense of order and predictability we have come to expect from numbers. But add the odd person and, all of a sudden, expected patterns of behaviour and anticipated actions of relational dynamics are offset. You are forced to share a conversation, to be attentive to another besides the one in front of you. You have to listen to more than one person, perhaps at the same time. That’s the problem and promise of three”.

So three is “difficult”. But God himself is infinitely more difficult still! For he isn’t just a threesome, with all its inbuilt imbalance and disequilibrium. Nor does he just have “a third side” along with the obvious binary contrasts of light-and dark, back-and-front, good-and-evil, a “third side” which means that we must constantly come at him from a different angle, think about him from a fresh perspective. No; while thinking of God as “three” is already hard, we must never forget that he is also “one” at exactly the same time. And how God can be three and one together is a conundrum, a paradox, a mystery which has challenged the Church, stretched its ablest minds, from the earliest days. We’re not going to resolve it here this morning!

The word “trinity” isn’t found in the Bible: it’s one that theologians have worked out by inference, although they haven’t always agreed on its exact definition (that’s actually an understatement: they’ve had massive rows about it, leading to splits in the Church). Of course the notion of “trinity” is most clearly seen in the New Testament, where we read of Jesus speaking about his relationship with both the Father and the Holy Spirit, where we hear him sending his disciples to preach and baptise in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit, where we read Paul writing, “God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father”. The Old Testament is far less clear, yet it does contain some “hints” of the Trinity; today’s story of Isaiah’s magnificent yet terrifying encounter with God in the Temple is one of them. For, as heaven’s doors crack open and he glimpses the divine worship of the seraphim, the prophet hears them crying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!”, which seems to be unduly, even extravagantly, repetitive. Wouldn’t saying it once have been enough? – after all, saying something once gets its meaning across, saying it twice underlines its importance, but saying it three times is just annoying! So why do we have this repetition of the word “holy” in what liturgists call the “tri-sanctus”?

Well, I can suggest a few reasons. It indicates the degree of reverence that God deserves and the infinity of his holiness, which far surpasses anything we can imagine. There’s also a sense in which these words span the timescale of eternity: God has always been holy, he is still holy now, and he will continue to be holy for ever. He doesn’t change.

And, yes, I think that the repetition of this word “holy” is also one of the hints of the Trinity I mentioned earlier. Now Isaiah saw only one God in his vision (and thought that his last hour had come), it’s the seraphim who utter the repeated words of praise. But is it fanciful to think of them describing not only the Father as holy, but also the Son and the Spirit? Perhaps it is; for such an idea would be anathema to a good Jew for whom the idea of “one God” was paramount. Yet, when we come to Revelation which is of course a distinctly Christian vision of glory, we get the threefold “holy” again: as the Nicene Creed says, the Father and the Son together with the Holy Spirit are worthy to be worshipped and given glory. All are equally holy.

I grant you that this whole idea of the Trinity is difficult for us to grasp; the suggestion that God can be One and Three at the same time stretches our minds beyond their limits. We might say that it’s a mystery – and that’s a thought which has some heavyweight support. For instance, the Catholic Catechism on the Vatican’s website – you can hardly get more “official” than that! – says, “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 people and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin”. That’s pretty wordy and dense, but what it’s saying is this: this idea of the Trinity is basic to our Christian faith – even though we struggle to understand it.

Tom Wright, the former Anglican Bishop of Durham is helpful, too. He makes the point that the doctrine of the Trinity is as much a way of saying “we don’t know” as of saying “we do know”: “To say that the true God is Three and One is to recognize that, if there is a God, then of course we shouldn’t expect him to fit neatly into our little categories.  The Trinity is not something that the clever theologian comes up with as a result of hours spent in the theological laboratory, after which he or she can return to announce that they’ve got God worked out now, the analysis is complete, and here is God neatly laid out on a slab.  On the contrary: the doctrine of the Trinity is, if you like, a signpost pointing into a light which gets brighter and brighter until we are dazzled and blinded, but which says: ‘Come, and I will make you children of light’.” Wright goes on to say that, however intelligent we may be, God is always far greater than we can even imagine.

Well, you’ve heard a lot of theology this morning and might have felt that you’ve been sitting in a university lecture-room rather than a church. And I suspect that there are some questions buzzing around your minds: “So what’s the point of all this? Are you saying that God is so mysterious that we can’t even begin to understand him? And, if that’s the case, can he have any real relevance to our daily lives?” Those aren’t stupid questions but I think I’ve got two answers to them.

The first is to say that life itself can be mysterious and puzzling. We see or hear things which we struggle to fit into the boxes of our experience or rational thought. We say, “Why is this happening? Why can’t I figure things out? Is it all random, or is something greater going on?” Those questions make us feel uncomfortable, as they challenge the way we think in today’s scientific age: we feel we have a right to understand everything and become frightened when we don’t, for that means we cannot control it and are effectively at its mercy (whatever the “it” may be).

Yet the doctrine of the Trinity, which tells us that God can never be completely understood yet is still trustworthy, assures us that we don’t actually need to know everything. Believing in the Trinity means that we believe in a God who understands the incomprehensible, a God who is able to reconcile every paradox, a God who can uncover every mystery. Knowing this can give us confidence that he is still in control, even when all the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction.

The other answer I’d give to our questions is that, although there is much about God that our human minds cannot comprehend, he has disclosed himself to us in Jesus. As John’s Gospel puts it: “No-one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is the same as God and is at the Father’s side, he has made him known”; or, to use the words of Graham Kendrick, “Wisdom unsearchable, God the invisible, Love indestructible in frailty appears”. Jesus not only taught about God (and repeatedly defined the relationship between the Father, the Holy Spirit and himself), he lived as God in the world. He wasn’t able to completely reveal God to us – but he lifted some, at least, of the veil of divine mystery.

The biggest winner at this year’s Academy Awards was “Oppenheimer” which won seven Oscars, including Best Film. Of course it’s the story of Robert Oppenheimer, the driving force behind America’s Manhattan Project which developed the atom bomb. Just before 5.30am on July 16^th 1945 the first weapon, nicknamed “The Gadget”, was detonated at a test site in the New Mexico desert – a site which he named “Trinity”.

Why did Oppenheimer choose that name? It’s because he loved the poetry of John Donne, one of whose sonnets begins, “Batter my heart, three person’d God” and expresses the paradox that, by being chained to God, we can be set free. Oppenheimer clearly loved the Trinity’s mystery, and thought that fear of the bomb’s deadly power might end war and redeem humanity. We now know that he was grievously wrong; but perhaps Donne himself was right: as we seek to get our minds around the Trinity, God starts to break the bonds of ordinary life, renews us and sets us free.

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.