Fr Matthew Reese
Dear Friends in Christ,
When I was in seminary, either in one of my parish placements, or returning to my sponsoring parish out-of-term time, I rarely got much choice as to when I would preach. “How about August 6th?” “What about this last Sunday in November?” “Maybe early June?”
“Yes, Father, that’ll do fine!”
What a fool I was!
Transfiguration. Christ the King. Trinity Sunday, and so on.
There’s a special kind of hazing in the Church which is to toss what are called the “theological feasts” at the seminarians and the curates! (This Trinity Sunday, at least, we are grateful to have as our preacher a deacon who is old hat at these things.)
The theological feasts are so difficult because they ask us not just to explore something which God has done, but to explore who God is. How can we describe, in our fallible and finite human terms, a God who is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent? How can we describe a God who gives his name to Moses as “I AM WHO I AM”? (Exodus 3:14). How can we describe a God who is both immanent—acting in the world—and transcendent, from before all worlds?
I remember the first Trinity Sunday sermon I gave, after having triple checked everything to ensure I had not unwittingly committed some heresy, and a wonderful retired Lutheran pastor came up to me afterwards and said, “No, my boy… Perichoresis! Perichoresis!… and by the way, speak from your diaphragm!”
It was a deflating start, but it was just as well. Nothing I could have said would have done justice to the Holy Trinity. A lifetime of Trinity Sunday sermons would not either, nor indeed two thousand years of witness of the Universal Church.
“We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.” (BCP 864)
Uncreated. Incomprehensible. Eternal.
And yet present with us always. On His throne of glory in heaven. In the Holy Sacrament of the altar. In the hearts of His faithful people.
Thanks be to God for that.
—Fr Matthew