Singing the Trinity - Sermon for 15 June 2025 8:00am and 11:00am Holy Communion

Last week, in an idle moment, I put a challenge to one of Elon Musk’s inventions, the Artificial Intelligence Programme called GROK, (you may have it if you use  X or Twitter). The challenge was to write a hymn in praise of the Trinity in Common Metre. It took about three seconds.

‘O Holy Trinity divine,

One God in persons three,

Your boundless love and grace we sing,

Through all eternity’

What Grok produced was a hotch potch of hymns and pious rhymes. I’ll spare you following four verses because a string of cliches put together mechanically does not, in my view, a real hymn make. Where’s the passion, where’s the awe?

The scripture readings given for Trinity Sunday give us some clues.  

Proverbs speaks of God addressing Wisdom, as his first creation, and of wisdom creating the world. (Slightly problematic that, as the other Persons of the Trinity, as our Creed will remind us are not created by God but ‘begotten’, in the case of the Son, or ‘proceeding’, in the case of the Holy Spirit. Our reading from Romans does indeed speak of God and of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. But there is no ‘Trinity’ in either passage, because the word had not come into Christian vocabulary until years after the New Testament was completed.

What is more helpful is that our Gospel has Jesus telling his disciples that there is truth yet to come, that he has things to say which the disciples are not yet able to bear. When the Spirit of truth comes he will guide them into all truth. It is 1700 years this year since the Nicene Creed was produced, summarising the early Church’s experience of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Not everyone accepts this of course. Our friends up the road, the Unitarians have never accepted the doctrine of the Trinity and there are others who sometimes have doubts. I have to say that for me the Trinity is a wonderfully rich and assuring doctrine that lifts the heart and speaks to our human need.

I would have been disappointed if our worship today had not begun with Holy, Holy. Holy, the words composed by Reginald Heber, who was a country clergyman for 16 years and was then appointed Bishop of Calcutta. He died in India at the age of 42. As he wrote this hymn his mind was full of scriptural imagery. Holy, holy, holy, reminds us of the prophet’s vision in Isiaiah 6 of the cherubim and seraphim, words which are sung later in this service as the Sanctus in the Eucharistic Prayer. There is also an allusion in Heber’s hymn  to the 4th chapter of Revelation, where the writer describes a vision of an open door into heaven, with  the throne of God, a ‘sea’ of glass mingled with fire, and the twenty four elders casting their crowns before him. The hymn goes on to reflect on those two visions, pointing out that what hides God from us is our own sinfulness and darkness, It then in the last verse, opens out the heavenly vision to all creation praising God’s name in earth and sky and sea. As a child I loved that hymn because it conveyed to me something beautiful and otherworldly, and yet infinitely desirable.

A quite different take on the Trinity comes in the hymn we’ll sing in a few minutes: Thou whose Almighty Word. This is built around the theme of light in the Bible and links the physical light at the dawn of creation to the spiritual light of the Gospel. The author was John Marriott, a scholar, poet and clergyman of the same era as Bishop Heber, but with a very different tone and style. In the first verse we pray to God the Father to dispel unbelief as he dispelled darkness at creation. Then in the second verse we call on the Son, the redeemer who brought healing, sight and health to humanity: ‘So now to all mankind, Let there be light’. And then in the next verse the  Spirit who hovered on the waters at creation is now called  to move again over the face of the waters, bearing the lamp of grace, which rhymes very happily with earth’s darkest place. And then, lastly, Blessed and Holy Three, Glorious Trinity: Wisdom, Love, Might. And a final return to the image of water, boundless, rolling, everywhere. This is the Trinity seen an terms of God’s mission to the world: God’s love and mercy and kindness filling the whole creation. So much needed now in our war-torn days, endangered as we are, struck down by accident and tragedy as we are: Let there be light.

Our final hymn today in the form we will sing it at the end of the service,  is the product of the Victorian age. It is a translation of a much older Irish source often attributed to St Patrick, the patron Saint of Ireland. It uses the metaphor of ‘binding’ to call on the Trinity for protection. Beginning with the saving life of Christ, the incarnation, baptism, death, resurrection, ascension and last judgment. We can’t sing all the verses this morning, but it goes on to call on the whole community of faith to surround and uphold us. And then the hymn opens out to link us to God through the whole creation, here seen as both benign and benign. The created world is full of the goodness and energy of God but also of danger and upredictability: the virtues of the starlit heaven, the glorious sun’s life-giving ray, the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks.

The hymn goes on to suggests that what I see in nature above and around me comes from the same source as the energy that is God’s power and presence in everyday life. God’s power to hold and lead, his eye to watch, his might to stay. The Trinity above us, around us, beyond us, within us. In creation, in redemption, in the Church, in the depth of personal experience. In birth and death and judgment.

And this can all be my prayer and your prayer, my life and your life.

Many years ago the then Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge preached a sermon about how the doctrine of the Trinity met our two most basic human fears. The first is the fear of isolation, of being cast adrift in the hell of our own minds with no one to sustain us. The second is the fear of being absorbed into something or someone else, losing our individuality, our  personhood. Harry Williams was a much loved and thoughtful priest but he also struggled with depression and anxiety. For him the  doctrine of the Trinity is the assurance that God is truly personal, that God truly understands, and calls us to live in loving relationship both with ourselves and with one another, healing each other’s wounds, bearing each other’s burdens. Where there is relationship there is no aloneness. Where there is personhood, we cannot be finally overwhelmed.

I commend this verse from St Patrick’s breastplate as a prayer:

‘I bind unto myself today the power of God to hold and lead, his eye to watch, his might to stay, his ear to hearken to my need. The wisdom of my Good to teach, his hand to guide, his shield to ward, the Word of God to give me speech, his heavenly host to be my guard.’

And now to God the Father God the Son and God the Holy Spirit be glory and honour, be might majesty and power now and for ever. Amen.

Angela Tilby

Canon of Honour Emeritus, Portsmouth Cathedal