Today’s service is led by the Revd Cara Heafey
Welcome
Hello and welcome to today’s worship from the URC. My name is Cara, I am a minister at Marston and Wheatley United Reformed Churches and part time in the Oxford hospitals. It’s a pleasure to be worshipping with you today on Trinity Sunday. Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.
Call to Worship
Wisdom is a woman, calling in the street, “Empty or full, you are welcome here! Confused and full of doubt? Make yourself at home. Hungry for justice? Taste and see that God is good. Come, quench your thirst, feed your soul, find your friends! You are all invited.”
Hymn Come Down O Love Divine
Bianco da Siena; Translator: Richard Frederick Littledale (1867) Public Domain Sung by the virtual choir of the Riverside Church, New York, USA and used with their kind permission.
Come down, O Love divine,
seek thou this soul of mine,
and visit it with your own ardour glowing;
O Comforter, draw near,
within my heart appear,
and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.
O let it freely burn,
till earthly passions turn
to dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
and let thy glorious light
shine ever on my sight,
and clothe me round, the while my path illuming.
And so the yearning strong,
with which the soul will long,
shall far outpass the power of human telling;
for none can guess God’s grace,
till Love create a place
wherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling.
Prayer of Approach
Creator: parent-God, patient with us, faithful to us,
delighting in what you have made.
We have come here today to worship you. Welcome us into your love.
Jesus: God-made-flesh, weeping with us, walking beside us,
teacher, brother, friend. We have come here today to hear your voice.
Help us to listen and follow.
Spirit: God-in-us, binding our wounds, opening our hearts,
stirring up the best kind of trouble. We have come here today to feel your power. Wake us up to your presence.
Mystery of Trinity, playfully swirling in Holy dance, calling us to move with your rhythm. Sweep us up into your embrace. Amen.
Prayer of Confession
Three-in-one God, in your very being you are relationship, you are love,
and you long to draw us into community
with one another, with the earth, with you.
We confess that we pull in a different direction.
Your Church is fragmented. Your world is divided.
We have lost sight of our interdependence,
our kinship with the earth and her creatures.
Forgive us and heal us. Repair our brokenness.
Bridge our separateness. May we step into the flow of your self-giving,
life-bringing love. Amen.
Assurance of Grace
God is merciful and gracious,
Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love (Psalm 103:8).
Sisters and Brothers, your sins are forgiven. Be at peace.
Prayer for Illumination
Jesus said to his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”
(John 16:12-13a)
Come, Spirit of truth. Breathe life into our faith and open our hearts
to receive and be transformed by your word.
Readings Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: ‘To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth — when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.
Hymn Holy Wisdom Lamp of Learning
Ruth C. Duck, 1995; copyright © 1996 The Pilgrim Press OneLicence A-734713. Sung by Orchard Enterprises Sessional Choir
Holy Wisdom, lamp of learning bless the light that reason lends.
Teach us judgment as we kindle sparks of thought your Spirit sends.
Sanctify our search for knowledge and the truth that sets us free.
Come, illumine mind and spirit joined in deepest unity.
Vine of truth, in you we flourish; by your grace we learn and grow.
May the word of Christ among us shape our life, our search to know.
Joined to Christ in living, dying, may we help the Church
convey witness to the saving gospel, bearing fruit of faith today.
Reading St John 16:12-15
‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
Sermon
“With the whole Christian Church the United Reformed Church believes in one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
Those are the opening words of the catchily titled Statement Concerning the Nature, Faith and Order of the URC. We profess to believe in God as Trinity, a belief we share with the whole Christian Church. It’s foundational to our faith.
But… I suspect that for many of us, we say the words without thinking about them too much. Because thinking about them makes our brains ache.
How can God be one and three at the same time? How can Jesus be God and also pray to God? Where does the Holy Spirit fit in? And as if all of that isn’t enough to make us dizzy, the Lectionary for today presents us with yet another character – this wisdom-woman from the book of Proverbs. Who is she, and what does she have to do with the Trinity?
These all seem to me like good questions. Spoiler alert: this sermon may not answer them! My hope and prayer, though, is that it may help us to live with them. To see these questions and others like them not as stumbling blocks or barriers to faith, but as part of a dynamic, growing, living faith.
Let’s take a breath and remind ourselves that all the language we use to describe God is provisional; it cannot contain the fullness of God. God is bigger than our imaginations, bigger than our intellects, bigger than our religion! This should not discourage us from making full use of our imaginations and our intellects and the traditions and wisdom of our faith. But it should encourage us to leave some room for mystery and possibility.
One way of maintaining this posture of openness and humility is to enlarge the vocabulary we use to speak of God. The Bible is rich with names and metaphors, some diverse and surprising, some playful and poetic, many of which have never or rarely made it into our worship and liturgy. God is described as being like a sculptor, like a shepherd, like an eagle, like a fortress, like a husband, like a ferocious mother bear, like a sheltering mother hen. God shows up in the Bible as fire, as a pillar of cloud, as a mighty wind, as three strangers in the desert, as a wrestler who fights dirty, as light and sound and silence.
And in the reading we heard today from the book of Proverbs, we meet the Wisdom of God personified as a woman. She breaks with convention and decorum, shouting in the street with boldness and authority. She describes being present when the world was created, playing like a child, delighting in humanity and being delighted in by God.
How refreshing to hear God’s character described as playful, childlike, joyous, female! Her claim expands those enigmatic verses in Genesis 1: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…’ So… in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:26-27). Here is another invitation to us to stretch our imaginations and our language when we describe God, finding new names, rediscovering old ones, expanding our hearts and minds in the holy process.
Wisdom’s claim to have been instrumental in creation, and to have existed with God before everything came into being, might sound familiar. That’s because it’s echoed in the prologue to John’s Gospel. The gospel writer makes a strikingly similar claim about Jesus, “He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:2-3). It seems very likely that John is drawing this parallel knowingly and deliberately, pointing towards the Hebrew Scriptures to say that the Word of God, the Wisdom of God, became flesh in the person of Jesus.
This, I imagine, is why we are hearing this passage from Proverbs on Trinity Sunday. It hints that while there is one God, there is a plurality within God. It paves the way for the writer of John’s Gospel to assert that in the human Jesus, God walked among us. And perhaps there are parallels to be found between Wisdom and the Spirit as well. The Spirit who, in Genesis 1, hovers over the face of the waters of the deep and is named using language that, in the Hebrew, is feminine.
These are really big ideas. They may make us feel confused, or uneasy. They may challenge our concept of God. You know what? I think that’s OK. I wonder whether over the millennia the Church has sometimes been too preoccupied with pinning faith down into authorized creeds, establishing and policing “right belief”, constraining and controlling the language we use. God and the Bible continually and inconveniently overspill these limitations.
But that is not to devalue the beauty or truth of the doctrine of the Trinity. It really is foundational to our faith. The concept of God as Trinity gives an amazing picture of God who, in Godself, is love, relationship, equality, diversity, and cooperation. It reveals to us that our faith is designed to be lived out in community. Humans, made in the image of God, are made for love. We participate in the life and mission of God when we form, heal or nurture relationships and when we help and care for one another. God lives, moves and breathes in the spaces between us.
In the passage we heard today from John’s Gospel, Jesus is speaking to his disciples as the time of his death is drawing close. He’s preparing them for the grief and uncertainty to come. He speaks about God the Father and the Spirit of truth as distinct and inseparable from himself. But this is no dispassionate theological treatise. These are words of comfort and promise. He is reassuring his friends that God has not stopped speaking and will not abandon them. Words of hope that resonate today.
The truth we celebrate on Trinity Sunday is not an abstract intellectual exercise, a philosophical puzzle we must solve. It’s a mystery apprehended through experience and lived in relationship. Faith is not an absence of doubt, nor is it static and unchanging. What God requires of us is not a systematic theology but a wholehearted commitment, to love one another and abide in God’s love.
Let’s expand the vocabulary we use to speak of God, finding language that’s spacious and inclusive, playful and creative. Let’s be humble with our theology, open to the idea that we might be wrong, and that God has not finished speaking. Let’s find our security – not in our own certainty – but in God’s unwavering love for us, and God’s promise never to abandon us. And let’s do the work of loving our neighbour and our enemy, repairing relationships, bridging division, welcoming all. God is love, and when we live in love, God lives in us (1 John 4:16). May this be so.
Hymn Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty
Reginald Heber (1826) Public Domain. Courtesy of St Andrew’s Cathedral & Choir, Sydney, Australia
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity!
Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore thee,
casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before thee,
Who was and is and evermore shall be.
Holy, Holy, Holy! Though the darkness hide thee,
Though the sinful human eye thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
Perfect in pow’r, in love, and purity.
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth, and sky, and sea;
Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.
Affirmation of Faith
We believe that God is bigger
than our affirmations of faith.
Creeds and doctrines,
however carefully, prayerfully, wrought
can neither contain nor tame
the One who is beyond all names
and greater than our intellects or imaginations can hold.
We believe that God is love.
That God is wonderfully, mysteriously, One and Three.
That God is within and beside and beyond us.
Prayers of Intercession
God who is love,
we weep for a world that’s ravaged by war and greed.
We see the wicked prosper and the innocent suffer.
There is so much that feels broken beyond repair.
(Silence is held)
Merciful one, we commend to your care
the things that are beyond our control.
We ask for your help to step into the work you have entrusted to us.
The work of praying and loving and sharing and lifting up.
God who is community,
we stand amazed at your stubborn belief in human potential,
in our capacity for kindness,
in the possibility that a realm of peace and justice is breaking in.
Where there is distrust and misunderstanding,
let your spirit weave connections.
Teach us to communicate, to cooperate,
to be generous, to see and celebrate the good.
God who is relationship,
draw us closer to your heart.
Tune our ears to hear your voice.
Help us to live honestly and to love whole-heartedly.
May we find our belonging, our safety and freedom in you. Amen.
Hymn We Sing a Love
June Tillman © 1993 Stainer & Bell Ltd. (Admin. Hope Publishing Co.) One Licence A-734713. Sung by the members of Dalgety Parish Church and used with their kind permission.
We sing a love that sets all people free,
that blows like wind, that burns like scorching flame,
enfolds the earth, springs up like water clear:
come, living love, live in our hearts today.
We sing a love that seeks another’s good,
that longs to serve and not to count the cost,
a love that, yielding, finds itself made new:
come, caring love, live in our hearts today.
We sing a love, unflinching,
unafraid to be itself, despite another’s wrath,
a love that stands alone and undismayed:
come, strengthening love, live in our hearts today.
We sing a love that, wandering, will not rest
until it finds its way, its home, its source,
through joy and sadness pressing on refreshed:
come, pilgrim love, live in our hearts today.
We sing the Holy Spirit, full of love,
who seeks out scars of ancient bitterness,
brings to our wounds the healing grace of Christ:
come, radiant love, live in our hearts today.
Blessing
May the grace of God surround us.
May the peace of God live in us.
May the love of God shine from us,
bringing warmth and light to the world.
And may the blessing of the Trinity,
Source, Saviour and Spirit,
Be yours today and always.
Amen.