Today is Trinity Sunday. So soon after Pentacost I ‘m a little unwilling to leave off the festival of Whitsun-tide. The Holy Spirit is my favourite part of Trinitarian theology. It’s like having a favourite Beatle. The Holy Spirit is definitely the Walrus.

When I was first studying theology the Holy Spirit was my way in … but for much Christian thinking the spirit is mysterious and hard to grasp. Joseph Ratzinger described the theology of the spirit as ‘a fugitive theology… that resists definition’. Theology of the spirit is sometimes called ‘the theology of the third person…’
Whitsun is the festival of the spirit and the notion of community which the outpouring of the Spirit represents is still present in our traditions; even our own communion celebration and shared meal last week is within the tradition of recognition of the ideal of Spirit, but the fuller traditions of the Church as represented by Whit-walks, the town parade where all the different churches would set aside their differences and march together, the Whit fairs and Whitsun weddings all celebrate unity and community in celebration of the democratic nature of the gift of the Spirit.

The great campaigner and theologian Archbishop Tutu is quoted as saying ‘God is not a Christian’. It’s a wonderful thing for a Bishop to say …

Tutu fought for an end to apartheid and worked for unity within SA afterwards. Interfaith work was part of his mission as he worked for reconciliation. There’s something about the statement that, when you’re as culturally embedded as we all are within a Christian context, is shocking, its one of those statements that jars you out of the illusion that you’re living within. This is a very important thematic idea which we must circle back to because it is a technique which is central to the ministry of Jesus. It is also some what similar to the effect of the first time you heard that Jesus wasn’t a Christian; it takes a second to re-adjust, because of course you know that, he was a Jewish Rabbi, a faithful and observant Jew, and his teaching tricks and techniques are perfect expressions of the Jewish tradition of Rabbinical narrative wisdom with its oppositions, juxtapositions and conceptual leaps …
Where does taking on board Tutu’s statement God is not a Christian leave our thinking about the Trinity? The Trinity is the religious doctrine that has provided Unitarians with the intellectual springboard to separate decisively from all of the mainstream denominations
What about another conceptual frame: I remember hearing the idea that every human tool is an extension of the human body, and each tool amplifies a pre existing human capability, we make a cup to refine or improve the natural cupping motion of our hands, we take up a club to increase the range of our fists. As hunters we seek to catch and so nets extend our reach. We throw a stone to increase the range and power of our intention to jab, to amplify the fist’s impact, and the sling amplifies the stone. The spear, and then bow and arrow are also extensions of this same physical motivation. Aggressively we punch, and first with club, then sword, and finally gun we externalise this aggression. Its not just the tools of war – you cannot but help think of this when you know it. pick up a tweezer to do just a bit more than you can do with your nails, a hammer to focus the force of your fist, a needle will do more than your fingers can to hold together the sides of cloth…
And then there are also other kinds/ forms of these extensions of ourselves, tools which represent our lives in time and space: these immediate and necessary extensions of our minds: marks we make, to create landmarks for ourselves of our unending passage through the momentary now: although we will never return here again, we are not meaning makers as is so often said we are meaning finders but we do make marks, when we can establish some reality we do mark it, most obviously we see this in the patterns of the ancients, marks we no longer understand perhaps but which we know to be of great significance…
Sandi Tokswig has a story about the earliest of mark making: “…when i was student at Cambridge…” she says “…I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. ‘This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar’ she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’ It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions?”
The marks we make are extensions of our own experiences of embodied life, but an embodied form which is experienced in time and space … and they are also open to misinterpretation as time passes …
and I hope you’re still following me on this circumnavigation but there are also intellectual tools, conceptual tools, tools that instead of extending a physical or conceptual capability or need extend our spiritual capacity…

The Trinity is the religious doctrine that has provided Unitarians with the intellectual springboard to separate decisively from all of the mainstream denominations, the angel with which we have most obviously wrestled. But of course its not just us – we are in good company in our struggle here: Turtullian, Augustine, Eusebius, Origien, Anselm, the list is long, the struggle tortuous – and the heresies; modalism, sabellianism, monarchialism tri-theism etc etc – are incredibly easy to fall into. Rowan Williams said that a heresy is evidence of a doctrinal point that requires development, and he could be right.
St Augustine said that the Trinity was a mystery that could not be solved in a single life-time. No believer in reincarnation he meant that it would only be revealed in the afterlife; perhaps heaven is a state of understanding the trinity and not the place where coffee tastes as good as it smells after all.
Once while struggling with the task of setting down his understanding of trinity Augustine took a break; he walked out of his library and down on to the beach where he walked in despair of ever finding a way of conveying his understanding of God. He saw a child playing and watched as a boy trying to transfer the sea into a hole he’d dug carried bucket after bucket up the beach and still failed to fill the hole – and suddenly Augustine realised that his effort was just as futile, and in after years the saint would caution his students that if they ever thought they’d understood the trinity it was evidence only that they’d failed to understand the trinity.
But could I call you back for a moment, supposing you’re even still listening, to the point made earlier that instead of extending a physical or conceptual capability or need there is also a capacity to extend our spiritual selves.
And then if that is so we might ask ‘What need might trinitarianism answer?’
At the outset of our service I quoted the words of Antonio Machado: “…between living and dreaming there is a third thing – can you guess it?” elliptical, strange but we know he’s saying something authentic in part because we recognise the reality of the trinity in the ‘conversational nature of reality’ (as David Whyte puts it); 3,2,1, Go! – our mind, the world and the other; the past, the present and the future, in – out and between, animal, vegetable and mineral; tight-head, hooker, loose-head; ratty, toady and mole, consciousness being and delight, you, me and the others, faith hope charity, me, myself and I, bread, butter and jam, sea, sky and land; peace! bread! land! yesterday, today and tomorrow.
You may be aware of the concept of triangulation: when a difficult conversation goes wrong it is very often because the people involved do not speak directly, as she says in the song (Moonshine Freeze by This is the Kit) we played earlier: “triangles are tricky” and anyone who has ever been in an overcrowded intimate relationship will affirm this, but there is another form of triangulation: in therapeutic terms when we speak to the one who listens it is understood that the conversation itself forms another, a third one. And this is also true in religious terms, when you and I talk together God is present and we form a ‘holy trinity’, the self – the other – and the sacred.
Jesus great remark remembers this when he says you should love God and your neighbour as yourself.
So what is the big problem then for Unitarians who have found the trinity such an objectionable stumbling block? From Miguel Servet the 16th century scientist physician who discovered the circulatory system whereby the blood delivers oxygen to our system and who was burned alive for publishing his book ‘On the Errors of the Trinity’, to the Minister of Mill Hill Chapel two hundred Years later Joseph Priestley (incidentally also a physical scientist interested in the nature of oxygen) who wrote and thought deeply about the errors of Christianity and developed a Unitarian systematic theology. Unitarians seem to have have wrestled with this doctrine. My colleague and friend Francis Elliot Wright recently wrote (in a superb blog post here) “The Trinity says that Jesus is God, so is the Holy Spirit. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. They are all God, but there is only one God. They are three separate persons, and yet they are all God as well. Philosophically, this is not just unlikely – it’s impossible, completely incoherent.”  
Well I ‘m not so sure. For a start I’m not sure that coherence is exactly the task that the conceptual tool is intended to facilitate, like you don’t use a hammer to sew with, you don’t use the trinity to formulate rationalistic answers to the nature of deity …
But Francis goes on “There are plenty of ways of seeing God’s hand in nature operating in diverse ways. If you like, you can classify these in threes – but why three? It is just as easy to pick another number. And three types of action do not a Trinity make. Nothing in nature suggests that God is three separate persons in a divine unity. All there really is, are various ways of seeing threeness – or fourness, or twoness depending on what it is you are trying to prove.”
Which again seems fair, but pre-supposes that the purpose for which the conceptual tool was intended is that of creating logical clarity – and I’m still not certain that is so: what I will ask is “is the purpose of the Trinity, is the outcome for which the conceptual/spiritual tool is created still as necessary to us as it was to the founders of the church in the second and third centuries?” – and is there something in the doctrine of the third person of the Trinity, the Doctrine of the Spirit that more clearly or more nearly reflects the theology of The Rabbi Jesus who strove to realise the prophesies of Isiaah that justice would roll as soon as we learned to realise that of God in the wounded and the broken and not just in the exalted and the mighty. Is there something in the doctrine of the third person that recognises the equal distribution of God’s nature throughout creation, that sees the realisation of the work of God in the air that we breathe, the water that runs or fire that rises in energetic and dynamic forms.
I think we should probably beware of trying to resolve on a Sunday morning the problems of a theology so mysterious that some of the greatest minds throughout history have failed to interpret and instead resolve to simply wonder in awe of a presence throughout history that generations have lived alongside. Ah well according to De la Soul in their magnificent Hip Hop breakout song ‘Its a Magic Number‘ : “Difficult preaching is Posdnuos’ pleasure /Pleasure and preaching starts in the heart.”
And I hope that’s not just a convenient cop out because a religious approach that acknowledges the mysterious alongside the practical will not only ask what is a concept for. Like a reader won’t always read a poem to understand it – not every poem is a straightforward message in a complicated form to be decoded by the reader. Some are and that’s fine but in the main poetry doesn’t say things that prose could say, that s not what poetry is for we already have prose to do that. But great, even good poetry nonetheless speaks to the soul, and in the soul of things we do not strive only for logical answers; we strive to relate: to be heard, to be held, to exist in the moment as it passes, we strive to be aware with our heart, which is the beginning, middle and end of Wisdom …