In the name of God the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Last Sunday we completed the season of Easter with the Feast of Pentecost. We remembered the gift of the Holy Spirit to Jesus’ first disciples and we pray continually for the Holy Spirit to breathe in us, in our lives, in our very being. And we pray every day for the Holy Spirit to sanctify the Body of Christ, the Church, of which we are members. Today, we turn around and look back on everything we have recalled and celebrated since Advent Sunday last year: the prophecy of the Messiah’s coming; the mystery of the incarnation of the eternal Word in the birth of Christ; his life, death, resurrection and ascension; and the coming of the Holy Spirit who leads us into all truth. Looking back on all this, Christians learned that Jesus Christ stands at the very heart of this drama. As he prays to the Father and breathes the Spirit on his disciples, he reveals to us something deeply mysterious about God. There is one God – that’s the ancient monotheism of Israel. God is also three – the Father who sent his Son and the Spirit who dwells in our hearts and leads us into truth. God is one but then we must also say that God is three – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the utterly distinctive Christian confession of God as Trinity.
Now, when we say that God is one and three, we’re tempted to think that this is some kind of mathematical or philosophical puzzle that we have to solve. The Christian profession of the Trinity – God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is not a puzzle to be solved but a life into which we are drawn. I’d like to talk about the Trinity first and foremost as God’s name. So we’re going to think about naming and the name of God, but I’m going to start in a slightly unexpected place – with babies.
When a baby is born, we usually want to know two bits of information: weight and name. The first gift we give to our children is their name. If a baby is not named immediately, it’s a little disconcerting, isn’t it? Why?
Because the baby’s personhood doesn’t seem quite complete until she or he bears a name, until we can refer to the baby by name and ask ‘is little Florence feeding well?’ Receiving a name is part of a child’s birth into the human community. Indeed, receiving a baptismal name is part of a child’s second birth into the family of the Church. So naming is personal and our identity is signalled by our name, even if we share that name with others. When we know someone, we don’t just know facts about them; we know their name. We all know how nice it is when someone remembers our name or how off-putting it is if someone mistakes our name. When we know someone – a friend, a colleague, a family member – we know them by name in all their particularity. That’s not abstract knowledge of another person; it’s personal knowledge and personal relationship.
So names are important to us in establishing our personhood and our relationships. What about naming God? In the book of Exodus in the Old Testament, when Moses goes up Mount Sinai to speak to God, he does not say ‘Please can you tell me a few facts about yourself?’ He says, ‘what is your name?’ ‘Who are you?’ God’s answer is both strange and amazing. God first says, ‘I am who I am’. God is the one who exists in himself, eternally. But God says something more to Moses: ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ When we read the name ‘the Lord’ in the Old Testament it translates what is known as the tetragrammaton, the name of God that has four letters: YHWH. This is deliberately unpronounceable. God has a name, yet the name can barely be said. We do our best by pronouncing this name ‘Yahweh’. Very often when we read the name ‘the Lord’ in the Old Testament, what we’re reading is this special, mysterious unpronounceable, holy name of God. We do our best to say it: Yahweh. God has a name, but God is beyond naming.
So that’s the ancient name of God revealed to Moses and Israel. Let’s compare that Jewish way of naming God with other religious traditions. At the time of Jesus, the Romans who occupied the land of Israel had countless gods. The philosophical schools from Greece that so influenced Christian thought in its first six centuries referred to the deep and unknowable divine mystery as ‘the One’. The pagan Roman gods are all too human, the Greek ‘One’ very abstract. But Jesus and teaches us to pray: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.’ We know that the Aramaic word Jesus uses for ‘Father’, ‘Abba’, is personal, an address used in a family. Yet God’s personal intimate name is also to be hallowed, kept holy, special, powerful.
When Jesus invites us to pray ‘Our Father’, he is inviting us to join his own prayer to the Father. When Jesus prays for his disciples, when he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he prays from the cross, he prays ‘Abba, Father, in heaven’. Now we know Jesus is fully human and fully divine. Jesus is God incarnate because Jesus is saviour and only God can save. So when Jesus prays, he prays a prayer that joins a human prayer to an eternal divine prayer – God the Son praying to God the Father, offering himself. By the gracious power of the Spirit, that is what we are drawn into – the praying heart of God. We address God, Yahweh, as Father in our union with Jesus Christ the Son and by the power of the Holy Spirit. So we have the mysterious divine name YHWH and Jesus takes us deeper into that name, the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. At the start of the Eucharist in the Cathedral we invariably say, ‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. We put our prayer and praise immediately under the protection of this divine name. These are not names of God, but the one name of God. At the heart of worship, we are joined to Christ to pray in the Trinity, in the name of God.
What this means is that when we’re thinking about our relationship with God, Father, Son and Spirit, we’re not talking about a relationship with something nameless and abstract. We are told God’s name, we are drawn into that name, into that life. So this is personal. We can address God by name, which means that we can worship God and not just talk about God. It’s about a deeply personal relationship with God who loves us beyond imagining, died for our sins, and rose to new life. The revealing of that name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, does not come in a grand theological treatise, but in the life of a person – the person of Jesus Christ who invites us to pray with him, by the Holy Spirit, ‘Our Father’.
When you call upon the name of the Lord, says the Bible, when you call in your grief, in your fear, in your tiredness, in your joy and your thanksgiving, when you call upon the name of the Lord, Father, Son and Spirit, you will be saved. You will be saved because calling upon the name of the Lord is to be drawn into that eternal relationship of love that calls us by name and never, ever lets go.
