Sermon preached for the Trinity Sunday Zoom Service: Matthew 28, 16-20

Revd Canon Leonard Doolan

‘Today week you will have to repeat what you have learnt today. Your godparents are responsible for teaching you…No one need be nervous and so fail to repeat the words. Do not worry, I am your father. I do not carry a strap or a cane like a schoolmaster’.  (St. Augustine, De Symbolo, see Awe Inspiring Rites of Initiation, Yarnold, p13).

Well, that’s a relief to all of us. These are the words of the 5^th century St. Augustine of Hippo regarding baptism candidates learning the words of the Creed. No caning if we can’t recite it from memory – but I hope most of us can, and if not it is not such a bad exercise to attend to if you don’t know the Creed. The Credo (Latin) or πιστέυω (Greek) lies at the centre of the delivery and transmission of Christianity. However, it has to be more than that, and it is. It is the core summary of our faith, and it is what holds together the life of baptism, the life of faith, life itself.

We will all be aware that when a candidate for baptism reaches the very high point of baptism in the water of the font, that the words to accompany this deep action are: I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit.

The Creed that we are meant to learn without getting a beating, according to St. Augustine, is but the statement of the church, a sacred statement, as to how we understand these words at the administration of baptism.

Nowadays baptisms are very public, indeed in the Book of Common Prayer (1662) the Sacramental Rite is referred to as ‘The Public Baptism of Infants’ to avoid any ‘secretive activity’ going on. Baptism is the public admission into the public worship of Christ’s church.

At one time though, in the early Christian centuries, this was not the case. When baptism candidates were going through the curriculum of learning the faith, it was done so in semi-secretive conditions. Before they were baptized the catechumens had to depart from the Liturgy, the Mass, because both the Creed and the receiving of the Holy Communion, could be observed and participated in only by the admitted believers, the deacon would cry out (as he still does in the Orthodox Liturgy) ‘The doors, the doors!’ at which point the unbaptized had to depart to allow the faithful to recite the Creed and receive the Holy Communion.

So the uninitiated were shielded from, among other things, the recitation of the faith that glorifies the Trinitarian nature of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I will refer to this as the ‘Trinitarian formula’, but this is to do a grave injustice to the fullness of our faith. It is adopted purely for the convenience of a ‘short-hand’ for the Glorious and Undivided Trinity, that dynamic relationship within the divine life, into which we are adopted as daughters and sons, and co-participators through baptism.

Baptism and Trinity have been connected from the beginning of the revelation of God in Christ. Through baptism we enter into the death and resurrection of Christ (Colossians 3) and in participating in this mystery we share the life of Christ which is indivisible from the Father and the Holy Spirit. The formula expresses this truth, and protects its authenticity.

It is at the very end of St. Matthew’s holy gospel that we get the very first glimpse of the connection between baptism and the Trinity. It is the very first time the formula is so clearly and unequivocally stated. Matthew’s holy gospel is thought to have been composed around 90AD, so a mere 55 or so years after the death and resurrection of Christ.  Jesus grants to us what we call the ‘Great Commission’ in which we are given authority for the apostolic life – the life of mission. In this Jesus places baptism and the Trinity together in one sentence, and the formula appears for the first time ever in the gospels.

 

‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 28, 19).

Nowhere else is the formula so plainly expressed. I am in danger of being facile when I say that the Trinity is implicit through most of scripture, for there is not time to study it in detail, but here Matthew makes it explicit on the lips of Jesus.

By this I mean we can, with our Trinitarian panorama, see in the Old Testament God revealed as Creator and Father; see the work of the Holy Spirit in the Creation (Genesis 2, 2), or in life giving experiences (Ezekiel 37); and in the prophets the ‘messianic expectation’ anticipates the overt revelation of the Christ, even of a suffering Christ (Isaiah 53); or again at the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the river Jordan there is a shekinah (divine manifestation) experience of the voice of the heavenly Father, the descent of the Holy Spirit as it were a dove, both present at the anointing of the ‘Son’, namely Jesus (Mark 1, 9); but nowhere else do we get the raw formulaic expression of the Trinity as we find at the end of St. Matthew (Matthew 28, 19); and its direct connection to the church’s central missional activity of baptism.

The holy and undivided Trinity permeates the whole of our liturgy, our prayer life, our very daily activity. We do not invite the Trinity into our lives, nor do we pray to the Trinity like some ‘abstract’, because that is to make two wrong assumptions.

Firstly, our lives are totally Trinitarian through baptism and we ‘live Trinity’; and secondly, because of this, the Trinity is not external to us, and thus all prayer offered is already Trinitarian, because the source and destination of our prayer is in the life of the Trinity. We are literally ‘already in the Trinity’ in all we say and do.

The Trinity is not to be found originating in an historical document we call a Creed; rather, the Creed is an attempt to express the glory and majesty and relationship of God- in- Trinity. The Trinity is not a concept to be worked out rationally and mathematically, but is our life in Christ. The Trinity is not to be officially recognized only on Trinity Sunday, but in the weft and weave of life and worship. The Trinity is however, to be honoured in glory and in majesty. Our baptism is a recognition that ‘life in the Trinity’ is ‘Trinity in our life’. We worship the Trinity in the sense that we worship the very sacredness of life itself.

In his baptismal teaching, St. John Chrysostom, in preparing the candidates for baptism, teaches that we approach the sacrament with awe and wonder. To describe this word awe he uses the Greek word φρικτός – from which we derive the English word ‘friction’.  It can be translated in this context as ‘causing a shiver’ or ‘making the hair stand on end’. (see ‘Awe Inspiring Rites of Initiation, Yarnold, p56 footnote 6).

In approaching baptism with our hair standing on end, so we enter worship, prayer, life itself, and the life of others, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That’s our life, and that’s our Creed. If you don’t remember it next week you won’t get a beating from me, but if you do remember this constantly you will get a shiver in your spine.