Cold Ashby:  Trinity Sunday 26th May 2002
As well as being Trinity Sunday, to-day, 26th May,  is also the day in the Christian year when we celebrate the life and work of St. Augustine of Canterbury who arrived in Kent 1400 years ago  sent by Pope Gregory the Great.   I hope that it will not be out of order for me to doff my cap in his direction  before attempting a few thoughts relating to Trinity Sunday.. 
  
The story that Pope Gregory saw some Angles in a slave market Rome describing  them Angels not Angles, was inspired to send missionaries to Britain,  is one that I particularly enjoyed in my Nursery History of England
Christianity had, of course been practised in Britain for a couple of hundred years before Augustine arrived in 597. The first, subsequently  Christian,  Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great, was proclaimed emperor at York.  But, following the departure of the Romans and  by the time Augustine landed on the Isle of Thanet  it was only surviving precariously in some of the more remote parts of the country: like Iona and Lindisfarne and of course in Ireland.  For all intents and purposes the rest of the country had reverted to paganism. 
It seems, however, that as Gregory’s agent for that conversion to Christianity, Augustine was not very keen to pursue his work in wild and woolly Britain: he had heard bad things about the country.  He had to be gingered up by the Pope.   At least Augustine must have taken comfort from the fact that the wife of Ethelbert King of Kent, was a French princess and a Christian and therefore that his message to the King’s court would not be entirely unfamiliar.  Moreover, there was already in Canterbury a church remaining from former times that he revived.  
He baptised Ethelbert and went on to found the bishoprics of Rochester and London.  Pope Gregory hoped that he would found a total of 12 bishoprics in the south and then appoint a bishop in York who would found another 12.  That never happened: but it was the basis of the idea that there should be two archbishops in England.    Augustine is associated  with the arrival of Christianity in the Roman tradition (as opposed to Celtic) in Britain but, according to Bede at least, he was not a very tactful   and there were soon arguments among Christians.  So what’s new?
 To be fair,  Bede has to be taken with a large helping  of salt  as a source of historical truth,  nor was he very inquisitive.  For example, although he lived in Jarrow only a few  miles from Hadrian’s Wall, but never ventured out to visit it.  
Let us remember with thankfulness  the pioneering work of St. Augustine and next time you pass the church at Brixworth founded only a few years after his death in 604, spare a thought for the man who sowed the seeds of  what we came to call Roman Catholicism in England. 
It is not easy for a layman to expound on Trinity Sunday.  For the doctrine of the Trinity  God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost is one of the most difficult pieces of theology to grasp,   at least to this layman it is.  
Perhaps the best known , and to my mind the most incomprehensible definition of the Trinity comes in the creed set aside for Trinity Sunday, among others in the  in the Book of Common Prayer and  known as  “Quicunque Vult” from which to give you the flavour, in case you have not read it recently I  now quote: 
[ Quotation from Page 53]
I am sure you get the message which is a very powerful argument  for doing more of our business these days in church in contemporary language.
Whenever I read Quicunque Vult I cannot help remembering the memoirs of Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen, a diplomat of the 1930s and 40s made famous by the fact that when Ambassador in Turkey during the war he allowed his safe to be burgled  by his butler who was a Nazi agent known as Cicero.   In 1930  K-H he became Minister to the three Baltic Republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. This involved residing at Riga in Latvia  and travelling  ceaselessly around those three Baltic States.    He summed up the rigours of his post in a brilliant parody, known as  “Quincunque Balt” 
[ Quote…]
I hope you will not regard this digression into a lesser know byway of diplomatic history as too frivolous.  I mention it only to illustrate how very hard it is to grasp  And cope with the concept of three in one in secular life, never mind spiritual life. 
One gets a rather  better steer from the Catechism, I find. Where after the Articles of Belief : 
“I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth …..
The question is then  put:
What dost thou chiefly learn in these Articles of Belief? 
 First I learn to believe in God the Father who has made me and all the world.
 Second, in God the son who has redeemed me;
 Third, in God the Holy Ghost who sanctifieth me and all the elect people of God;
That to my mind is a good deal simpler than Quicunque Vult.  Because as a Christian I do believe that God made us and our world,  God loves us and has a plan for our lives. 
So when we pray as ordinary Christians we are trying to get in touch with God.  And, as C S Lewis, I think, put it,  what prompts us to pray is also God, God inside us. 
Now for the second pillar of the Trinity: What we know about God comes from His son – the man who was God and is standing beside God . He helps us to pray and prays  and intercedes for us.  
The third pillar is the Holy Ghost: as I see it ( subject to what a theologian might say) that is the spirit that directs us and makes it possible for us to travel towards God in our prayers.   “Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire………….” 
Trinity Sunday is then the opportunity to reflect on these three Articles  of  Christian belief and to pray God that he will in the words of our Collect to-day   “keep us steadfast in our faith “.  
Holy Spirit , take our minds and think through them
Take our mouths and speak through them
Take our hearts and set them on fire. 
