Sermon by the Dean | 11am Sung Eucharist, Portsmouth Cathedral

The re-opening of restaurants has inspired me to begin my Trinity Sunday sermon with reference to fast food from MacDonalds, and the tasting menu at Heston Blumenthal’s ‘Fat Duck’ restaurant.

So let’s imagine for the moment, that while restaurants were closed during the lockdown, and all you could get was takeaway food, we forgot there was any other diet than Big Macs, French fries, and McFlurry’s ice cream. This is what food is, as far as we are concerned; until someone invites us to go to Heston Blumenthal’s three Michelin starred ‘Fat Duck’ restaurant in Berkshire. In short, it’s an overwhelming experience. There are tastes and textures and aromas we never dreamt existed. After the Vodka and Lime Sour, the Pommery Grain Mustard Ice Cream, Jelly of Quail, Oak Moss and Truffle Toast, and Snail Porridge, we have pretty much reached sensory overload. But there is so much more. After eight further dishes, culminating in Artichoke, Vanilla Mayonnaise and Golden Trout Roe, it’s a relief to find that the ‘Fat Duck’s coffee, nice as it is, is not so different from the coffee at MacDonalds.

Sitting there, cup in hand, something unexpected happens. Heston Blumenthal himself approaches our table, smiling broadly. ‘So what do think of my food?’ he asks. We wonder what we can possibly say to do justice to the experience. Perhaps something like this: ‘your food is like the most perfect Big Mac ever, followed by the most exquisite McFlurry ever created.’ For all the high-flown adjectives, however, this doesn’t feel quite right. After all, we’re still using MacDonalds as our basic point of reference, while Heston’s dishes seem of a different culinary order altogether. So perhaps we could try an alternative approach: ‘your food is the absolute negation of a chicken burger; it is everything that French fries are not.’ In some ways this feels a little closer to the mark; but still inadequate – we’re not sure Heston will feel suitably affirmed.

So we plump for something different again: ‘Well, Mr Blumenthal; it was so wonderful, I feel completely lost for words.’ At which the famous chef beams happily and moves on to another table.

‘Lost for words’: in different ways, each of our readings this morning reveal something about human speech in relation to the Trinity. In Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, human speech fumbles and falters. Nicodemus comes to Jesus, asserting his conviction that Jesus must be from God, only to be told about being born ‘from above’. Understandably confused, he asks how a rebirth is possible, only for Jesus’ answer, speaking of water and Spirit and wind, to leave him more perplexed than before. Nicodemus’ existing assumptions and reference points leave him flummoxed, and for all his good intentions, he speaks in ways that reveal his lack of understanding.

The passage from Romans chapter eight contains a different kind of speech; the cry of believers who can say only, ‘Abba! Father!’ That cry does convey a rightful confidence in addressing God, but also indicates the inadequacy of human language. The eager expectation, the longing, the hope of humankind, comes to expression with the inarticulate cry of an infant. A few verses on, Paul speaks of the Spirit praying within us with ‘sighs too deep for words.’

And then there is Isaiah’s overwhelming vision of God in the temple, which fills him with a sense of his own weakness. ‘Woe is me!’ he says, ‘I am a man of unclean lips’. It is only

when his lips have been cleansed with a live coal that Isaiah is able to respond to God’s invitation: ‘Here am I; send me!’

Taken together this Trinity Sunday, along with the words of Psalm 29 about the voice of the Lord ‘dividing the flames of fire’ and ‘shaking the wilderness’, these different readings evoke the majesty and mystery of God, known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They also remind us of how human speech falters in the face of the divine; drawing on the language of Big Macs, or indeed other aspects of human experience, however many superlatives we may add, will always fall short. So too will the opposite approach of describing God in terms of what God is not. Both of these approaches have been tried by many Christians before us, and the textbooks give them names; the ‘affirmative way’, and the ‘negative way’ or via negativa: but God transcends all human language.

For Christians it is Jesus Christ himself who enables to know God, and to speak about God, and speak to God. Christ is the link between heaven and earth, for as today’s passage from John Chapter three puts it, ‘No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven.’ And in order for the Christ to make possible communication between earth and heaven, he must first be lifted up: lifted up on the cross, and then lifted up at the ascension.

And why? Because ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.’ God’s love comes first. God longs for us, and all things, to fully and joyfully participate in the divine, Trinitarian life.

Famously, or perhaps notoriously, Sigmund Freud taught that sexual desire is basic to human life; and that the notion of God was ephemeral and illusory. Contemplating God as Trinity teaches us the reverse: it is God who is basic, and the many forms of human desire remind us, however dimly, of the fundamental human longing for the One who has made us, and who seeks to bring us home to the source of life itself.

Contemplating the Trinity teaches us that desire belongs first and foremost to God, who gave his only Son so that we might have eternal life. Because we are created in God’s image, we humans also know desire: but we usually forget that longing for sexual union, or material prosperity, or the regard of others, or for power and domination, are secondary, not primary. It is not that such human desires are unimportant, or are all unworthy; simply that they are to be seen in the light of God’s desire for us, and our desire for God.

Human life is too often characterised by a misdirecting of desire, and the call to Christian discipleship is to learn to think, act, desire and see aright. This is what it means to be ‘born from above’: God desires our transformation, our flourishing; but knows also this will be a slow process, uncompleted in this life. We have to learn to see that there is more to life than our equivalent of MacDonalds, or even Heston Blumenthal’s ‘Fat Duck’. That is the point of the church, for all its faults; that is the purpose of its patterns of prayer and common life. It is here, perhaps most fully in Eucharistic worship, that God the Father gives to us his Son, in the revitalising power of the Spirit.

‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory’; ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…’. These texts speak of the nature and the desire of God, whom one day, because God has descended to us in Christ, and sent us the Spirit, we may see ‘face to face’ in heavenly glory. Who knows what the tastes and textures and aromas and sounds of heaven might be? But at least in our worship we have experienced a foretaste of what is to come, and the transformation of our desire has begun, so that when God asks us what we think of heaven, we might not be entirely ‘lost for words’. AMEN.