TRINITY SUNDAY  Guilsborough,  June 2008
It’s Trinity Sunday again, a bit of a watershed in our Christian year. After the tongues of fire, and the exotica and inspiration of Pentecost, one could say that we are now moving into calmer waters, that long period of 25 Sundays after Trinity leading us to Advent and Christmas. 
When I think of this Sunday, celebrating the glory of what our Collect to-day calls the “eternal Trinity”, I remember that amazing piece of English prose the Athanasian Creed.   And, not too irreverently I hope, recall Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, a diplomat whose double barrels still resonates exotically, if dimly, through the footnotes of history in the first half of the twentieth century. 
Among those who study such footnotes – and I confess that there are not many of  us – he is known for three things.   First, he was the man who when British Ambassador to Turkey in the Second World War, where his job was to keep Turkey out of it, left his keys lying around and,. as a consequence, his safe was burgled by his butler, an indefatigable German spy with the codename Cicero.   Fortunately the Germans did not believe most of Cicero showed them in the papers he had purloined, about preparations for D Day among other things.  And for his pains they paid him in forged currency.  
Second, with this security breach still undiscovered,  Knatchbull- Hugessen moved sideways as Ambassador to Belgium in 1944.  Not having an official residence, he bought himself, one assumes on the cheap in war torn Belgium, a delightful eighteenth century town house, once inhabited by Napoleon’s sister, with virtually all of its contemporary furniture intact, and on retirement offered it to sell it the nation.
You won’t be surprised to know that at first the parsimonious Treasury turned him down. But wiser counsels eventually prevailed and to day the grateful taxpayers own this wonderful house, the official residence of our Ambassadors to the European Union. 
Which, thirdly, by a somewhat roundabout route, brings me to Trinity Sunday, and the splendid parody of the Athanasian Creed that Knatchbull-Hugessen wrote in the 1920s when serving as Minister to the three, newly created, Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuanian and Estonia.  
The Athanasian Creed, with its Latin subtitle of Quicunque Vult, was in days gone by, sung or said on Trinity Sunday in place of the Apostles creed….  [Read extract] 
And so it goes on for 44, to me as a schoolboy,  somewhat confusing, verses concluding with a warning, albeit not a popular one in our own touchy feely age:   
 “They that have done good shall go into life everlasting and they that have done evil into the everlasting fire.  This is the catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved.” 
The K-H version began:  “ Whosoever will be saved before all things it is necessary that he hold the Baltic Post…..
And the Baltic Post is this, that we have one minister in three capitals and three capitals in one Minister.
You get the drift.  
And he ends “So there is one Minister, not three Ministers; one salary, not three salaries; no secretary not even one Secretary…
Such is the Baltic post – although any reasonable man will find it hard to believe faithfully.”
 
The whole concept of a so-called Triune God of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is not easy for us lay people to grasp.  Indeed, the Athanasian Creed itself speaks of  “ the Father incomprehensible,  the Son incomprehensible and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.  The Father eternal, the Son eternal and the Holy Spirit eternal and yet they are not three eternals but one eternal. “  -  a bit baffling. 
However, I find when the going get tough in the Book of Common Prayer, that the Catechism – another rather neglected part of it  – is always helpful.  In the section headed Articles of Belief which includes the Apostles’ Creed, the question is posed: 
“ What does thou chiefly learn in the Articles of thy Belief? “ 
And the answer comes: 
“ I learn to believe in God the Father, who hath made me and all the world; Secondly in God the Son, who hath redeemed me and all mankind; Thirdly, in God the Holy Ghost, who sanctifieth me, and all the elect people of God. “ 
That to my mind is a good deal simpler explanation than the contortions of the Athan Athanasian Creed   Because as a Christians the fact that God made the world is our first and most fundamental belief. In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth….”.  Then through the teachings of Jesus we know that God loves us and has a plan for our lives.  He wants us to perform, to live our lives according to his word.  To be inspired by it. 
I think of God’s plan whenever I say the prayer in the Communion Service asking God  “so to assist us with thy grace that we may do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in. “  
But to work to the Godly plan we need to get in touch with God.   And we do that through prayer.  As I think CS Lewis puts it, what prompts us to pray is also God, that is to say God inside us.  
Now for the second pillar of the Trinity: 
What we know about God in the New Testament comes from His Son – the Man who was God and who stands with God. He helps us to pray - taught us to pray – and intercedes for us with God the Father.  
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 and fill them with celestial fire………….” 
Last Sunday, Pentecost, was the occasion to consider the place of inspiration in our lives.  That inspiration, I would like to think, comes from the Holy Spirit.  Certainly almost all that is good about our history came from inspiration, from the will of individuals to change the world around them: William Wilberforce, William Booth, Robert Baden-Powell, Florence Nightingale and other British born founders of world wide movements.  Lives of great men all remind we can make our lives sublime and in passing leave behind us footprints in the sands of time. “    
Trinity Sunday is then the opportunity to reflect on these three basic pillars of Christian belief and to pray that God 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. 
