This sermon was preached on Trinity Sunday 2026, Preached at Blackburn Cathedral, Trinity Sunday, 31 May 2026. Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Psalm 8, Matthew 28:16-20, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13

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Trinity Sunday – The Grace and the Bridge

You may be wondering, as I was this week, why is it always muggins over here who has to preach on Trinity Sunday? The other priests desert the cathedral and I’m left holding the can. It just so happens that I have preached this service for a number of years running now. And having written this sermon last night, I went to look at my back catalogue, so to speak, and noticed that the instincts tend to be the same year in, year out. So for some of you this will be revision. I pray it’s still helpful.

It is always tempting on Trinity Sunday — and I think one of the reasons why this service fills the preacher with so much dread — it is always tempting to feel that the responsibility on your shoulders is to peel back the veil of creation, point to the transcendent mystery of the Trinity, and say thus was ever so.

That is not going to be my task this morning, because I don’t think that’s where the Trinity comes from primarily. The Trinity is a reality in Christian theology because of the way Christians have prayed, because of the way Christians have worshipped, and because of the way Christians have ordered their common life together. Prayer and worship and fellowship: those things are primary. Theology is secondary.

We talk about God to one another. We pray to God. And because of who we believe God to be, we live with one another in a certain way. Those are the first things. Theology comes second. Theology is talk about God. Or to put it another way, theology is making explicit the stuff that is implicit in our life together.

That matters on Trinity Sunday in particular, because part of my job this morning is to make explicit the stuff that is always implicit in our lives with one another. And it also helps correct what I think is a common misassumption about the relationship between the church and theology. Many of us imagine there are some boffins in a back room somewhere who made a decision about God being Trinity, and then walked into the church and said, “Because we’ve decided who God is, we want you to pray like this and worship like this.” That is completely back to front — both to what actually happened in history and to the way it should be. Christians pray to the Father, through the Son, in the power of the Spirit. And theologians watched that happen and said, “Hm, I wonder what that means. I wonder how we might articulate that.” The boffins came second. The work the boffins do is secondary. The ordinary stuff of Christian life is primary.

Engineering and bridges

Let me give you an example. For some of you this will be familiar. Theology, to my mind, is analogous to engineering. And the Christian life is like walking over bridges.

Saying your prayers, getting baptised, taking communion, loving your enemy, reading the scriptures, being a disciple of Jesus: all of that is the stuff of walking back and forth over the bridge of life. Doctrine and theology is how we articulate why the bridge works, how it holds up. An engineer can look at a bridge and say, “Ah, it’s because of that beam connecting in that direction, and you need those angles here, and you need this amount of concrete there.” All of that is very helpful. But most of us are not engineers, and all of us are able to walk across bridges. Most of the time you don’t need to know the engineering in order to walk over the bridge. The bridge works, and for most of the people who ever walk across it, that’s the important thing. I can say my prayers, and I can get to the other side.

The Manhattan Bridge was one of the first suspension bridges ever built. It was built in 1909, held up by thin metal cables. Instead of using heavy iron arches, it looked like it was made out of spindles, and it was crossing a distance that was just impossible to the people of those days. When it was first built, New Yorkers refused to use it. They had to be convinced that it would hold their weight. They didn’t believe it would. Engineering is particularly helpful when you’ve lost confidence that the bridge will hold your weight, or when you need to build a bridge in a new context of some sort or the other. The engineer can address the people and say, “This is why the bridge works. You can trust the bridge.”

As with engineering, so theology. The discipline of theology is making explicit the rules that hold up the stuff of ordinary Christian life — most of which we do without really thinking about it. And, as I’d like to suggest, theology can be particularly helpful when, for some reason, the Christian life is in crisis. You can return to theology to reassure yourself that this stuff does actually work, and articulate why.

That’s a lot of introduction. Let’s make it applicable. I’m going to give two examples: the Grace, and our prayer life.

The Grace

We turn to 2 Corinthians, and the prayer Paul prays at the end of that letter. Both 1 and 2 Corinthians are hard letters. Paul is having to address a church that is behaving extremely badly, a church that does not trust him or believe in his ministry. So he does a lot of offensive and defensive work in those letters — telling them off for the ways they’re behaving, defending his own ministry and apostleship, explaining why he’s done what he’s done.

You may not be aware, but the different letters Paul writes to different churches in the ancient world each have a different flavour. Some of them are so sweet and lovely, and Paul is so pleased with the people he’s writing to, and he’s got a good relationship with them. Corinthians is not like that. It is a bruising set of letters. And after chapters and chapters and chapters of conflict, Paul finishes with the Grace:

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.

It’s a prayer I think is probably familiar to many of us. We often say it at the end of our meetings with one another. You can say it with your eyes closed; you know it so well it trips off the tongue. Maybe you’ve forgotten, or you’ve not heard it for a while — those formulations afresh: that our communities are based on the grace of Jesus Christ; that they are founded on the love of God; that they are held together by a fellowship that goes beyond blood or water, a fellowship held in the Spirit who lives in you and lives in me and binds us together.

Paul describes that as a prayer because he says: you and I are participating, in our communal life, in the very heart of God — the Trinitarian heart of God. This is years before Tertullian came up with the Latin word trinitas, or the Council of Nicaea described our faith in a particular way. At the end of these bruising letters of conflict, Paul says: Friends, remember the foundation on which we live together. It’s the grace of Christ. It’s the love of God. It’s the fellowship of the Spirit.

That’s the Grace. What about prayer?

Prayer

C.S. Lewis has a wonderful description of prayer in his book Mere Christianity, which I’d like to read for you in full. I’ll just say beforehand: Lewis was a man of a previous century, and old school at that, so this has an old-world language feel to it, but I think it’s still worth reading as it was originally written.

An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian, he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. And he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God — that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him.

God is the thing to which he is praying — the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on — the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal.

So that the threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up and pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself.

(C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book IV, Chapter 2: “The Three-Personal God”.)

Prayer. Ordinary prayer is you participating in the very life of God. The Holy Spirit inside you, motivating you to pray. Christ standing next to you, leading you towards the Father. Your prayers being directed to the Father in his transcendence.

In a sense, there is no ordinary prayer if that’s what prayer really is.

When the bridge feels shaky

So here’s the question. What do we do when we’re feeling a bit shaky on the bridge? What do we do when we’re not quite convinced that the Grace and the prayers we pray are effective in any way at all?

I don’t want to press this point too hard. But how do we respond in a community that has been at conflict for many, many months — well over a year? Do you find yourself thinking, “I’m not sure if church even works any more. I don’t know how church is supposed to work. The whole thing feels a little bit shaky for me right now”?

Or, talking about prayer: do you ever feel like your prayers are just bouncing off the ceiling?

I do most of my prayer life in the chapel at the east end of the cathedral — the Jesus Chapel. I’m there for morning and evening prayer almost every day of the week. Most of the time it’s me and a virger. Often we’re joined by members of the congregation, or members of the public, or people passing through. Sometimes the prayer just feels effervescent: I find myself perfectly in communion with Christ, I know the things I need to say, and it’s great. And sometimes my prayer life is boring, and I sit there and I think, Is this really worth an hour of my day, every day — half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening, when I have such incredible pressures on my time? I sit there and I don’t know what to say. I sit there on my own and I think, Does anyone really care? I wonder if you’ve ever felt like that. I hope I’m not — I know I’m not — the only one. I hope I’m not the only one.

What do we do when the bridge feels shaky and we’re not quite sure if it’s going to hold our weight?

Friends, Trinity Sunday is the day to reflect on the engineering that holds the bridge up. To say: the Father and the Son and the Spirit, in perfect communion with one another, enfold us in their pattern of life, so that we might participate in the very Godhead of the Trinity. So that even when we’re in conflict with one another, I get to share the Grace with you. Even when we’re fighting and we cannot agree, I get to share the peace of Jesus with you. Even when my prayers feel empty and I’m bored and tired, I can remind myself that I am being enfolded in the Godhead: Christ beside me, the Spirit within me, praying to the Father.

Closing

I wonder — and this I say in closing — I wonder if you have ever stood and marvelled at a suspension bridge. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of being on the shoreline of Manhattan Island and looking up at the Manhattan Bridge, just marvelling at the wonder of it. For me personally, that’s why I like doing theology — because I think this stuff is marvellous. I love to look and just glory at this thing that can be described and explained — the mysteries of God communicated as clearly as we possibly can — and I get to see intimately how it works and how it holds up the Christian life.

But maybe that’s not for you. What is Trinity Sunday for you this morning? Maybe it’s a reassurance that the Grace really does work. That your prayers really do matter. That as we baptise Christians, as we live our lives together, we are enfolded in something that goes beyond us and which we’ll never understand — but we have the joy of walking over that bridge called the Christian life, time and again.

So in closing, if you’ll join me, shall we say the Grace together?

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all evermore. Amen.

#trinity #grace #prayer #c-s-lewis #cathedral