Heresy Bingo

This sermon was written for our Trinity Sunday service on Sunday 26th May 2024. I hope you enjoy reading it!

Eleven years ago, I sat in what was then Vicky Johnson’s office, over the road, and talked to her about the possibility of me becoming a Reader. I remember saying to her at the time that I was worried about preaching, as some of my views about God were probably heretical!

Vicky laughed and replied that someone had once told her that all good sermons had a bit of heresy in them!

Whether she believed that or just said it to make me feel a bit better at the time, it’s often brought me a bit of courage when writing sermons – it’s allowed me to say the braver thing, rather than the safer thing – and I like to think, it’s helped me to become a better preacher.

 

And – if it’s true – well, buckle up, ‘cause today’s sermon is going to be a doozy!

 

Today is Trinity Sunday. And today, brave preachers up and down the country are going to be preaching heresy – accidently, of course. The ones who play it safe will probably just avoid the topic completely; maybe preach about last night’s Dr Who, the football, or even the upcoming election instead, or, perhaps, they might just concentrate solely on the Gospel.

But today, I’m going to be brave – and remembering that there’s a fine line between being brave and being stupid – I’m going to talk about the Trinity.

 

I have preached on the Trinity before. When I did, I mused that I’d once had the idea of a game I called Heresy Bingo; where the caller read out a heresy, and if the players believed it, they could tick it off on their bingo card… I wonder how quickly it would be before the majority of us got a full house?

I’ve never been quite sure what the prize would be, though… excommunication, maybe?

 

As you might have guessed by the bingo cards in the pews, we’re playing it today! Well, sort of!

For my Trinity sermon today, I’m going to call out some heresies with a number, and if you have them on your bingo card, you can cross them off. The first person to get a line can stand up and shout out “heresy!”. There’s an actual prize and everything. We might not get that far, though!

 

Are you ready? Well, eyes down for today’s game…

 

Bingo!

 

 And, the first number is…

 

Debbie McGee, number 3!

TRITHEISM: 

OK – as today is Trinity Sunday, let’s rule out a couple of heresies straight away. Tritheism is the belief that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are three different Gods. That’s not what Christians believe. I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find many people these days who believe this, but you never know!

We believe in God as Trinity – one God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Tritheism doesn’t cut the mustard.

Ok – let’s find the next number…

 

On it’s own, number 1!

UNITARIANISM: 

This one you might have heard of. Unitarian churches exist today, and Unitarians are lovely, lovely people! Unitarianism is – if you like – the opposite of Tritheism. It espouses that God is one, which is grand. The problem is, though, that it says that God is not three. For Unitarians, Jesus was just a man – a great man, and a very holy man, but not God. Again, that is not what we believe. We believe that Jesus Christ is God, and that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

 

With those two out of the way, then, let’s look at some heresies that fit within Trinitarian belief…

The next number is…

 

One at a time, 49!

MODALISM: 

Have you ever heard the analogy that the Trinity is like water, which can exist as ice, liquid and steam? Or that the trinity is like a man who is a parent, a son to his own parents and an employee at his place of work? It’s a really common analogy, and it’s the idea that God behaves differently at different times. The one about the man in his three roles shows it clearly – I have different behaviours and activities at my work than I do when I’m parenting Isaac and Miriam, and the same again when I’m with my parents. The problem is though, if we start to think of God in this way – having a different mode for when God is the Father than for when God is Christ or when God is the Holy Spirit, we are in danger of thinking of God as having a different personality at different times – like, for example, thinking of the God of the Old Testament as angry and vengeful and, then Christ comes along later showing grace and mercy, and then – after Christ went away, the Holy Spirit came along after that. 

This is not what God is like. All three beings of the Trinity are co-equal and co-eternal. They have always existed, and always been in unity.

 

Ok – let’s find the next number…

 

Can I have some more, it’s number 34!

PARTIALISM: 

OK, so God doesn’t exist in modes. How about, then, the analogy that the Trinity is like a three-leaf clover, or even an egg, that consists of shell and yolk and egg-white? These three all exist at the same time, and make up the same being, so perhaps this is a better example?

The problem here, though, is that if I pull one of the sections off a clover leaf and give it to you, I’ve not given you a clover leaf. I’ve given you a part of a clover leaf. And if I’ve got an egg and separate it into its parts, into yolk, white and shell, I don’t have an egg any more. I’ve got parts of an egg; and – if you’ve ever seen me attempting to bake – I’ve also got a mess.

But that’s not true of the Trinity. The Father is not part of God. The Father is God. So is Jesus, and so is the Holy Spirit. The problem with Partialism is that we start to think of the beings of the Trinity as less than the whole. Or, even worse, less than each other.

But this is not God. All three beings of the Trinity are co-equal and co-eternal. All three are God and cannot be separated.

 

So, with the image of an egg fresh in our heads, let’s crack on…

 

Begotten, not Made, number 28!

ARIANISM: 

Arianism is the belief that God; in the beginning, was one being. And his first act was to make God the Son, through whom all other things were made. Later on in the service, we’ll recite the creed together. You might sometimes wonder at the wording of the creed and why we say what we say. The truth is, much of it is a reaction to heresies that have existed within the Church, including this one – that Christ was created, rather than having always existed as part of the Trinity. We’ll specifically say in our creed today that “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.”

Arianism, then, doesn’t cut it either. As I said – all three beings of the Trinity are co-equal, and co-eternal. As John says in his gospel, “in the beginning was the Word… and the Word was Christ”. Christ was not created.

OK – eyes down for our final number:

 

Stairway to Heaven, 67!

ADOPTIONISM: 

This is quite similar to Arianism, and does what it says on the tin. This is the belief that Jesus started out as fully human – but not fully divine, and that, having earned God’s favour, God then chose him and adopted him as his son, raising him to Godhood.

This is not what we believe either. God’s favour cannot be earned; instead, it is freely given to all. We are all adopted into God’s family, into which – as our creed says later – Christ was made man, not the other way around.

 

 

So, there we go. 

A whistlestop tour of Trinitarian heresies. The Church throughout its history has had the belief that it is so important that we do not fall into believing any of these that Trinity Sunday was set up to ensure we believed the right thing.

But now, I have one more heresy for you. This is one of mine.

 

None of this matters. Not really. We can never understand the Trinity; it is a mystery that our human minds cannot comprehend, so we grasp at examples, all of which are imperfect. And, as long as we remember that these examples are ‘almost, but not quite’, I don’t think they impact our relationship with God one jot.

Because that is what the Trinity is about; relationship. One God in three persons – a relationship that has existed since before the world began. Since before anything else was brought into being, there was relationship. Community.

God is – in God’s very essence – a relationship. And God wants you to be part of that too.

And if that’s the only truth you ever grasp about the Trinity, well, I think you’ve just got a Full House.

 

Amen.