It’s Trinity Sunday which means we celebrate God’s triune nature. What does this mean for us? That would be the question Martin Luther would ask. So, I give to you two quotes often attributed to Luther.

“To deny the Trinity is to risk our salvation. To try to explain the Trinity is to risk our sanity.”

‘Risk’ is a dirty word these days so I think this Sunday I will make sure we will avoid any risk to your salvation, or your sanity! (It’s just not worth the paperwork!) Instead, we might go in a different direction. Luther also said, “Of what help is it to you that God is God, if he is not God to you?” Perhaps that is the question for Trinity Sunday, anyway.

This is a page from a 600 year old document known as the Voynich Manuscript. For centuries it has fascinated scholars mainly because no one has the faintest idea of what it says! It may well contain the greatest wisdom ever written but if no one can understand what it says it simply becomes a historical curiosity.

This Sunday we celebrate the 1,992nd birthday of the church (give or take a couple of years). Let us pray that the church never becomes a historical curiosity.

A headline in an online newspaper this week: ‘Aussie sacked and replaced by AI’.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the hot topic these days as pundits debate possibilities from doomsday predictions to a scenario where an AI is tasked with procuring you a reservation to a popular restaurant and ends up shutting down all the mobile phone networks and traffic lights in order to prevent other patrons from getting a table!

More measured voices point out the risk of AI is less apocalyptic and more philosophical (and, I would argue, theological) with AI altering the way people view themselves and degrading abilities and experiences that people consider essential to be human. One writer suggests ‘AI is good at accomplishing goals but dangerous because it won’t necessarily align with the moral values of its creators’. Does that sound familiar? Hasn’t it always been this way and AI is just another iteration of a perennial issue: In trying to be more than human (in trying to be god-like) we make ourselves less than human.

How different God’s way is from ours! God’s way is to be human; to give up what we regard as power and prestige and control and become human, with all its limitations! And, surely that’s what God wants for us too: for us to be content to be human, for us to find joy in being human, for us to discover, even, what it is to be human.