Truth in the Grey

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” I come to you this morning with a confession. As a child, I used to lie about cleaning my teeth. Mum would ask if I had brushed them, and I would say yes… Sometimes I would even go to the effort of rubbing toothpaste on my gums so that my breath would smell clean. Looking back I really may as well have actually brushed my teeth, but it didn’t seem that way then.

I was generally a well behaved child, and tended to be believed rather than questioned, but I do remember being caught in the lie a couple of times. And of course, my parents explained to me the importance of telling the truth, and that lying was bad.

When you’re seven, truth seems pretty easily definable. ‘Have you brushed your teeth?’ Yes, or no? But as an adult it turns out that it isn’t always so easy to draw the lines.

In the conservative Baptist church I was brought up in, I remember a distinct sense of feeling a bit sorry for all the other poor Christians who didn’t quite believe the right things. Other churches and denominations had somehow misinterpreted or missed out on part of the truth, and it was even questionable if many of them were real Christians at all.

But as I got older, the black and white began to merge into grey. It seemed you could find different truths in different places, and still have integrity, still have a deep faith, still be a faithful and admirable person.

Then if you take just the most cursory glance over the history of the Church, and the development of theological doctrines, you find an absolute mess of declarations, condemnations, people being persecuted, thrown out of church or society, and even killed, for having a different idea of what the truth might be. The question ‘what is truth?’ is not a new one, and the history of our faith is not pretty at all.

But, somehow, there are beliefs we have collectively arrived at. There are fundamentals of our faith which we hold to be true, whether literally or metaphorically. And one of these is so integral to Christianity that it gets its own feast day - the only feast day dedicated to a theological doctrine, rather than a person or event. And so, every year, clergy throughout the world get to wrestle with the conundrum of having to preach on something which is essentially indescribable. Welcome to Trinity Sunday!

Now here’s a fun fact: the word “Trinity” doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible. Trinitarian theology emerged from the early Church’s deep wrestling with the mystery of God’s nature, as revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, in knowing the God of Israel as Creator, and in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit - the very breath of God, coming in wind and fire at Pentecost. These different experiences of God naturally led to the question: if God and Jesus and the Spirit are divine, how does that hold with a belief in one God? How can God be one and three? Not three gods, not one God wearing three masks, but three in one Being.

The short answer is that it is a mystery. But it is a mystery which is the bedrock of what we believe and how we experience God. Jesus doesn’t give us details - just like so many other things where we may wish he had given some nice explicit teaching - but he is pretty clear about being one with the Father, and that the promised Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter, was also of God. ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth’, says Jesus.

So I wonder how you discern what truth is. It feels like it used to be simpler, whereas now we have to wade through a river of competing narratives. To find the ‘truth’, or to even agree on what ‘truth’ is, seems like an insurmountable barrier standing between any two people with a differing political, ideological, social or religious perspective.

But Trinity Sunday can offer us hope. It took prayer, scripture, heresies, councils, community debate, and Spirit-led discernment to arrive at what we now call the doctrine of the Trinity: our belief in God who is an eternally relational, eternally loving communion of persons. And that long process of discernment that the church had to go through is itself deeply Trinitarian: the Father speaking the Word, the Word made flesh, and the Spirit guiding us into truth.

Truth, in other words, is not a simple, or static ‘thing’ to be found. It unfolds. It requires listening, to one another and to God. And God is not finished speaking. In the midst of division and confusion, anger and pain, isn’t that something wonderfully hopeful? God is continually working in us, through the Spirit, to lead us into truth. Not all at once. But as a process of holy discovery. It is found in prayer, in scripture, in community, and—above all—in love.

That’s good news in a world where truth can feel elusive, manipulated, or polarizing. We may want certainty, to know that we are right, even at the cost of others being wrong. But God offers us something better, which is relationship. The Trinity reminds us that God is never alone. And neither are we. We walk this path with the guidance of the Spirit, and we walk it with each other.

The doctrine of the Trinity didn’t appear as a tidy solution, but as the Church’s faithful attempt to describe the encountered God - Creator, Son, and Spirit - within the confines of human language and comprehension. Not an all encompassing explanation of God, but a testament to God’s diverse ways of being present with us.

So that’s the invitation of Trinity Sunday—not just to believe in a mystery, but to live in its hope. Because the Spirit of truth is not a one-time revelation, but an ongoing companion. Jesus doesn’t promise that we’ll have all the answers, or that it will be easy, but that the Spirit will guide us into truth. Not perfectly. Not instantly. But faithfully.

And so we go out with confidence in the One who walks with us. To live in the image of the Trinity is to stay open. To seek wisdom. To listen well. And to trust that God is still speaking—not to shame or divide us, but to draw us into deeper communion. To discern the truth requires us to keep our ears and hearts open, to be willing to listen when we disagree, to seek where the Spirit might be found even in the grey spaces. “When the Spirit of truth comes,” says Jesus, “he will guide you into all the truth.”

So may we keep listening, keep walking, and keep being open to being guided. For in this way we are shaped by the God who is Trinity: relationship, truth, and love.

Amen.

John 16:12-15