Trinity
Sunday – Eucharist – 11.vi.2017
(Isaiah 40.12-17; 2
Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20)
When I consider
your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the
stars you have set in their courses,
What are mortals,
that you should be mindful of them?
mere human
beings, that you should seek them out?
These
are words from today’s Psalm - Psalm 8. Words about the majesty of God, the
enormity of his Creation. But I’m afraid that even as I read them I couldn’t
get out of my mind a song that has been taken up by the Messy Church movement:
My God
is so great, so strong and so mighty,
there's
nothing my God cannot do.
My God
is so great, so strong and so mighty,
there's
nothing my God cannot do.
The
mountains are his, the rivers are his,
the stars
are his handiwork, too.
My God
is so great, so strong and so mighty,
there's
nothing my God cannot do!
I
think it’s what is known as an ear-worm,
something you hear and then can’t stop hearing. That’s the point: the greatness of God and “nothing my God
cannot do.”
But
the Psalmist sees a problem with that. If the heavens and all that goes with
them are so great - and now we know that the universe is far greater in its
extent than anyone could have known at that time - then why should God be
bothered about us, such a small part of Creation and so petty in all our concerns?
We are mortal creatures, why should
he be mindful of us? Mere human beings, so why should he seek us out?
Isaiah
sees that to be an issue as well:
Who has measured
the waters in the hollow of his hand
and marked off
the heavens with a span,
enclosed the dust
of the earth in a measure,
and weighed the
mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?...
Even the nations
are like a drop from a bucket,
and are accounted
as dust on the scales…
All the nations
are as nothing before him;
they are
accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.
But
that’s the remarkable thing. God is so
great. We might be such a minuscule part of the sum of things that we don’t
count for anything. But the whole point of what Isaiah writes is that in fact we do. The mystery of God is
that he is so great, yet still he puts us at the centre of his concern. The
nature of God might be beyond our understanding, but it’s our limited, mortal
humanity which is of the utmost concern for God. As perfect as he is in
himself, needing nothing outside himself to sustain himself - nevertheless he
reaches out to us, poor human beings. That’s because of who he is, his very
nature - and at its simplest that is to say that “God is love…”
The grace of the
Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God,
and the communion
of the Holy Spirit
be with all of
you.
These
are the words with which St. Paul concludes his Second Letter to the Christians
at Corinth. They’re the words with which we so commonly end our prayers: “The
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy
Spirit, be with us all, evermore.” The love
of God is at the centre of our faith and our prayer. But it doesn’t end
there. It’s made known only through the grace of Jesus Christ - the way in
which and the person in whom God reaches out to the world. It’s made real by
his continuing presence with us by his Holy Spirit.
How
can you know God? How can you express
the reality of God? Rather unexpectedly,
I recently found myself having that discussion at a wedding reception - with a
philosopher. He was researching in metaphysics and epistemology and before long
we were into talking about Wittgenstein. The one thing I can remember from Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s writings is his proposition: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Or - if you can’t put it into words then you
should keep quiet. For many people, this has been taken to exclude any
religious frame of reference or talk about God. And Wittgenstein’s first
proposition is, “The world is
everything that is the case.” But he himself came to be a critic of his own
writings. And all along he had been saying simply that talk about God was not
something for the realm of philosophy.
It didn’t mean it could be excluded
as a matter of ultimate concern. He’d said as well that philosophy could not
explore ethics - but it didn’t mean
that we can live without them, and his own life showed the importance of
ethical action from the courage he had shown as a soldier to his giving up his
professorship during the Second World War to work as a hospital porter and then
a lab assistant at the RVI.
About those things of which we cannot speak we should keep silent… That
might be the philosopher’s point. And I
think Christians need to value silence more. When we come to meet God we
need to do so in stillness, able to
recognise the mystery of God. God is
not a “thing” to be talked about. God is before all things, greater than all
things: God is Being itself, and only in him do we have any being ourselves. So
much talk about God is inadequate. Talk about God when it gets wrapped up with
churchiness or personal agendas can be just superficial or glib.
But we do need to move from silence into speaking of God, because God
speaks to us. In himself God is imponderable, beyond understanding, but he
reveals himself to us - and a record of how he does that is found in the Bible.
It uses human words, so they are always going to be inadequate. But they tell
us something of God by showing how he has called a people to be his own and
revealed his love for us in Jesus - and that he doesn’t leave it there two
thousand years ago but continues to be our guide and strength through the
presence of his Holy Spirit. That’s what’s there in the final words of Jesus
recorded in St. Matthew’s Gospel:
All authority in
heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go therefore and
make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in
the name of the Father
and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit…
Jesus
himself speaks of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It’s the way his
disciples have known God. One God with one will and one purpose. He could exist
simply for himself, but such is his love that he reaches out and beyond for
love of the world he has made. You can discuss how God can be one God and at
the same time three Persons - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - and people have.
Theology, talk about God is a vital thing. But remember always that talk can
get you only so far - we need to be prepared to admit what we can’t put into
words, ready to encounter the mystery of God in silence.
To
know God is to affirm that God is love.
St. John sums up what it is to be a Christian in one sentence: “God is love,
and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.”
Can we live knowing the truth of that statement? A simple faith is going
to be demanding - and that’s true as we try to make sense of the world… as we
try to make sense of God. What we need to do is to try and make sense of both together. We make sense of them
when we know that God is love - and reveals that love in so many ways. We make
sense of our faith when we respond in love to the God who first reaches out to
us, and when we put love into action for the people around us.
David Jenkins, former Bishop of Durham, used to sum up Christian belief by
saying, “God is as he is in Jesus, and so there is hope.” When God seems
unknowable and distant, it’s Jesus
who reveals who God is. And in our on-going relationship with God it’s Jesus who is the point of reference -
it’s because of Jesus that we understand the work of the Holy Spirit. So, be
open to encounter with God. God can’t be limited by human definition - the
Spirit blows where he wills - but we can judge that encounter by reference to
Jesus, and then we will begin to know something of God.
The danger on Trinity Sunday is that we get bogged down in all the talk
about how God can be Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three Persons, yet one God,…
and the end result is to leave us with a doctrine
rather than a God who is alive and active.
None of us can ever fully understand God, still less explain how he works. But
we see him at work. What we do
reveals God to others. We may have far
to go in working out the implications of that faith, but the promise is that
God will travel with us. Do we want God as our companion on life’s journey? If
we ask ourselves this question perhaps it will help us understand more about our relationship with God - and our calling.
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