Sermon of the Month - June 2011
Trinity and Life
Introduction
Who is God? – and Who are we? These are two of the biggest questions of all. We’re not asking them superficially, but going as deep as we can. Who is God, really? What sort of a God is God? When we say we believe in God, who exactly is the God we believe in? And who are we as human beings? What does it mean to be you, truly you, really you?
And these two questions are not two, but one, in the end; two sides of the same question. Genesis 1:26-27: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over all the livestock, over all the earth, and over the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
1. Who are we?
Who are you? Who am I? We are created in the image of God.
Oh yes, someone may say, but that’s creation, that’s Genesis 1, that’s how it was in the beginning – before we messed it all up.
So let’s see what happened after the fall, after Adam and Eve, and their falling for the snake’s lie; after Cain and Abel and Cain’s falling for violent, murderous jealousy; after chaos in the heavenlies, when the ‘sons of God’ fell for the ‘daughters of men’; after Noah and the flood. After all that decline and fall of the human race, we are told God made a covenant with Noah, and in Genesis 9:6 declared: Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man: in the image of God has God made man. Even now, that is who you are, who I am. Even with all our sins, all our attempts to grab knowledge – that experience of good and experience of evil – all our jealousy, rage, violence and murder; all our sexual rivalries, lusts, rapes, bigamies and the rest; all our heaven-storming ambitions, in sum all our wickedness. After all this, we are still in the image of God. The image may be distorted, may be hard to see. But it’s there. It is truly there.
Now it’s true that God loves you. God loves me. Oh, we can be very sure we don’t deserve that love. We keep forgetting God. We keep disobeying God. We are prodigals who go off to the far-off land, and even when we come back, we slip away from time to time. We certainly don’t deserve God’s love. But like the father in that great, extraordinary parable, we see God loves us, as his children. Of course it hurts him every time we stray. But it doesn’t stop him loving us.
God loves us. But that’s not the deepest truth about us, deep, profound and beautiful as it is. God has made us in his image. That is a deeper truth. You see God also loves the chimpanzees and the giraffes. He loves all his creation. But his relation with us is different. He has made us in his image, and that is who we are. We are made not only so that God can love us, but so we can love him. We are made to love. That is a major part of what it means to be made in the image of God. And to see how that works, we need to turn to the other big question, Who is God? If we are made in God’s image, just who is the God whose image we somehow share, and what does it mean that we in the image of this God?
2. Who is God?
Just who is God? The philosophers ask this question abstractly. But Pascal was right. “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the god of the philosophers.” It’s the real God, not the God of speculation we need. And the truth about God is that we can only truly know God if God lets us. And God does let us know. He reveals himself. He lets us know who he is. He reveals himself in Jesus Christ, through the Spirit. As Christians we know God, and the only way we know God is the way he lets us know him, the way he shows himself to us. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. God was in Christ.
It goes even deeper than that. It’s not just that God shows us himself in Jesus. It’s who God is. God is Jesus; Jesus is God. It’s not that we can sort out who God is, who he really is, without looking at Jesus, and then say afterwards, Oh well, now we know who God is, we can say that Jesus is truly God. The only way God is, is as Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and the only way he reveals himself to us is as he truly is.
Who is God? God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Today is Trinity Sunday (if you hadn’t guessed). But we need to see that to say that ‘God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ is not an optional extra insight, some add-on, only for those skilled in advanced higher celestial mathematics! It is the absolute, solid rock foundation.
Who is God? God is not a lot of gods, or a remote being above all the gods, as most of the ancient and animistic religions have it. And God is not a supreme, isolated entity, distant, remote, unconnected, as the philosophers have it. He is God in relation: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is love. And you can’t be love if you don’t love. That God is love means that God loves. And what God is, he always is. He does not change like shifting shadows, as James put it. God is utterly reliable. So if God is love, he has always been love and he always will be love. Just let’s think about that word: always. Always means for ever. Not just for a very long time. According to astronomers, the Universe is a little over 13 billion years old. But to say that God is love does not mean that God has only been love for 13 billion years. He is God. He is always love. Even when there was no Universe, no space, and no time, God is still love. There may be no Universe, but God is still love. In the beginning, God said let there be light. God precedes the Universe. He is eternal. And he is the same; he is love.
So God is love even if there is no Universe, and no one in it to love. How can God be love, if there’s no Universe? Because God is already love in himself. If God were on his own, a solitary Father without any Son, grand, imposing, isolated, ineffable, impassible, unconnected, he would not love. And that how the ancient Greeks saw God. But it is not how God reveals himself to us. As Hebrews puts it, at the start: In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the Universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being. (Hebrews 1:1-3a) God has spoken to us through his Son. In him we see and know God. As John 1:14,17f. puts it. The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth... grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No-one has ever seen God, but God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known. And God made the Universe in love, because he already was love.
The great theologian Augustine of Hippo put it this way: God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is God as Lover, Beloved and Love.
God is love because he always has been and always will be. Even beyond time itself, God is love. Because he is love at the deepest level of his being. God as Father loves the Son; God as Son loves the Father; each loves the other in and through the Holy Spirit.
3. Who God is, shapes who we are and how we are
The prayer of Jesus in John 17 is very special in many ways: what it says about Jesus’ mission, his compassion, and what it indicates for us, our call to love and to spread the good news, that the world may believe. But it is special for something even more important than all that: in this prayer we are given a unique insight into Jesus’ relationship with God, how God the Son prays to God the Father. This is a prayer in relationship; it is a prayer in love; and it is a prayer within the Godhead. But this relationship shapes ours. Who God is, shapes who we are and how we are. Speaking of the disciples and not just them, but all who would believe because of them, and that includes us, in John 17:11, Jesus says: Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name – the name you gave me – so that they may be one as we are one. Isn’t that extraordinary? Jesus prays that we may have the deepest level of unity of all reality: the unity of the Father and the Son, a unity in pure love. Later, in John 17:21, he prays that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.
This means that there can be no solo Christianity, no Robinson Crusoe heroic individual Christian, and no solo churches. You can’t be following Christ unless you love. If anyone says, “I love God,” while hating his brother, he is a liar. That’s strong language, isn’t it? But it’s not my judgment: it’s 1 John 4:20. There’s no such thing as a Christian without love. We need to receive love; and we need to express love. Dare to be changed; dare to change the world – in love.
The church must reflect the Trinity. The Trinity is love. And we are called to be a people of love. Of course we might say that there are differences between us and God, and of course we would be right. The way God the Trinity is love is God’s way. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, each is distinct without being separated. But we are human beings; we are separate beings. As theologian Miroslav Volf puts it, talking of the three persons of the Trinity, “all mutually permeate one another, though in doing so they do not cease to be distinct persons.” (After Our Likeness, p.209.) But of course we are separate human beings. We do not permeate one another; we love each other, while remaining who we are. However selfless we might be and act, we do not stop being selves. And yet there is an even deeper mystery. God the Holy Spirit blows where he wills. And he chooses to blow within our lives. To accept Jesus into our lives as Lord and Saviour is to receive the Holy Spirit. God’s self lives in our lives. As Paul prayed, I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. The love of God enters our lives and grows. Of course being love, it is not force. This love grows as we express the love God has given us, the love that is God himself at work in our lives. This love is also Communion; it is another expression of koinōnia, fellowship, sharing, participation. A time to be open to God, the God of love, to be empowered to receive and share the divine love. Jesus prays we have a deeper communion: may also they be in us: we love, as we are in God (John 17:21).
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