On the principle of "Better Late Than Never", here is last week's sermon!
"and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, "Know the Lord" for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them" saith the Lord."
Or, as Isaiah put it, "And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children."
Our personal, immediate communication with God is constantly stressed in the Scriptures. We are, certainly, to be guided by church leaders and official pronouncements (or Moses if we happen to be children of Israel) but ultimately we are in life, as in death,alone with God; it is a a question not of acting according to the church’s rules, not of having the correct belief about the exact nature of the Trinity, but of knowing God, the personal God, whoever, however or whatever you understand him or her to be; it is clear that our God is a God who does communicate with each of us.
Jesus, picking up the words of Isaiah, responded thus to the people who were wanting doctrinal definitions from him about the Bread from heaven: “No man can come to me, except the Father, which hath sent me draw him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh to me.”
And this learning does not even need to involve a conscious relationship with the church. Paul, who knew what he was talking about when it came to direct communication with God, put it very strongly: “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves”.
So what am I doing standing up here, then? You may well come to a conclusion about that during the next ten minutes or so.
Almost from the beginning of Christianity there has been some disagreement about the source of our knowledge about God and how he wishes us to live our lives. To oversimplify the position as it is now and has been since the Reformation: Protestants claim that Scripture alone is the source, Roman Catholics would add Tradition - that is, the teaching of the Magisterium of the church (let’s say “the Vatican”) - and Anglicans, which includes us Episcopalians, would add Reason. Scripture, Tradition and Reason, are the "three-legged stool" upon which faith rests.
This so-called "three-legged stool" probably originates with the work by Richard Hooker, an Anglican divine of the reign of Elizabeth I in his work "The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity". He never used the phrase, but the concept is clearly there.
However, it must not be misunderstood. One of the beauties of the Anglican part of the church - in theory at least - is its inclusiveness, its refusal to over-define, its openness to people as they actually are. Yes, certainly. But if we accept Hooker's understanding of the source of our faith, we should do him the courtesy of listening to what he actually said. Which was this: "What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due; That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgements whatsoever"
"What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due". Sometimes - I would even say usually - it is perfectly clear what Scripture is saying. But sometimes is it is not, and then we have the choice between taking another’s word for it, or struggling to understand for ourselves. The Roman church, and possibly most Anglicans, would assume that using our own judgement comes last; but that is not the original Anglican tradition, and it is not the belief of Hooker: “the next is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth.”
Can we really decide for ourselves what a particular passage of scripture means? Yes, I think we can (and must?).
The Roman church, when pronouncing on an area of doctrine, may give three broad judgements: This is what you should hold; this is something you should not hold; or: This is the safe position to hold. I really like the thinking behind this third possibility. In this case, you are told you are free to think differently if your reason and your understanding of the scriptures leads you so to do, but if you wish to be safe, then you know what the "safe" belief is.
In fact, I think my appreciation of this Roman Catholic concept has helped me to understand, and appreciate, what some see as "Anglican woolliness". We have the choice, I believe, to accept the "safe" way. Some people may choose that all the time; probably all of us choose it some of the time, or on some subjects; it would be arrogant to think that one person has such acuity and is so close to God that they could, in Kierkegaard's phrase, "float above five hundred fathoms" unaided at all times. And we must not look down on those who do choose the safe way, the way of seeking out and accepting without question whatever the church teaches.
But we also have the choice, where it cannot be said that "Scripture doth plainly deliver" - and only there! - to try to make out "what we can necessarily conclude by force of reason". We shouldn’t forget that the Psalm calls God “Deus scientiarum Dominus”, a phrase taken up as a motto by Cambridge university.
But God is more than the God of intellectual knowledge. Some have spoken of a “four-legged stool” which adds experience to Scripture, Tradition and Reason. As someone said, "I would rather feel contrition than be able to define it". Now this does not mean ”feeling” as in “if I feel it is so, it is.” It is best expressed by Melanchthon's equally famous phrase "this it is to know Christ - to receive his benefits - not to contemplate his natures, or the modes of his incarnation".
Of course, we need to do both; and the Scriptures are there for us to interpret, and god is there for us to know.
So what AM I doing standing up here, if God speaks to all of us through Scripture, reason and experience? Why have I got a special right to instruct any of you? I don’t think it is a question of right to instruct. I think I am here to do a bit of encouraging. To say “Do not be afraid”.
Our God is not a God who lies in wait for us to put a foot wrong. He is not even a God who stands and cheers us on from the sidelines. he is a God who is with us ever inch of the way: the safe way and the risky way; the joyful way, the sorrowful way, and ultimately the glorious way, for he has walked them before us. A God who said “I am with you in tribulation” and “Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I have called you by your name; you are mine.”
So let us pray: “O you who are the source of our faith, Christ our God, you have fulfilled th law and the Prophets in their entirety. Fill our heart with love and our minds with understanding each time we take your holy Scripture in our hands; you who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever. Amen.”
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Per ducatum Evangelii pergamus itinera Christi
2 August 2009
2 Samuel 11:26-12:13; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35
Kierkegaard said: “Far be it from us to endeavour to win human admiration by fathoming what is not to be fathomed; we do not believe that he came to this earth to propose for us themes for a learned investigation. But He came to this earth to prescribe the task, to leave behind Him a footprint, so that we might learn from Him.” Elsewhere he remarked that, rather than agonising over the parts of the Bible we do not understand, or even abandoning our faith because of them, we would do better to take in the parts we do understand, and live by them. If we really try to do that, he suggested, we probably wouldn’t have time to worry about the rest.
Christianity, living according to the will and law of God, is dead simple. Sometimes, in my more unconventional moments, I suspect it may even be dead easy, once you really get stuck in. Momentum doesn’t only work for the devil; it’s perfectly true that one sin leads to another (just look at David) and that once we get on to the slippery slope of vice it is difficult to turn and climb back up, and so forth. but, as someone said, the best way to pray is to pray. Praying is not easy, not for anyone, unless they are really experienced, and perhaps not even then, unless they have been given the grace of discovering “their” way of prayer. But once you actually start doing it, it does become easier. You are carried by the momentum. The same applies to virtuous actions; and the simpler both the prayer and the action is, the better.
We have an awful tendency to mock the Jewish Law, especially as it became in the Pharisaic and Rabbinic periods. Hedges round the Torah, hedges round the hedges. But we would do well to glance at our own faith. Now, I do not deny the necessity of law. Jesus gave us a law, and a very clear one: and if we do not keep that law we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. The simpler the law, the more binding – if not in theory, certainly in practice. Paul himself said that neither his generation nor their fathers had been able to keep the Jewish Law, and we have gone a long way towards making the Christian law equally impossible (and might I say undesirable) to keep. The church over the millennia, through, I believe, the same laudable desire to be certain about God’s will as the Jews had, has built up a vast structure of details, commandments big and small, sub-clauses of sub-clauses, full of ifs and buts and at the very same time extreme precision – I think that if everything seems to be collapsing around our ears, if our own part of the church appears to be tearing itself apart, it is because we have sowed the wind and we are now reaping the whirlwind.
Paradoxically, it is a minimalist attitude that leads to this mind-breaking (and soul-destroying) maximalism. It is the minimalist attitude that needs to know who my neighbour is (or rather, who he isn’t) and how little I need to do for him and still squeeze into heaven; and that same attitude, therefore, which leads to the details, the hedges, the ifs and buts. And still more paradoxically it is the minimalist attitude which leads to the need for domination and laying down of rigid rules. if I can’t get away with this, neither shall you; I want to do this but I am not allowed to, so neither shall you; if I have to do this, then you shall do it too. At which point I quote, yet again, Father Faber’s “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea”. Jesus, who is God, was as un-minimalist, un-hedged-about and as free from both ifs and buts and sweeping rigidity as we are the opposite. “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
We are full of the wrong kind of fear: a fear of the consequences, a fear of inconvenience, a fear of discomfort; a fear that “God might be cross with us” as if he were an unreasonable and unpredictable parent; an insecurity; a human respect. Like Kierkegaard, I am preaching primarily to myself. We are too afraid to dare to be wrong, and too insecure to bear seeing another exercising the freedom which both attracts and frightens us. We have been held back by minimalism, by suspicion and by insecurity for too long; we are trying to break out of a painful situation, but we are going about it in the wrong way. It is as if we said “These rules as to who is my neighbour and what I must do for him are absurd and constraining. Therefore I will cast aside the very concept of “neighbour” and “charity” and be free from such shackles.” They are indeed absurd and constraining. indeed we should not be shackled; but we will only unshackle ourselves as God wishes it by going in precisely the opposite direction. Yes, this is the Edinburgh-Perth road. But to get to Perth, you don’t only have to be travelling on this road, you have to be travelling in the right direction. When theory becomes crushing and maze-like, when law turns into a great heap of tangled details and all sense of proportion and hierarchy of values is lost, the answer is not to chuck all theory and all law. The answer is to go back, to discover the foundations of the theory and the law, the point at which they are as clear and unmistakable as a signpost to Perth.
It is true that not everything is in the Gospel, or not explicitly so. When dealing with situations which are not explicitly there, one may respond in one of two ways. The first is the one which the church has adopted up to now and when I say the church I am starting with Moses, if not Abraham. It is to start to build up, or build up again, a huge structure of laws, each logically or not so logically deduced from previous ones. It does feel safer, I admit, and it is probably easier. But the other, which has not been tried except in very circumscribed areas – yes, even by the Anglican communion – could be simply to say “We don’t know” and leave it to private judgement. This is really scary to the average Christian (even to the congregation of St John’s) but it seems to me to be far more in tune with the Gospel itself. There are passages in the Gospel which are beyond us; but we have got to deal with that. It is not a disaster. There are situations for which the Gospel does not even give us guidelines. I think we have got to deal with that too. There is so much in the Gospel that we can understand, so much that we can carry out. The word is very near to us, in our mouth and in our heart that we may keep it. We do not need to cross the sea or climb mountains to find it. We do not even have to climb up to heaven to fetch it down: it has already come down to us. AN Whitehead complained that “the brief Galilean vision of humility flickered through the ages uncertainly…but the deep idolatry of fashioning God in the image of Egyptian, Persian and Roman rulers was retained. The church gave unto God attributes that belonged exclusively unto Caesar”. God is not a dominating God. God is a God whose truth gives freedom. When St Mechtild asked God what was most pleasing about St Gertrude, God replied “Her freedom of heart”. That sounds like a bad joke in the context of the church as institution, but it is true. It is only human beings who need to dominate and to hedge things about.
Could we perhaps try to walk in the direction of the sometimes wild-sounding indications Jesus has given us or, better still, follow in his footsteps? And maybe worry a little less when we can’t see them and the path is not quite clear? It may well be that in the area where we are walking just now there is no one correct path. If we are following his general direction we will come out automatically in the right place and find the footprints again.
Of course, this can be carried too far. The following suggestion by Dermot A Lane could be dangerous if taken maliciously. But perhaps some of us could try to use it benignly and see what happens:
“The need to move beyond a modern mechanical perception of the world towards some form of post-modern, inclusive, progressive paradigm is receiving growing acceptance among scientists and theologians alike. The issue facing humanity is to move from theory to praxis, from an instrumental rationality to a liberating wisdom, from an ethic of domination to a new ethic of social and ecological solidarity.”
Well, I mightn’t have put it quite like that. But when I unpack it it seems to say exactly what I mean. God, and so the things of God, is too big to be contained in one way of looking at things, and too simple to be codified. The essentials do not change, and changing world-views do not make them change. All truth speaks truly of God, since it comes from God. We could do with being a lot less afraid, and we would be a lot less vulnerable to the devil and his angels and a lot more supple in the hands of God. Per ducatum Evangelii pergamus itinera Christi!
2 Samuel 11:26-12:13; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35
Kierkegaard said: “Far be it from us to endeavour to win human admiration by fathoming what is not to be fathomed; we do not believe that he came to this earth to propose for us themes for a learned investigation. But He came to this earth to prescribe the task, to leave behind Him a footprint, so that we might learn from Him.” Elsewhere he remarked that, rather than agonising over the parts of the Bible we do not understand, or even abandoning our faith because of them, we would do better to take in the parts we do understand, and live by them. If we really try to do that, he suggested, we probably wouldn’t have time to worry about the rest.
Christianity, living according to the will and law of God, is dead simple. Sometimes, in my more unconventional moments, I suspect it may even be dead easy, once you really get stuck in. Momentum doesn’t only work for the devil; it’s perfectly true that one sin leads to another (just look at David) and that once we get on to the slippery slope of vice it is difficult to turn and climb back up, and so forth. but, as someone said, the best way to pray is to pray. Praying is not easy, not for anyone, unless they are really experienced, and perhaps not even then, unless they have been given the grace of discovering “their” way of prayer. But once you actually start doing it, it does become easier. You are carried by the momentum. The same applies to virtuous actions; and the simpler both the prayer and the action is, the better.
We have an awful tendency to mock the Jewish Law, especially as it became in the Pharisaic and Rabbinic periods. Hedges round the Torah, hedges round the hedges. But we would do well to glance at our own faith. Now, I do not deny the necessity of law. Jesus gave us a law, and a very clear one: and if we do not keep that law we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. The simpler the law, the more binding – if not in theory, certainly in practice. Paul himself said that neither his generation nor their fathers had been able to keep the Jewish Law, and we have gone a long way towards making the Christian law equally impossible (and might I say undesirable) to keep. The church over the millennia, through, I believe, the same laudable desire to be certain about God’s will as the Jews had, has built up a vast structure of details, commandments big and small, sub-clauses of sub-clauses, full of ifs and buts and at the very same time extreme precision – I think that if everything seems to be collapsing around our ears, if our own part of the church appears to be tearing itself apart, it is because we have sowed the wind and we are now reaping the whirlwind.
Paradoxically, it is a minimalist attitude that leads to this mind-breaking (and soul-destroying) maximalism. It is the minimalist attitude that needs to know who my neighbour is (or rather, who he isn’t) and how little I need to do for him and still squeeze into heaven; and that same attitude, therefore, which leads to the details, the hedges, the ifs and buts. And still more paradoxically it is the minimalist attitude which leads to the need for domination and laying down of rigid rules. if I can’t get away with this, neither shall you; I want to do this but I am not allowed to, so neither shall you; if I have to do this, then you shall do it too. At which point I quote, yet again, Father Faber’s “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea”. Jesus, who is God, was as un-minimalist, un-hedged-about and as free from both ifs and buts and sweeping rigidity as we are the opposite. “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
We are full of the wrong kind of fear: a fear of the consequences, a fear of inconvenience, a fear of discomfort; a fear that “God might be cross with us” as if he were an unreasonable and unpredictable parent; an insecurity; a human respect. Like Kierkegaard, I am preaching primarily to myself. We are too afraid to dare to be wrong, and too insecure to bear seeing another exercising the freedom which both attracts and frightens us. We have been held back by minimalism, by suspicion and by insecurity for too long; we are trying to break out of a painful situation, but we are going about it in the wrong way. It is as if we said “These rules as to who is my neighbour and what I must do for him are absurd and constraining. Therefore I will cast aside the very concept of “neighbour” and “charity” and be free from such shackles.” They are indeed absurd and constraining. indeed we should not be shackled; but we will only unshackle ourselves as God wishes it by going in precisely the opposite direction. Yes, this is the Edinburgh-Perth road. But to get to Perth, you don’t only have to be travelling on this road, you have to be travelling in the right direction. When theory becomes crushing and maze-like, when law turns into a great heap of tangled details and all sense of proportion and hierarchy of values is lost, the answer is not to chuck all theory and all law. The answer is to go back, to discover the foundations of the theory and the law, the point at which they are as clear and unmistakable as a signpost to Perth.
It is true that not everything is in the Gospel, or not explicitly so. When dealing with situations which are not explicitly there, one may respond in one of two ways. The first is the one which the church has adopted up to now and when I say the church I am starting with Moses, if not Abraham. It is to start to build up, or build up again, a huge structure of laws, each logically or not so logically deduced from previous ones. It does feel safer, I admit, and it is probably easier. But the other, which has not been tried except in very circumscribed areas – yes, even by the Anglican communion – could be simply to say “We don’t know” and leave it to private judgement. This is really scary to the average Christian (even to the congregation of St John’s) but it seems to me to be far more in tune with the Gospel itself. There are passages in the Gospel which are beyond us; but we have got to deal with that. It is not a disaster. There are situations for which the Gospel does not even give us guidelines. I think we have got to deal with that too. There is so much in the Gospel that we can understand, so much that we can carry out. The word is very near to us, in our mouth and in our heart that we may keep it. We do not need to cross the sea or climb mountains to find it. We do not even have to climb up to heaven to fetch it down: it has already come down to us. AN Whitehead complained that “the brief Galilean vision of humility flickered through the ages uncertainly…but the deep idolatry of fashioning God in the image of Egyptian, Persian and Roman rulers was retained. The church gave unto God attributes that belonged exclusively unto Caesar”. God is not a dominating God. God is a God whose truth gives freedom. When St Mechtild asked God what was most pleasing about St Gertrude, God replied “Her freedom of heart”. That sounds like a bad joke in the context of the church as institution, but it is true. It is only human beings who need to dominate and to hedge things about.
Could we perhaps try to walk in the direction of the sometimes wild-sounding indications Jesus has given us or, better still, follow in his footsteps? And maybe worry a little less when we can’t see them and the path is not quite clear? It may well be that in the area where we are walking just now there is no one correct path. If we are following his general direction we will come out automatically in the right place and find the footprints again.
Of course, this can be carried too far. The following suggestion by Dermot A Lane could be dangerous if taken maliciously. But perhaps some of us could try to use it benignly and see what happens:
“The need to move beyond a modern mechanical perception of the world towards some form of post-modern, inclusive, progressive paradigm is receiving growing acceptance among scientists and theologians alike. The issue facing humanity is to move from theory to praxis, from an instrumental rationality to a liberating wisdom, from an ethic of domination to a new ethic of social and ecological solidarity.”
Well, I mightn’t have put it quite like that. But when I unpack it it seems to say exactly what I mean. God, and so the things of God, is too big to be contained in one way of looking at things, and too simple to be codified. The essentials do not change, and changing world-views do not make them change. All truth speaks truly of God, since it comes from God. We could do with being a lot less afraid, and we would be a lot less vulnerable to the devil and his angels and a lot more supple in the hands of God. Per ducatum Evangelii pergamus itinera Christi!
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Gone Fishing
Back, with luck and a fair wind, at the end of July. There may (if you are lucky) be a sermon for the feast of St Benedict.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Salvum me fac Deus quoniam intraverunt aquae usque ad animam meam
I recently heard someone say, as if it were a given, that, had we not had the letter to Philemon (in which Paul pleads the case of Onesimus, Philemon’s slave and Paul’s convert) we would never have known that he had a softer, more human – more Christlike – side. This rather shook me.
Paul is unpopular – I wanted to say “nowadays”, but I get the impression that he has been unpopular ever since I remember, and no doubt earlier than that. The reasons that are generally given are (a) that Paul was a legalistic reactionary misogynistic, cantankerous old so-and-so and (b) that he introduced alien Greek philosophical ideas into the simple teachings of an itinerant Rabbi and turned a branch of Jewish thought and practice into a new religion, an offshoot of Stoicism Neo-Platonism Gnosticism and – well, you think up your own insult.
So poor Paul was at once a hidebound Hebrew traditionalist and a dangerous syncretistic progressive. In other words, in twenty-first century Scottish words, he was at once a hardline Calvinist-leaning pillar of the Kirk and a liberal with New-Age and probably Buddhist leanings. A bit Festival of Spirituality and Peace, ken.
Hmm. Well done, Paul. For wasn’t this the man who said “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some”?
Well, I like Paul. I can imagine having a stormy but fruitful friendship with him, punctuated by long discussions as to how he saw and understood that Jesus Christ whom he had persecuted, whom he had met on the road to Damascus and with whom he was now deeply in love, so deeply that he could hardly think of anything else. Do you know the folk song “O Waly Waly”? It contains these lines which, especially in the context of today’s reading from Acts, immediately make me think of Paul:
“There is a ship, and she sails the sea;
She’s loaded deep as deep can be;
But not as deep as the love I’m in:
I know not if I sink or swim”.
I think that’s why Paul could be so casual about physical danger, why he could be cheerful in the midst of a shipwreck. The ship might sink, he might be in deep water, but no water could be as deep as his love.
Jesus told us that the two great commandments, love of God and love of neighbour, are one and the same. To see this demonstrated in action, you can look at Jesus himself, or you can look at Paul. And I sometimes think that it is easier for us to look at Paul. He’s just a little less perfect! Do people forget those many passages where he proclaims – no, sings – his love for God, his breathless wonder and worship, or those passages where he pours out his love for his converts: “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God every time I remember you, and in all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy”.
If he sometimes spends page upon page discussing and teaching detailed, intellectual doctrine, that is simply what we all do when we are getting to know someone who bowls us over with love. Paul had thought he knew God – and then he met God. As some of you might have thought you knew the person who was to become your spouse or partner during your initial time of acquaintance, until that moment when you suddenly discovered who they really were, and getting to know them as soon, as quickly and as thoroughly as possible became imperative. You get the same thing with Thomas Aquinas and also with Jeremiah: “But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name," his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.”
When you are passionate, you are sometimes excessive. We do need passion. Passion for God and passion for God’s people.
Paul was a brave man, that’s evident. But the most striking thing about this passage for me is the way he is permanently turned towards God. God is the constant in his life, his point of reference for everything. When you have been adrift in a storm for 14 days, what do you do? You try to escape surreptitiously, you panic, you despair. Paul? He celebrates a dawn eucharist (well – yes – listen to the phrase: “and when he had said this, he took bread, and giving thanks to God he broke it..” – the word for giving thanks is, of course, eucharistein), having been in such close communication with God that he had total assurance that they would all get safely to land.
If I had never read a single word of this man’s letters, I would know there was something extraordinary about him, not just extraordinarily God-centred, but also something extraordinarily powerful and attractive. He couldn’t still the wind and the waves like Jesus, but he could still 276 terrified people in a half-wrecked boat.
And so we come to the other objection people have to Paul. He wasn’t Jesus, Paul added stuff to the simple teaching of Jesus, turned it into a new religion. full of doctrine and rules. First – are you sure Jesus’ teaching was so simple? I haven’t got time now to detail just how complicated, ground-breaking and often explosive it was, but may I just direct you to the sixth or seventeenth chapter of St John’s gospel?
But you know – I am glad that we have Paul as well as Jesus. Jesus was – is – God; there are things that he simply did not experience. There are things that he simply wouldn’t think of. He did not, for example, experience his own sin; and he did not experience conversion. He did not battle with doctrine; he told it as he had seen it with his Father. We should imitate Jesus; but in many ways we cannot be like him. We are not God made man; we are not the source of Truth, who can neither deceive or be deceived. But we can be like Paul. Inspired he may have been, apostle he may have been, but he could not see as Jesus saw, and neither can we. He had to be precise, to define, to be on the safe side, just as we have to. On a beautiful bright day you may walk right up to a precipice; you will keep a mile away from it in a fog; and the vision and understanding of the greatest saint and doctor of the church is as fog compared with that of God made man.
It would be idle to deny that the godly life taught by Jesus by word and example differs in emphasis and maybe content from the religion preached by Paul. There are many things I wish Paul had not said, which I am sure Jesus would not have said, and which I sometimes suspect he would not have approved of had he heard it said by one of his disciples “while the Bridegroom was with them”. However, Paul was the man hand-picked – warts and all – by the Holy Spirit for the job, and we ignore or deny his teaching at our peril. We may disagree with him sometimes as we may not disagree with Jesus – but only if we are very clear of the risk we are taking and are sure we know what we are doing. I cannot resist quoting a passage from the instructions for my chainsaw at this point; I think it answers that second objection better than a more pious expression ever could:
“We strongly recommend you do not attempt to operate your chainsaw while in a tree, on a ladder, or any other unstable surface. If you decide to do so, be advised that these positions are extremely dangerous”.
Paul, lover of Christ and seeker after his truth, pray for us that, like you, we may walk in the safe way of his commandments, and come at last to the unspeakable joy and glory of his Kingdom. Amen.
Paul is unpopular – I wanted to say “nowadays”, but I get the impression that he has been unpopular ever since I remember, and no doubt earlier than that. The reasons that are generally given are (a) that Paul was a legalistic reactionary misogynistic, cantankerous old so-and-so and (b) that he introduced alien Greek philosophical ideas into the simple teachings of an itinerant Rabbi and turned a branch of Jewish thought and practice into a new religion, an offshoot of Stoicism Neo-Platonism Gnosticism and – well, you think up your own insult.
So poor Paul was at once a hidebound Hebrew traditionalist and a dangerous syncretistic progressive. In other words, in twenty-first century Scottish words, he was at once a hardline Calvinist-leaning pillar of the Kirk and a liberal with New-Age and probably Buddhist leanings. A bit Festival of Spirituality and Peace, ken.
Hmm. Well done, Paul. For wasn’t this the man who said “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some”?
Well, I like Paul. I can imagine having a stormy but fruitful friendship with him, punctuated by long discussions as to how he saw and understood that Jesus Christ whom he had persecuted, whom he had met on the road to Damascus and with whom he was now deeply in love, so deeply that he could hardly think of anything else. Do you know the folk song “O Waly Waly”? It contains these lines which, especially in the context of today’s reading from Acts, immediately make me think of Paul:
“There is a ship, and she sails the sea;
She’s loaded deep as deep can be;
But not as deep as the love I’m in:
I know not if I sink or swim”.
I think that’s why Paul could be so casual about physical danger, why he could be cheerful in the midst of a shipwreck. The ship might sink, he might be in deep water, but no water could be as deep as his love.
Jesus told us that the two great commandments, love of God and love of neighbour, are one and the same. To see this demonstrated in action, you can look at Jesus himself, or you can look at Paul. And I sometimes think that it is easier for us to look at Paul. He’s just a little less perfect! Do people forget those many passages where he proclaims – no, sings – his love for God, his breathless wonder and worship, or those passages where he pours out his love for his converts: “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God every time I remember you, and in all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy”.
If he sometimes spends page upon page discussing and teaching detailed, intellectual doctrine, that is simply what we all do when we are getting to know someone who bowls us over with love. Paul had thought he knew God – and then he met God. As some of you might have thought you knew the person who was to become your spouse or partner during your initial time of acquaintance, until that moment when you suddenly discovered who they really were, and getting to know them as soon, as quickly and as thoroughly as possible became imperative. You get the same thing with Thomas Aquinas and also with Jeremiah: “But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name," his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.”
When you are passionate, you are sometimes excessive. We do need passion. Passion for God and passion for God’s people.
Paul was a brave man, that’s evident. But the most striking thing about this passage for me is the way he is permanently turned towards God. God is the constant in his life, his point of reference for everything. When you have been adrift in a storm for 14 days, what do you do? You try to escape surreptitiously, you panic, you despair. Paul? He celebrates a dawn eucharist (well – yes – listen to the phrase: “and when he had said this, he took bread, and giving thanks to God he broke it..” – the word for giving thanks is, of course, eucharistein), having been in such close communication with God that he had total assurance that they would all get safely to land.
If I had never read a single word of this man’s letters, I would know there was something extraordinary about him, not just extraordinarily God-centred, but also something extraordinarily powerful and attractive. He couldn’t still the wind and the waves like Jesus, but he could still 276 terrified people in a half-wrecked boat.
And so we come to the other objection people have to Paul. He wasn’t Jesus, Paul added stuff to the simple teaching of Jesus, turned it into a new religion. full of doctrine and rules. First – are you sure Jesus’ teaching was so simple? I haven’t got time now to detail just how complicated, ground-breaking and often explosive it was, but may I just direct you to the sixth or seventeenth chapter of St John’s gospel?
But you know – I am glad that we have Paul as well as Jesus. Jesus was – is – God; there are things that he simply did not experience. There are things that he simply wouldn’t think of. He did not, for example, experience his own sin; and he did not experience conversion. He did not battle with doctrine; he told it as he had seen it with his Father. We should imitate Jesus; but in many ways we cannot be like him. We are not God made man; we are not the source of Truth, who can neither deceive or be deceived. But we can be like Paul. Inspired he may have been, apostle he may have been, but he could not see as Jesus saw, and neither can we. He had to be precise, to define, to be on the safe side, just as we have to. On a beautiful bright day you may walk right up to a precipice; you will keep a mile away from it in a fog; and the vision and understanding of the greatest saint and doctor of the church is as fog compared with that of God made man.
It would be idle to deny that the godly life taught by Jesus by word and example differs in emphasis and maybe content from the religion preached by Paul. There are many things I wish Paul had not said, which I am sure Jesus would not have said, and which I sometimes suspect he would not have approved of had he heard it said by one of his disciples “while the Bridegroom was with them”. However, Paul was the man hand-picked – warts and all – by the Holy Spirit for the job, and we ignore or deny his teaching at our peril. We may disagree with him sometimes as we may not disagree with Jesus – but only if we are very clear of the risk we are taking and are sure we know what we are doing. I cannot resist quoting a passage from the instructions for my chainsaw at this point; I think it answers that second objection better than a more pious expression ever could:
“We strongly recommend you do not attempt to operate your chainsaw while in a tree, on a ladder, or any other unstable surface. If you decide to do so, be advised that these positions are extremely dangerous”.
Paul, lover of Christ and seeker after his truth, pray for us that, like you, we may walk in the safe way of his commandments, and come at last to the unspeakable joy and glory of his Kingdom. Amen.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Unconditional Positive Regard, or "On Love....again!"
Sermon, Evensong, 21 June 2009 – Jeremiah 10:1-16; Romans 11:25-36
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in God’s justice which is more than liberty.
At first glance you might think that the two readings we have just heard are saying contradictory things. In the first reading everyone except the chosen people is wrong and, basically, there’s not a lot of hope for them; in the second, not only is it now the chosen people who are wrong, but there is plenty of hope all the same.
Well, I don’t think they contradict each other at all. I think they are both saying what God has said over and over again, in both Old Testament and New, and that we continue to fail to hear: Fear not. Do not be afraid. Not of those non-gods who scare the gentiles so much, and not of God himself. And certainly not of anything less.
There was once a theologian called Jacob the Carthusian who wrote a cheery little work called “De paucitate salvandorum” – “Of the fewness of those who will be saved”. I often wonder what he thought about his own chances. From some of his writings it would certainly appear that he took a pretty dim view of most of his colleagues. Father Faber, the Oratorian who wrote the hymn that I quoted at the start of this sermon, have quoted before and will no doubt quote again, concluded that, on the contrary, most Catholics will be saved. We would no doubt go further and say at least that most Christians will be saved. I’m fairly sure that God would go further still; and I think it was a realisation along those lines that made Paul burst out in that famous cry of adoration, which bears hearing again: Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.
We echo that in our communion service when we say “for everything in heaven and on earth is yours. All things come from you, and of your own do we give you.” But I wonder whether we really grasp the literal truth of this.
We have most of us heard the teaching that we can do nothing by ourselves, that we cannot save ourselves; that none of our virtues are our own, that we are saved quite simply by the blood of Christ, or, rather, by the love that led him to shed that blood. That can seem quite an unattractive teaching. So we are useless, are we? Even our virtues are as filthy rags, are they? Well, no. And yet it is true. The point, however, is not that God looks on our good deeds, on our efforts, on our observances, and sneers. The point is that God looks on them with love, but would look on us with love just as much without them.
When one is learning the basics of person-centred counselling, as I am, the first thing one is taught is that it is not a technique, but a way of being with a person. And that the so-called “core conditions” (that is, the characteristics of that “way of being”) are, by themselves, enough to lead the person you are listening to to find their own solutions. These core conditions are empathy, congruence (or honesty), and that thing which for us is impossible, though we strive to get as close to it as we can: unconditional positive regard. Yes, it’s jargon; but it does what it says on the tin. It means to look at a person positively (as opposed to negatively) without imposing any conditions on that positiveness. Perhaps it’s loving the sinner and hating the sin; or, as I believe Carl Rogers himself once suggested, simply…love.
Love is something we have difficulty with. We are apt either to put conditions on our love, or if we try not to, we end up becoming doormats, which is not what it is about. And that’s where another of the “core conditions” can come to rescue us: congruence. Congruence is the thing that makes you speak the truth in love; because if you are withholding an important part of yourself you are not truly loving. It doesn’t mean that you have to tell someone you love that their new hat is ghastly – but it does mean that you have to be straight with someone you love about the drinking habit that is wrecking their life. If it is important to the person who loves, then it needs to be brought into the love.
I am not claiming this is easy, and indeed my purpose in mentioning it is not primarily to tell you – or to tell myself – to do it. Indeed, only God can perfectly do it, and that is why I’m talking about it. Because that is what these readings are about. God’s love, which is unconditional; and God’s congruence, which means that God will never pretend something is OK when it isn’t. Emmanuel, God-with-us, as well as being called “Almighty God and Everlasting Father” is also called “Wonderful Counsellor”, and while it is a different sort of counsellor that is meant, I like to think that God is the model for those of us who would be counsellors, as well as for those of us who would be Christians…or Jews…or Moslems…or...
Congruence means that God, through Jeremiah, says clearly that the customs of the gentiles are worthless, that their fears are unfounded; it means that through Paul God says that the chosen people “has experienced hardening in part”. But, Jeremiah hints, all the gentiles would have to do is to stop fearing those worthless bits of wood and stone, and discover the God whose love casts out fear. And Paul states very firmly that, hardened or not, the children of Israel, once loved, are loved forever. Unconditional positive regard or what!
And so I come back to fear. There are things that we should indeed be afraid of, some for this world (such as hungry tigers or speeding cars), and some for the next (such as final impenitence, which means continuing to turn away from God until we die, still turned away). Part of congruence, part of empathy, indeed, is refusing to take away a person’s free will, their autonomy, their right to decide to destroy themselves. That loved one who is killing themselves with drink – we have no right to stop them, even if we could. And in that we are struggling to imitate God, who will never force anyone to love him…even if he could. God will not, and, yes, cannot. Because free will cannot be forced. God will remind, will threaten, will cajole, will die for you, will love to the end. But God will never force. Perhaps, indeed, that is the only thing that should frighten us: our own free will. But we have been given it to use, not to deny or to throw away. It is the sign of God’s love in us, and his love, we are told, is without repentance. With God we can dare what we can hardly dare with human beings: we can dare to risk getting it wrong. As Father Faber says: The love of God is broader than the measure of our mind.
And so, as Paul prayed for his Ephesians, let us pray: that we, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in God’s justice which is more than liberty.
At first glance you might think that the two readings we have just heard are saying contradictory things. In the first reading everyone except the chosen people is wrong and, basically, there’s not a lot of hope for them; in the second, not only is it now the chosen people who are wrong, but there is plenty of hope all the same.
Well, I don’t think they contradict each other at all. I think they are both saying what God has said over and over again, in both Old Testament and New, and that we continue to fail to hear: Fear not. Do not be afraid. Not of those non-gods who scare the gentiles so much, and not of God himself. And certainly not of anything less.
There was once a theologian called Jacob the Carthusian who wrote a cheery little work called “De paucitate salvandorum” – “Of the fewness of those who will be saved”. I often wonder what he thought about his own chances. From some of his writings it would certainly appear that he took a pretty dim view of most of his colleagues. Father Faber, the Oratorian who wrote the hymn that I quoted at the start of this sermon, have quoted before and will no doubt quote again, concluded that, on the contrary, most Catholics will be saved. We would no doubt go further and say at least that most Christians will be saved. I’m fairly sure that God would go further still; and I think it was a realisation along those lines that made Paul burst out in that famous cry of adoration, which bears hearing again: Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.
We echo that in our communion service when we say “for everything in heaven and on earth is yours. All things come from you, and of your own do we give you.” But I wonder whether we really grasp the literal truth of this.
We have most of us heard the teaching that we can do nothing by ourselves, that we cannot save ourselves; that none of our virtues are our own, that we are saved quite simply by the blood of Christ, or, rather, by the love that led him to shed that blood. That can seem quite an unattractive teaching. So we are useless, are we? Even our virtues are as filthy rags, are they? Well, no. And yet it is true. The point, however, is not that God looks on our good deeds, on our efforts, on our observances, and sneers. The point is that God looks on them with love, but would look on us with love just as much without them.
When one is learning the basics of person-centred counselling, as I am, the first thing one is taught is that it is not a technique, but a way of being with a person. And that the so-called “core conditions” (that is, the characteristics of that “way of being”) are, by themselves, enough to lead the person you are listening to to find their own solutions. These core conditions are empathy, congruence (or honesty), and that thing which for us is impossible, though we strive to get as close to it as we can: unconditional positive regard. Yes, it’s jargon; but it does what it says on the tin. It means to look at a person positively (as opposed to negatively) without imposing any conditions on that positiveness. Perhaps it’s loving the sinner and hating the sin; or, as I believe Carl Rogers himself once suggested, simply…love.
Love is something we have difficulty with. We are apt either to put conditions on our love, or if we try not to, we end up becoming doormats, which is not what it is about. And that’s where another of the “core conditions” can come to rescue us: congruence. Congruence is the thing that makes you speak the truth in love; because if you are withholding an important part of yourself you are not truly loving. It doesn’t mean that you have to tell someone you love that their new hat is ghastly – but it does mean that you have to be straight with someone you love about the drinking habit that is wrecking their life. If it is important to the person who loves, then it needs to be brought into the love.
I am not claiming this is easy, and indeed my purpose in mentioning it is not primarily to tell you – or to tell myself – to do it. Indeed, only God can perfectly do it, and that is why I’m talking about it. Because that is what these readings are about. God’s love, which is unconditional; and God’s congruence, which means that God will never pretend something is OK when it isn’t. Emmanuel, God-with-us, as well as being called “Almighty God and Everlasting Father” is also called “Wonderful Counsellor”, and while it is a different sort of counsellor that is meant, I like to think that God is the model for those of us who would be counsellors, as well as for those of us who would be Christians…or Jews…or Moslems…or...
Congruence means that God, through Jeremiah, says clearly that the customs of the gentiles are worthless, that their fears are unfounded; it means that through Paul God says that the chosen people “has experienced hardening in part”. But, Jeremiah hints, all the gentiles would have to do is to stop fearing those worthless bits of wood and stone, and discover the God whose love casts out fear. And Paul states very firmly that, hardened or not, the children of Israel, once loved, are loved forever. Unconditional positive regard or what!
And so I come back to fear. There are things that we should indeed be afraid of, some for this world (such as hungry tigers or speeding cars), and some for the next (such as final impenitence, which means continuing to turn away from God until we die, still turned away). Part of congruence, part of empathy, indeed, is refusing to take away a person’s free will, their autonomy, their right to decide to destroy themselves. That loved one who is killing themselves with drink – we have no right to stop them, even if we could. And in that we are struggling to imitate God, who will never force anyone to love him…even if he could. God will not, and, yes, cannot. Because free will cannot be forced. God will remind, will threaten, will cajole, will die for you, will love to the end. But God will never force. Perhaps, indeed, that is the only thing that should frighten us: our own free will. But we have been given it to use, not to deny or to throw away. It is the sign of God’s love in us, and his love, we are told, is without repentance. With God we can dare what we can hardly dare with human beings: we can dare to risk getting it wrong. As Father Faber says: The love of God is broader than the measure of our mind.
And so, as Paul prayed for his Ephesians, let us pray: that we, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell
Normal service will (I hope) be resumed next week...
(not unwell, just overworked)
(not unwell, just overworked)
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Sanctus sanctus sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth
7 June 2009: Ez 1:4-10, 22-28, Rev 4
The readings we have just heard strike me as quite surprising, and perhaps unhelpful ones for the Feast of the Trinity. When I hear about the four living creatures it is the four evangelists I think of: Matthew the man, Mark the lion, Luke the bull and John the eagle. Not the Trinity. What I think the church is trying to convey by choosing these passages is the awesomeness, awe-inspiringness of God. God, the Trinity, is altogether too much, too high for us, a mystery before which we must bow down and hide our faces.
OK. You can approach the Trinity like that: “Fear God” – you get that right down into the New Testament. And it’s true that the moment we lose that, the moment we forget that we are creatures and have a Creator – is the moment that we cease to be believers, cease to be followers of Jesus Christ. But – should we leave it at that?
Who, after all, is God to us? Who is God to you? Who is the Trinity to you? It’s God the Father, who created us: not some terrifying emperor figure but our father; God the Son, who dwelt among us as one of us; and God the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us. I’ve said many times that if you want to see what God is like, look at Jesus – well, he said so, didn’t he? “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”. But I’d go further than that, especially for us who do not see Jesus in his day-to-day life. Do you believe that we are made in God’s image and likeness? Do you believe that YOU are? In which case, if you want to see what God is like, look at yourself.
Yes, the angels hid their faces and said “Holy holy holy”; but I venture to say that our relationship with God is different. The angels say holy holy holy, but Isaiah confesses his sinfulness and is cleansed, chosen and given a mission by God. As Paul said, “unto which of the angels said he at any time “Thou art my son, this day I have begotten thee”?
God the Son did not become an angel. He became incarnate as one of us. Like us. Like you. Like me. It is extraordinary and incredible, but after all not so extraordinary and incredible; who, according to Genesis, is “made in the image and likeness of God”? That already suggests something. the Trinity includes Jesus Christ who has been and eternally is one of us. We, the human race, are part of, intimately part of the Trinity.
The Son is not less than the Father because he has been incarnate. The Son is not intrinsically more visible than the Father. Don’t imagine that the OT God is the Father, the NT God the Son, and the God of the era of the Church is the Holy Spirit No. All three are the Trinity. God is the Trinity. YHWH is the Trinity.
All God’s actions external to himself are actions of the Trinity – there is no distinction. It is only in the relations within the Trinity that there is a distinction. Undoubtedly, when it comes to incarnate life on earth, to crucifixion, that blows your mind. but – of course God blows your mind. And that is the sort of awe, the sort of “too much for us” that we should feel about the Trinity: not that God is so far removed but that God is so intimate, so close to us, so much part of us and we of God. Jesus prayed “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me.” So – hang on to your pews here – God is not just close to us because the Son was incarnate. God, the Trinity, is close to us because we are made in the image and likeness of the Trinity.
I think that was what St Augustine was getting at when he devoted a large part of his book on the Trinity to a discussion of our own internal being and to searching for the trinity within. He found it in many places, but settled for the mind’s self-memory, self-understanding and self-willing or self-loving, and the way in which these mental acts proceed from one another or are generated or conceived one by another. The Trinity, far from being something utterly remote from us, is in fact the blueprint of our being, just as the design of the Temple was supposed to be a copy of a heavenly original. The Feast of the Trinity is our feast. If you feel inclined to argue that we cannot understand the Trinity, that it is a great mystery, indeed it is. But – are we much less of a mystery? I understand myself better than I did twenty or thirty years ago, but there are still deep recesses of mystery within myself, and I think there always will be; and I am just a finite created being. The infinite uncreated God whose finite created image I am will be infinitely, uncreatedly more mysterious than I am, but not in an entirely different way. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Augustine, utterly fascinated by his own being and psychology, made the Trinity the subject of his major work, a work he spent his life writing and rewriting until his friends, impatient with the endless revisions, pinched the manuscript and published a pirated edition.
All this is babbling. Of course we cannot understand the Trinity. But all the people over all the centuries who have tried, suggest to me two things. One: that it is worth trying; and two: that the Trinity is indeed closer to us than we are to ourselves. We try to grasp the Trinity with the same hunger with which we try to understand ourselves. And since we cannot look into the Trinity and we have been told that we are made in its image, all we can do to “feel after him and find him” as Paul says, is to look into ourselves.
Augustine is saying that if you are interested in looking for God and finding him, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you must look within yourself, through a glass darkly. You must in fact also be engaged in a quest for your true self. And conversely, your only hope of finding your true self is in finding, or at the very least in continually seeking, the true God, who is eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
This trinity in us is not static; as the Blessed Trinity is anything but static, being constituted by relationship and the ceaseless ebb and flow of the love which is God, which generates God and which is the God who is generated. Augustine sees the action of the Trinity in our souls, turning our self-understanding, self-memory and self-loving towards God, when it becomes God-understanding, God-memory and God-love. Our mind or soul reflects the Trinity not just in its structure but in its proper sphere of activity, which is union with God.
So might I suggest, as a hymn to accompany our thinking about the Trinity, our praying to the Trinity, not “Holy Holy Holy” but this one:
Lord, your summons echoes true when you but call my name
Let me turn and follow you and never be the same.
In your company I’ll go where your love and footsteps show.
Thus I’ll move and live and grow in you and you in me.
The readings we have just heard strike me as quite surprising, and perhaps unhelpful ones for the Feast of the Trinity. When I hear about the four living creatures it is the four evangelists I think of: Matthew the man, Mark the lion, Luke the bull and John the eagle. Not the Trinity. What I think the church is trying to convey by choosing these passages is the awesomeness, awe-inspiringness of God. God, the Trinity, is altogether too much, too high for us, a mystery before which we must bow down and hide our faces.
OK. You can approach the Trinity like that: “Fear God” – you get that right down into the New Testament. And it’s true that the moment we lose that, the moment we forget that we are creatures and have a Creator – is the moment that we cease to be believers, cease to be followers of Jesus Christ. But – should we leave it at that?
Who, after all, is God to us? Who is God to you? Who is the Trinity to you? It’s God the Father, who created us: not some terrifying emperor figure but our father; God the Son, who dwelt among us as one of us; and God the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us. I’ve said many times that if you want to see what God is like, look at Jesus – well, he said so, didn’t he? “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”. But I’d go further than that, especially for us who do not see Jesus in his day-to-day life. Do you believe that we are made in God’s image and likeness? Do you believe that YOU are? In which case, if you want to see what God is like, look at yourself.
Yes, the angels hid their faces and said “Holy holy holy”; but I venture to say that our relationship with God is different. The angels say holy holy holy, but Isaiah confesses his sinfulness and is cleansed, chosen and given a mission by God. As Paul said, “unto which of the angels said he at any time “Thou art my son, this day I have begotten thee”?
God the Son did not become an angel. He became incarnate as one of us. Like us. Like you. Like me. It is extraordinary and incredible, but after all not so extraordinary and incredible; who, according to Genesis, is “made in the image and likeness of God”? That already suggests something. the Trinity includes Jesus Christ who has been and eternally is one of us. We, the human race, are part of, intimately part of the Trinity.
The Son is not less than the Father because he has been incarnate. The Son is not intrinsically more visible than the Father. Don’t imagine that the OT God is the Father, the NT God the Son, and the God of the era of the Church is the Holy Spirit No. All three are the Trinity. God is the Trinity. YHWH is the Trinity.
All God’s actions external to himself are actions of the Trinity – there is no distinction. It is only in the relations within the Trinity that there is a distinction. Undoubtedly, when it comes to incarnate life on earth, to crucifixion, that blows your mind. but – of course God blows your mind. And that is the sort of awe, the sort of “too much for us” that we should feel about the Trinity: not that God is so far removed but that God is so intimate, so close to us, so much part of us and we of God. Jesus prayed “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me.” So – hang on to your pews here – God is not just close to us because the Son was incarnate. God, the Trinity, is close to us because we are made in the image and likeness of the Trinity.
I think that was what St Augustine was getting at when he devoted a large part of his book on the Trinity to a discussion of our own internal being and to searching for the trinity within. He found it in many places, but settled for the mind’s self-memory, self-understanding and self-willing or self-loving, and the way in which these mental acts proceed from one another or are generated or conceived one by another. The Trinity, far from being something utterly remote from us, is in fact the blueprint of our being, just as the design of the Temple was supposed to be a copy of a heavenly original. The Feast of the Trinity is our feast. If you feel inclined to argue that we cannot understand the Trinity, that it is a great mystery, indeed it is. But – are we much less of a mystery? I understand myself better than I did twenty or thirty years ago, but there are still deep recesses of mystery within myself, and I think there always will be; and I am just a finite created being. The infinite uncreated God whose finite created image I am will be infinitely, uncreatedly more mysterious than I am, but not in an entirely different way. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Augustine, utterly fascinated by his own being and psychology, made the Trinity the subject of his major work, a work he spent his life writing and rewriting until his friends, impatient with the endless revisions, pinched the manuscript and published a pirated edition.
All this is babbling. Of course we cannot understand the Trinity. But all the people over all the centuries who have tried, suggest to me two things. One: that it is worth trying; and two: that the Trinity is indeed closer to us than we are to ourselves. We try to grasp the Trinity with the same hunger with which we try to understand ourselves. And since we cannot look into the Trinity and we have been told that we are made in its image, all we can do to “feel after him and find him” as Paul says, is to look into ourselves.
Augustine is saying that if you are interested in looking for God and finding him, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you must look within yourself, through a glass darkly. You must in fact also be engaged in a quest for your true self. And conversely, your only hope of finding your true self is in finding, or at the very least in continually seeking, the true God, who is eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
This trinity in us is not static; as the Blessed Trinity is anything but static, being constituted by relationship and the ceaseless ebb and flow of the love which is God, which generates God and which is the God who is generated. Augustine sees the action of the Trinity in our souls, turning our self-understanding, self-memory and self-loving towards God, when it becomes God-understanding, God-memory and God-love. Our mind or soul reflects the Trinity not just in its structure but in its proper sphere of activity, which is union with God.
So might I suggest, as a hymn to accompany our thinking about the Trinity, our praying to the Trinity, not “Holy Holy Holy” but this one:
Lord, your summons echoes true when you but call my name
Let me turn and follow you and never be the same.
In your company I’ll go where your love and footsteps show.
Thus I’ll move and live and grow in you and you in me.
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