Sermon Archive
Letting God be God
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 15 June 2003, Trinity Sunday
Some of you may be old enough to remember the Honest to God controversy of the 1960s. Bishop John Robinson had written a book suggesting that we should try to develop a new way of understanding God. God is not up there - in outer space - but in here, within us, the ground of our very being. It seems pretty obvious now, but for a bishop to say such things then seemed to some to be threatening the simple faith of ordinary folk!
About that time a cartoon appeared in Private Eye. A vicar is in the pulpit affirming, 'God is not an old man in the sky with a long white beard.' In the sky above the pulpit is an old man with a long white beard looking down saying, 'How does he know?'
The doctrine of the Trinity - God who is one yet three, three yet one - is an attempt to describe the indescribable. Trinity Sunday is a celebration of the incomprehensible and unknowable essence of God.
Of course, the Trinity has often been used to claim quite the opposite. As if somehow it offered an incontrovertible mathematical formula that encapsulates, defines and provides the last word on God. God has revealed himself and he has done so in this way.
I suppose it might seem desirable to keep God in his place, neatly buttoned up. 'This is your rather attractive room, Lord, if you'd like to step in I'll lock the door behind you.' As I said at Easter, we have a kind of urge to gaze into the tomb, the place of death. However unpleasant, however desolating the death of Jesus at least as we weep and mourn we know he's not going to come back and undermine our glum resignation. In a similar way, I suppose, the Trinity as a mere dogma is dead, sorted - much easier to gaze at that than to allow it to speak to us of the God who is an unutterable and disturbing mystery.
I wonder if this is partly what Jesus means when he says to Nicodemus, 'You must be born again'? There's no need to enter our mother's womb for second time, we've already done it! We create our own womb, a warm and secure cocoon - where we have charted the contours of the space, its possibilities and routines. Or, as Jean Jacques Rousseau might have put it - we are born free and spend the rest of our lives putting ourselves in chains.
In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, his rebellious hero, Winston, chooses to conform, to accept all the distortions of truth all the limitations of living under the domination of Big Brother rather than confront his greatest fear in Room 101 (for him it was a cage of ravenous rats). Nicodemus too has opted for limited and distorted truth, he prefers the darkness of the tomb, of the womb, to the light, the revolutionary possibilities offered by Jesus. What was he afraid of?
What's in your Room 101? What are you afraid of? Is there anything for us that makes us prefer death to life, darkness to light, slavery to freedom? This is what St Paul is getting at in the first reading: 'you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, "Abba! Father!" it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.' Paul is pointing out that there is no need to be slaves to the Old Testament law - we have been set free to be in a new relationship with God, a relationship which is ours because of the suffering and death of Jesus. We are now like him, children of God, we are his brothers and sisters and joint heirs with him of all that God offers.
There is no need to live in fear. It's a constant strand of Jesus' teaching: Do not be afraid! And yet so easily we create, impose, imagine reasons to be anxious. Our conscience reproves us for all sorts of minute misdemeanours (whilst conveniently overlooking much more significant ones); we imagine a multitude of things that might go wrong. And in the face of a world that's constantly changing, disturbing us, we cling to a picture of God that is static, unchanging.
Surely, you might say, this is right. Whatever else changes God remains the same. Well, perhaps. Perhaps it is that God is so much bigger than we can understand and comes to us in so many different ways that God only appears to change. Perhaps, in the same way that a favourite book from our youth read many years later might seem different, it is our perception of God that changes as we change, not God himself.
But I cannot help just wondering at the possibility that as we grow through relationships so God might be affected by his relationship with each of us. And, if we take the social dimension of the Trinity seriously, God as a communion of love, then love too is not static. Of course, I speak as one who has no understanding. I speak using only the human words and categories available to me. But, as Margaret Forrester helped us to see last week at Pentecost, when she spoke of the 'wildness of God's mercy', and as we read in the gospel today of the wind, the Spirit, that 'blows where it wills', then the God who emerges for me is dynamic, unpredictable and unsettling.
Should this not make us afraid? Does it not make the 'ground of our being' shift queasily beneath us? Well yes, in one sense, but the story of Jesus helps us to see that whatever you meet when you meet God, you will meet love. God approaches us always in love. 'If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!' Matt 7.11 Here is the constancy of God, the perfect love that casts out fear.
But this love does not define God; it defines us. Rabbi Zusya said: 'In the coming world they will not ask me: "Why were you not Moses?" They will ask me "Why were you not Zusya?"' In the love of God we become who we are meant to be - we discover ourselves in the light of Christ, we grow into the full stature of Christ, not to lose ourselves but to find ourselves.
In other words, Trinity Sunday reminds us that we find our identity in God - in relation to the Father, in the likeness of the Son, by the ingathering grace of the Holy Spirit who shapes us, not alone but as brothers and sisters who belong together because we belong to God. In order to discover this identity we must be ready to make the disorientating decision to step beyond the place of safety, and be born again in submission to the call of the unknowable God. A God who most likely does not have a long white beard, but even if he does cannot be defined by it.
As Meister Eckhart said, 'Let God be God, for God's sake.' To which we might add 'and, for our sake too.'
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