“When I was a child, I thought God was a large, powerful old man
who lived in the sky – a bigger, stronger version of my father,
but with magical powers.” So writes Reza Aslan,
American academic, Muslim, cum Christian, cum Sufi mystic,
in his book ‘God’. He continues: “I imagined him handsome and grizzled,
his long grey hair draped over his broad shoulders.
He sat on a throne enwrapped by clouds.
When he spoke his voice boomed through the heavens,
especially when he was angry. And he was often angry.
But he was also warm and loving, merciful and kind.”
Somewhat overwrought we might be thinking!
Though certainly, this is how Renaissance art imagined God!
El Greco’s Trinity on the cover of our service sheet!
The dove represents the Holy Spirit.
Each of us will have a unique conception,
as we ponder that age-old human question:
Is there something, anything, bigger than us, out there?! Or are we alone?
In his research, Reza Aslan finds that human beings are hardwired
to give God a human face! And although it is not my impression
that the subject of ‘God’ is much talked about these days,
many are the authors, theologian or not, irresistibly drawn
to write on this universal concept of a reality beyond ourselves!
Each bring their own peculiar history and outlook to the matter!
From Jewish fertility specialist, Robert Winston,
to ex-Roman Catholic nun, Karen Armstrong!
Who is God? This question it seems to me,
should be much more a hot topic than would appear to be the case!
So who is God?
On Trinity Sunday the Church ventures an answer. An important answer!
For how we think about God profoundly informs
how we think about each other. How we think about our world –
and our place in it! What sort of a world it is, we will build together!
The God of the Bible is of course, the God of Israel.
That is, the tribal god of the people known as Israel, the god whose name
is that mysterious yet bold and profound assertion, ‘I Am’ .
The One God of Israel. The one God of Israel, able to defeat
the multifarious gods of her neighbours – in the inevitable battle for land.
As ever, we know of this God through story,
the story of God’s relationship with his people, recorded in Scripture.
A complex, convoluted story of growing understanding and new revelation
- an understanding evolving over time.
We move through the text from God very much present in the Garden of Eden, creator and friend – protector who wills his creation to prosper;
to God fiercely angered by the betrayals of his people.
God now, hell-bent on their destruction –
though not unyielding to pleas for mercy.
On ultimately, to a new understanding of the God of Salvation,
0the God who will repent of his anger,
and the fierce punishments he has enacted against his people.
The God of the prophet Isaiah:
Almighty everlasting Creator of the ends of the earth,
his understanding unsearchable. God who will never grow weary. ….
The only God, and God who will send Messiah to rescue his beloved people,
that they might rise up with wings like eagles!
A new world where punishment is rescinded. And all shall be well!
0Later apocalyptic writings – the Book of Daniel,
writings in the Apocrypha; and those ancient texts found in the Judean desert,
the Dead Sea Scrolls, each present their own
nuanced understanding of the role of the Messiah!
Both warrior and priest, this figure will drive out the oppressor, will conquer, reclaim the land for God’s people – establishing God’s rule on earth.
And indeed there were in Palestine, throughout the first century
through to the final destruction of Jerusalem in the second,
there were those who claimed the role of messiah,
rebel leaders who brought resistance to Roman oppression
into open revolt and insurrection. All of them executed – on a cross.
From Judas of Galilee who raided the Roman city of Sepphoris
close to Nazareth, to Simon bar Kochbar,
killed in the final revolt against Rome in the year 135 CE.
But one Messiah was different. He would bring salvation – liberty,
through transformation of the human heart.
Through sharing, in every way, our human suffering,
and the evils we perpetrate against one another.
His radical presence, his teaching, was unsettling,
growingly disturbing to the Roman authorities and their Jewish High Priest.
Sufficiently so, that they should determine he too, must end his life on a cross.
Though his followers would come to see his life in this way,
did Jesus himself believe that he was God? John’s late gospel
does indeed present Jesus as God, deeply conscious of his divinity.
But there is no such understanding in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.
At least not until the end of Matthew’s text, our gospel this morning,
with that neat summation that the disciples of Jesus are to baptise
in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – though some doubted.
-480I hope by now you are catching the idea,
that the concept of God is quite literally, beyond us to pin down!
In exile in Babylon, the Hebrew people had come to a new understanding.
That while there may be a heavenly court,
there is only one supreme God across the entire world,
God of the whole universe! Monotheism.
To many, seemingly the most rational, the best way, of thinking about God!
I say seemingly, because this is not the Trinitarian God of Christian faith.
And it matters. For what we believe about God
will shape our societies – for good or for ill.
Monotheism is akin to monarchy. A hierarchical model of society,
with one, mono, figure at the top wielding total power!
We have just crowned our new king! Our constitutional king!
But it took centuries of struggle to wrest from the monarch’s grip,
that notion of the divine right of kings to absolute rule and authority.
The divine right of kings, a political, not a Christian notion!
In the early Middle Ages, those ancient texts of classical Greece
were preserved in the Muslim Age of Enlightenment.
Sadly that Enlightenment has disappeared from many Muslim nations today.
In its stead we find harsh authoritarian rule, social hierarchy,
often with women at the bottom, and little if any flexibility.
The Taliban. The ayatollahs of Iran. Wahhabism in Suadi Arabia –
a fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam, now exported to the West.
And of course, there are similar hard-line Christian groups too.
The understanding of God as Trinity changes everything.
God as Trinity breaks down all such hierarchical thinking!
For in the Christian understanding of God as three equal persons
in one Godhead, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, mutually honouring one another,
there is no place for a rigid status quo – or for any sort of dominance!
Our institutions are to be egalitarian, reflect an honouring of one another,
based on a differentiation of roles – not a differentiation of status!
And in that conundrum of God as Three Persons,
is recognition that our understanding of God will always be partial – and evolving.
The gospel revelation of God is so enormous in its height and depth and breadth,
we will never come to the end of growing in spiritual learning and maturity.
The Church teaches that God is both, immanent – God with us,
and transcendent – God beyond us.
As we receive communion, the precious body and blood of Christ,
God comes very near, God within us. Yet this God is also transcendent.
God so vast, so ‘other’, in ways beyond the mind to grasp….
In our liturgy God calls us to come close. Closer still.
We also experience, especially on Trinity Sunday, the transcendence of God.
Expressed physically in the lofty heights of our gothic cathedrals!
Those soaring perpendicular windows!
Shortly, in our Offertory hymn, that great hymn known as St Patrick’s Breastplate,
with its powerful – and difficult, tunes alternating with each other,
if we will allow ourselves, as we stay with it, allow the music and the words
to wrap themselves around us, we may experience something
of the conjunction of these two dimensions …. Amen.