Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington (Benefice Service)
2 Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”
I was hoping for a few ales in Kalkar’s Rathauskeller, but it closes at 9 pm! © Gerry Lynch, 5 April 2018.
I was in Germany last week, which enjoyed the same heatwave as we did. I was therefore looking forward to exploring the pub culture as well as the much cheaper German pub prices. I arranged to meet someone I knew from social media but had never met in person, at 9.15 on a Wednesday evening. He lives in a town the size of Devizes, but he warned me that there wouldn’t be a pub open in that town for us to meet in. Instead we had to meet in the larger county town, about the size of Trowbridge, and even that wasn’t exactly lively.
And I know what you’re thinking – what on earth does this have to do with the Holy Trinity? Did the Rector get heatstroke, or perhaps have too much of the unholy sort of spirit when he was across the North Sea?
Well, let’s park that for a moment, and return to it once we’ve had a chance to talk about what it means to be human, and what it means to be God.
To create, to suffer, and to love – these are three of the deepest experiences that human life contains. Creating, suffering, and loving are central to making us human.
They are also central to what God is – God also creates, suffers, and loves.
The Father creates. He creates life, as human beings do; and as good human parents do, He creates life to set it free, to find its own path. The problem is, as any human parent knows, that the lives you bring forth sometimes do stupid things, dangerous things, wrong things.
The same is true no matter what you create. Once you write a book, make a film – or preach a sermon – it is out of your hands and you have no control over what other people will do with it later.
That’s what we did with God. He gave us simple rules so we could live in harmony with one another, with Him, and with the world He made. But we wanted more, so we rebelled.
That’s why the Son had to come and suffer. On the Cross, He repaired the breach that we generated by rebelling. But more than that, although the Son was already in existence in the beginning with the Father before time, He became one of us. If we want to see what God is like, we look at Jesus. The fact that God became a human being in the person of Jesus Christ tells us something else – that human beings are truly made in the image and likeness of God; that for all our silliness, rebellion, and greed, there is something divine about us.
The Holy Spirit is love. The love between the Father and the Son, love as a person in its own right, love as God. The Holy Spirit can be tough love, too. This isn’t just about warm feelings and affection, although they are part of the story. This is about the love that seeks to drive away from us the worst that is in us, drive us out of our comfort zones, which can be toxic and sickly places, and into a reality that is sometimes less comfortable but always healthier.
Three persons in one God. But not three Gods sharing out the work between them, but one God, who is, in His very self, a communion of love. If this seems a bit weird – that’s OK. If God is what the Church says God is, then He must be in many ways well beyond the human ability to understand. But we have analogies to help us: we might think of understanding God as Trinity as like seeing God in 3D rather than on a flat page, in full colour rather than black and white.
And the Holy Trinity tells us something about ourselves – that the God in whose image we are made is at His heart a relationship, and that therefore we are not made to be alone. Each of us is of value as an individual in our own right, but each of us only becomes who we were made to be through our interaction with others.
And that brings us back to the lack of open pubs in Germany. Societies all over the world are disintegrating into collections of individuals. All sorts of technological developments and cultural change over the last sixty years have contributed to this, from the smartphone to the Pill. Most of these developments are positive in their own right; but we have been too long blind to their compounded effect, which has been to make each of us an island largely unto ourselves.
We have lost faith in the things that used to bring us together – churches, certainly, but the membership of all sorts of things that used to bring us together is a fraction of what it was even a few decades ago: political parties, trade unions, old boys’ associations, the Girl Guides, the Freemasons, the Women’s Institute – even organised amateur sport.
At a time when all our other institutions are crumbling, we need somewhere where we can love one another, support one another in suffering, create things together – and to learn how to forgive. The only institution that fits the bill is the institution the Holy Spirit founded and gave life to – the Church.
There’s a myth that the Church is for slightly pious people who think they’re better than everyone else. But our Gospel reading shows some of the apostles doubting even as Jesus was giving them the Great Commission and the reading from Paul shows brand-new Christians squabbling like toddlers. If the Church was perfect, there wouldn’t be room for me in it. Or for you. The Church often gets things wrong, and sometimes it gets on its sanctimonious high horse in ways that even I as a clergyman find annoying.
But remember, the Church isn’t made up of perfect people, but human beings – which is what we are made to be. At its best, the Church is the crucible in which we create, suffer, and love, and will at the end of our lives be transformed into a new state, where what we see now only dimly will be revealed to us, face-to-face.
And now to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
