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.
Why is it that every couple of months, one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence research pops up in the news, to tell us it could wipe out the human race?
Gethsemane by Mark Rothko (1944). In a private collection.
On Newsnight last week it was Yoshua Bengio, whose research is cited more often than any other computer scientist in the world. Sometimes called ‘one of the three godfathers of AI’, Professor Bengio told Faisal Islam bluntly that “the worst case scenario is human extinction”.
It turns out that Bengio is based at the University of Montreal. Coincidentally, I had one of the most interestingconversations of my life on a bus to Montreal airport two years ago this month. I started talking to an American in his fifties, in town to attend an industry conference for people working in quantum computing, and a woman of about twenty who was studying computer science at one of the local universities. When he outlined that the first thing functioning quantum computing would do would be to instantly render all existing cybersecurity obsolete, the young woman was wide-eyed – and so was I. He smiled and shrugged and said, “It’s just like when the Iron Age arrived. Up until then, anyone who had bronze weapons and armour ruled the roost. Then all of a sudden they were obsolete and people needed steel. It’s just what human beings do; we advance.”
We advance—to restoring sight to the blind and killing one another with drones; to conquering cancer and poisoning the planet. In recent decades, technology that changes what it means to be human has started becoming especially problematic, whether creating machines smarter than we are, or viruses more dangerous than nature would produce, or simply driving ourselves crazy with smartphones that follow us everywhere, constantly buzzing and demanding attention.
Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington
Readings – Romans 8. 12-17; John 3. 1-17
“When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”
When we cry to God the Father, it is the Holy Spirit calling within us, rhyming with our own human spirit, and bearing witness to the fact that as children of God, we are His joint heirs along with Christ. That’s an attempt to paraphrase in more understandable language what St Paul wrote in today’s epistle reading from the Letter to the Romans. We are heirs of God, His legitimate inheritors, jointly with Jesus Christ, and the fact that we instinctively cry to God as our heavenly Father reveals that the Holy Spirit is at work within us.
We often hear the phrase that we are made ‘in the image and likeness of God’. This is not just a fundamental teaching of Christianity, but one that we inherited directly from the Jewish faith where this statement is made in the Genesis creation story during the ‘sixth day’. While Christianity has more in common with Judaism than it does with any other religion, we part company very dramatically in our belief in the Holy Trinity, that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
So when we say we are made in the image and likeness of God, we don’t mean that we are made in the image and likeness of the Father alone—although certainly in His image. But we’re also made in the image and likeness of the Son, Jesus Christ. That seems to follow logically, as Jesus is God made human. There’s something much more mysterious, however, about the nature of Jesus. Jesus is not just the babe of Bethlehem or the preacher of Galilee, but also the eternal Word who was with God before time began. We human beings are like God, Father and Son, perhaps most obviously in that we are begetters of life, as the Father begat the Son, and were also ourselves begotten by our earthly fathers and mothers.
We are also made in the image and likeness of the Holy Spirit. There are two ideas from the sermon I preached on the Holy Spirit last week for Pentecost that I want to repeat on Trinity Sunday. The first is this: the Holy Spirit is many things, many of them beyond human comprehension, but one certain thing is that the Holy Spirit is love. The Holy Spirit is the love that the Father and the Son each have for the other, love as a person in its own right, flowing not only among the Father and Son but outwards into the Church and the whole universe. The second is this: the Holy Spirit is in many ways alien and difficult to understand; it is unbiddable—as St John records Jesus saying in today’s Gospel, when we are born of the Spirit, the wind blows where it wills and we have not the foggiest idea where it comes from or where it goes. We are made in the image of this Holy Spirit as much as the Father and the Son, and therefore made in the image of love, of this wild, unbiddable, uncontrollable, freely moving being. Love and freedom are at the very heart of what it means to be human, and the points at which our human nature most obviously touches the nature of God.
Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Worton
Readings – Acts 1. 15-17, 21-26 ; John 17. 6-19
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”
Pentecost is the Feast of the Holy Spirit. So, let me talk a little this morning about the nature of the Holy Spirit, because it is one of the truly distinctive things about Christianity. We share our faith in a loving, fatherly creator with Muslims and Jews, and indeed many traditional religions around the world. This seems to be something that human beings grasp quite instinctively.
Descent of the Holy Spirit (fragment) by Duccio, 1308-11.
The idea of the Son, Jesus Christ, God made human, has some very profound and perhaps intellectually difficult implications, but is something human and therefore not beyond us.
In contrast, there is something fundamentally otherworldly and inhuman about the Holy Spirit. Because there is no obvious human comparator for what the Holy Spirit is, we must attempt to shed some light on its nature by analogy. Here’s the odd thing—we need to remember that this very otherworldly, very inhuman, being is God, and as we human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, the Holy Spirit in all its strangeness and unbiddability is also something that we are made in the image and likeness of. Deep within us, often beyond the horizon of our senses, is part of our nature that is as uncontrollable and difficult to comprehend as the Holy Spirit.
So with all that in mind, let’s explore some of the things we do know about the Holy Spirit.
Firstly, the Holy Spirit is love, and therefore God is love. The Holy Spirit is the love that flows mutually between the Father and the Son, Love as a person in its own right. Love, therefore has a character, and a will, all of its own.
