Tag Archives: Son

The Elephant In The Room

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Ever wanted to know how to explain the Trinity? Well perhaps now you can stop trying so hard. Sermon preached on Trinity Sunday 2021 based on John 3:1-17 and Romans 8:12-17

May I speak and may you hear through the Grace of our Lord; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Before we turn our attention to our bible readings today, perhaps we ought to address the matter of the elephant in the room – that is the Trinity. Today is Trinity Sunday when traditionally an attempt is made by the preacher to ‘explain’ exactly what the Trinity is. It falls to my lot this year, but I wondered if we could take a different approach and actually try not to explain it.

By that I don’t mean dismiss it altogether for it is something that exists; but set aside the usual illustrations that somehow always fall short of the mark. For example, the idea that the Trinity is like water, which can be in a liquid, gas or solid state, but it’s still the same water. The problem with this is that is denies the three distinct Persons of the Trinity by claiming that God is one Person who appears in different ‘modes’ at different times. However, the three are not co-existing; H2O can only ever be one form at a time whereas for instance at the baptism of Christ, the Father, Son and Spirit are all distinctly present and interacting and only one of them is in the actual water!

To theologists this aquatic depiction of the Trinity is akin to the heresy of Modalism.

Similarly, we can discard many of the alternatives; the egg, with its yolk, shell and albumen where each part of the egg make up only a portion of the whole – the yolk alone is not the fullness of the egg, whereas each part of the Trinity is fully divine. Or perhaps the Sun, with itself, its light and its heat – again we’re verging towards the heresy of Arianism to claim that, because whereas light and heat are simply creations of the sun, we can not claim that the Son or the Spirit are mere creations of the Father.

And before you dash out to pick a clover leaf, just let it be…

Trying to explain the Trinity is rather like the Hindu fable of six blind men encountering an elephant, which John Godfrey Saxe translated into his poem The Blind Man and the Elephant where each man is brought into the presence of an elephant but can only feel one part and thus describe it variously as a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan and a rope – you will have to guess which parts they were touching. His concluding verse, however, can remind us God is someone whom we have to encounter as a whole.

So, oft in theologic wars the disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant not one of them has seen!

And yet we have seen and still see the Triune God all around us. We encounter the three persons of God when we visit a nature reserve and see the marks of careful husbandry; we encounter the three persons of God when we watch the skills of a surgeon in a real-life documentary, we encounter the three persons of God when we listen to the joyful sound of children’s laughter

At the moment I am on tenterhooks awaiting the birth of my first grandson, who will definitely be born of the flesh, and yet his arrival will reveal, as all new-born babies reveal, the Trinitarian presence of God, in creation, in love and in Spirit.

But what of Nicodemus, a devout Jew, a teacher of the Law; his mind was trained to obey God and to keep to the Law, yet his encounters with Jesus had led him to see a glimpse of God in the man Jesus, something had moved him to seek out a closer relationship and understanding that he was of God. Even so, he was trying to apply human logic and reasoning to something that clearly was beyond that.

Nicodemus was told he had to look beyond the physical and instead allow the spiritual to guide him. ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So, it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit’. And as St Paul suggests in his letter to the Romans, that instead of trying to elucidate God’s nature through the things that tie us to earthly conventions we must allow ourselves to be led by the Spirit as children of God. 

Perhaps we would be better to be content to admit that we cannot fully understand the Trinitarian nature of God, but rather to simply and faithfully accept that God exists eternally as one divine nature, substance, or essence, comprising three co-equal, co-eternal and consubstantial persons – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Instead to accept the truth that despite living in a perfect Triune relationship, which is completely self-sufficient and with no deficiency, he still chose to create and eventually redeem us at great cost to himself.  

If we bring to an end our attempts to cognitively master God and the fact that we cannot understand the full depth of the Trinity (and certainly not with any myriad of analogies from the limited realm of creation) it should bring us to the reality that we are finite creatures standing before a sovereign, transcendent divine mystery… or more appropriately, it should bring us to fall to our knees and humbly worship the One true God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

How Far Can We Trust God?

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Trust blog

How far can we trust God?

Our readings for Evensong on the second Sunday in Advent bring us the story of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, and his encounter with Gabriel in the Temple sanctuary. It gives us Luke’s introduction of how God’s divine plan is about to unfold…

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-11; Luke 1:1-25

May I speak and may you hear in the name of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

This evening our gospel reading leads us further into our Advent preparations and on this second Sunday of Advent we are reminded of the work of the prophets, and in particular we remember John the Baptist who stands as a link between the Old and New Testament. However, this evening it is not directly about John, but his parents, especially his father’s pre-conceptual reaction to the news of his divinely ordained fatherhood.

It is with this story that Luke begins his gospel and being the historian he is he is at pains to include in his dedication the care he is taking to make sure that we have an orderly and accurate account. He doesn’t set out Jesus’ ancestral claims like Matthew does; or the symbolic prose of John, or even start with John, the adult baptiser, appearing in the wilderness to fulfil Isaiah’s prophecy as in Mark’s gospel. No, Luke wants to start with a story of how people reacted to God’s preparations for the gift of his Son to the world. So, what does it tell us and how might we learn about our reactions from it?

We are introduced to Zechariah and Elizabeth, chosen by God to play an important role in Jesus’ story. I think we can safely say that neither of them were lukewarm nominal believers. Their credentials meant that they were righteous in the sight of God. Zechariah serving as a priest in the order of Abijah, which can be translated as ‘my Father is Yahweh’, and Elizabeth claiming descendancy from Aaron, God’s original high priest at the time of the Exodus. They walked blamelessly and observed all the commandments. In other words, they were obedient servants of God. Yet, for Zechariah there was an area in his life that resulted in some trust issues.

We can imagine that for a long time they had tried hard to conceive a child and had prayed to God about it, but no doubt as they grew older they had given up hope that it was likely to happen. So it is fairly reasonable that when Zechariah, alone in the sanctuary and terrified at the sudden appearance of an angel, is told that not only is he going to be a father, but that his child will play a pivotal role in proclaiming the arrival of the Messiah, that his first response is, ‘Are you sure? What proof can you offer for this?’

‘How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.’
Luke 1:18

He was confronted with a situation that required faith and trust. The faith bit he had in abundance but the trust was not so easy. Very often we too can face a lack of trust where God is concerned. It seems that we are happy to accept that love underpins our motivation to seek God and to follow his example but trust is harder to pin down. Often this difficulty has to do with our past experiences and our present situations. As humans our fall-back position is to initiate our self-reliance mode. It’s a primitive response to protect ourselves from perceived harm, thinking that we only have ourselves to rely on to get out of trouble

It can also be difficult to imagine stepping out of our comfort zones, but we have to remember that nothing is impossible with God, not even in areas where we have experienced nothing but failure, disappointments and frustration. We have to trust he is there to catch us when we fall and to uphold us as we move forward. It may be that we are holding back that trust because we are happy and comfortable to stay exactly where we are; but this can lead to stagnation; our faith never gets an opportunity to mature, or for our relationship with God to grow stronger as we grow closer to him.

God knows all things; he knows our hearts, our desire to be committed to him and sometimes our desire to be rebellious. But we have to be prepared to take the first necessary step to trust him in each area of our life. Take that step, then another and then the next one. This is the way to grow our faith in God, one step at a time… and how much easier is it as well to take those steps in the company of others, to be encouraged and to encourage each other. Because the more we hand over our lives to God and trust in him the more we can be freer to become the people that God is calling us to be.

With regard to Zechariah’s enforced silence following his lack of trust, I would not see this as a punishment for a lack of faith rather an opportunity for Zechariah to have space for reflection. If we fast forward to his son’s birth, we know that he had become reconciled to leaving things in God’s hands, for his first actions on having his speech restored to him was to speak in praise of God and to leave people amazed at just what his son was to become

We know he was to be ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’ but we also know that we too can be responsible to make this happen in our own lives. From Proverbs 3 ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.’

So, this Advent let us all be prepared to step away from self-reliance and instead step forward in faith and trust.

Amen

zechariah window

Zechariah and Gabriel at the incense altar in the Temple

What Does It Take For Us To Believe?

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'This is impossible' said Alice

‘This is impossible’ said Alice

Readings for the Second Sunday of Easter: Acts 4:32-35; 1 John 1:1 – 2:2; John 20:19 – end

On the second Sunday of Easter we find out that not everyone was yet ready to believe the incredible Easter news that Jesus was alive. Some people still had their doubts, including the apostle Thomas. We also hear how another apostle, John, was persuading a group of Christians that what he had witnessed first hand was the truth. Put that alongside the growing number of believers who were learning a new way of living as a community and suddenly the question of what it would take to enable us to believe is one that we might ask; which is exactly what I did in my sermon this morning

May I speak and may you hear through the grace of our Lord; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

If you don’t mind I’d like to start by conducting a straw poll with a show of hands. There are two main choices, but possibly an infinite number of circumstances and experiences that could fall into either of those categories.

I want you to think about your journey to faith, from when you first took an interest in Christianity to a point when you knew you believed. I wonder whether this was a sudden and datable experience or whether it was more of a gradual process, where you can perhaps remember a time when you didn’t believe and now you do but you don’t know exactly when that happened. Perhaps you’ve always believed or maybe you’re still on that journey.

None of these choices are better than the other, but it would be interesting to know, if you’re willing to share. Put your hands up [Reader, you too can join in, although remember that statistically the result will be 100% for whichever choice you raise your hand to] if your belief followed a sudden, ‘Damascus road’ type experience…… and now if your belief has been more gradual…… We’re actually quite representative of the average, which is about three-quarters describing it as gradual and a quarter as sudden.

I’d actually quite like to stop and hear from some of you about your journeys but I suppose I better carry on… because the really interesting bit might not be when it happened for those already there, but what it takes for us to believe.

The Incredulity of St Thomas blog

The Incredulity of St Thomas, Benjamin West (1738 -1820)

For Thomas it was the sheer physical proof of placing his hands on a man with whom he had spent the best part of the last three years and who he knew had been crucified, had died and had been shut up in a rock tomb and was now according to his friends and fellow disciples very much alive again; a man who was speaking to him and asking him not to doubt but to believe. This apparently indisputable proof led Thomas to publicly declare that Jesus was indeed ‘My Lord and my God’.

Where then does it leave those of us who will probably never have the opportunity to physically encounter Christ, at least not in the same way that those first disciples did? We are told that we are blessed more if we come to believe without seeing. Do we, therefore, come to belief because there are first-hand witness statements available to this event?

The First Letter of John

The First Letter of John

We don’t know for sure who the author of the first letter of John was, but from the very earliest of times it was believed to have been written by John, the fisherman and apostle of Jesus and bears striking similarities to the Gospel of John. Here is someone writing to one of the first group of Christians, who are somewhat unsure as their faith is being tested by spurious claims about whom Jesus really was; that he wasn’t actually human and didn’t really suffer on the cross; that he only ‘seemed’ human.

John writes to reassure these believers, that as a first-hand witness of Jesus’ ministry he and his friends saw and heard and touched Jesus when they became his disciples and shared his life. In this way their testimony is very convincing – they believed that Jesus was none other than the ‘Word’ of God – the source and meaning and purpose of life.

Even so, an eyewitness account is not quite the same as having concrete facts and figures, to inform our belief. Now before you get too excited I am not going to pull the ‘white rabbit’ of incontrovertible evidence out of my theological training ‘top hat’ but in amongst the minutia of historical data plenty of scholars and historian have investigated what might be myth and what could be reality.

WDITFUTB_Lament over the Dead Christ blog

Lament over the Dead Christ, Giovanni Bellini (c1432 – 1516)

We know that without a resurrection Christianity is counterfeit. As the apostle Paul tells the Corinthians, ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless’ 1 Corinthians 15:17. Accordingly, since a resurrection requires death, Jesus’ death by crucifixion has to be regarded as true. This ‘fact’ is attested to by a number of ancient sources, including the non-Christian historians, Josephus and Tacitus, who were therefore not biased toward a Christian interpretation of events.

We know that the chances of surviving crucifixion were very bleak and no evidence exists that Jesus was removed whilst still alive. The unanimous professional medical opinion is that Jesus certainly died due to the rigours of crucifixion, and even if he had somehow managed to survive, it would not have resulted in the disciples’ belief that he had been resurrected.

Il Precusore,

Il Precusore, Giulio Aristide Sartorio (1860 – 1932)

What about the empty tomb? Well its location was known to Christians and non-Christians alike. So if it hadn’t been empty, why would the chief priest have devised a plan to give a large sum of hush money to the guards, telling them to say that ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep’ Matthew 28:12-13. It would also have been pretty impossible for the large group of believers to have suddenly sprung up in the same city where Jesus had been publicly executed just a few weeks before and for those same believers to have been willing to die brutal martyr’s deaths if they knew this was all a lie.

Were people hallucinating when they encountered the risen Christ? Well, usually hallucinations are something that happens in an individual’s brain and not repeatedly on separate occasions and certainly not to groups of up to 500 people! 1 Corinthians 15:6 Even if they were visions, brought on by the apostle’s grief over the death of their leader, surely the body would have still been in the tomb.

Pascal's Wager

Pascal’s Wager

Convincing facts and figures? Well maybe. Or perhaps Pascal’s Wager might be the reason why people believe. Pascal was a seventeenth-century philosopher who theorised that humans live their lives by wagering that believing in God is a good bet because if when they die he does exist then they have gained the best of everything, on the other hand if they don’t believe and then find out he does exist then they made the worst choice and will have lost everything. However if they were to discover after death that God never existed then it didn’t matter what you believed.

So by believing, you are in a win-win situation. This sort of hedging my bets is just one accusation made against Christians who assume that because they believe in the right God, they are automatically good and have a one-way ticket to everlasting life. However, it also assumes that God would always reward blind faith above living a conscious Christ-centred life and all of the obligations that that might bring.

WDITFUTB_Belief is truth blogPerhaps belief and faith are different then… that belief is something that our logical, human minds hold to be true whilst faith is something that is felt deep within our hearts. Or could it be that faith is based on belief and that is why faith alone is not possible because belief always brings about actions and reactions?

Some people might even say that faith is truth held in the mind and that belief is a fire in the heart. Perhaps we just can’t separate the mind and heart, because as we heard ‘The community of believers were of one heart and one mind’ Acts 4:32

I hope you’ve been aware that I’ve been careful to never actually define what it is exactly that we understand and count as belief. Some might say that’s a cop-out; that the church is forever allowing so much laissez-faire around declaring what it believes and stands for that it nullifies any claims it might have to the truth. Well, I’m sure that for the majority of us it will include the belief that Jesus died and was resurrected in order that we might ‘have life in his name’, but that for each of us that might mean something slightly different depending where we are on our journey of faith.

As we walk together in fellowship with each other and with God, let’s make sure that we’re not only helping each other to increase in faith, but that we are sharing our beliefs with others so that God’s joy may be complete. After all didn’t Jesus say ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’. So let’s go and open a few more eyes to the truth of what we believe.

Amen

John 20:29

John 20:29

On A Midnight Train From Georgia

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Baptism of Christ Icon - written by Tamara Rigishvili

Baptism of Christ Icon – written by Tamara Rigishvili

To be honest I don’t know if it really was put on the midnight train, or any train for that matter. Maybe it came by plane or postal van, but however it travelled, it arrived safely at my door last week.

The truth though is that it did come from Georgia – Tbilisi, Georgia to be exact – some 2,653 miles to the east of my home, where the very talented artist Tamara Rigishvili lives and works. However, the creation of this beautiful icon came about in what was for me an unusual series of events, which culminated in owning what has become to me a very important representation of the story of Jesus’ baptism.

In April of 2014, I wrote about using this icon to explain the actions performed while making the sign of the cross in Coming Into The Presence of God. Wanting to upload an image of the icon that has been used on that day, I googled several images and came up with one that was taken from Tamara’s website. However, I felt that I needed to get authority to do that, and so I e-mailed her and sought permission, asking her to check out the contents of my blog and with the promise of a link to her site.

Christ submerged in the water of the Jordan

Christ submerged in the water of the Jordan

Thus a correspondence was begun between two people, thousands of miles apart, who did not know each other, did not necessarily speak the same language (although Tamara’s English is excellent, whilst my schoolgirl Russian is yet to be tested); connected by their common faith, and which resulted in my asking if she would ‘write’ a copy of the icon for me. True to her word, she completed the icon over a three month period and it was then carefully packaged and despatched…

… In the meanwhile, as part of my spiritual direction at college, it was suggested that I meditate on Matthew 3:13-17. This description of Jesus’ baptism is just one of the bible’s explicit passages where the Trinity appear together.

And when Jesus had been baptised, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’
Matthew 3:16-17

As a Trinitarian at heart, I have always found that the three-fold nature of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit has both fascinated and frustrated me. On the one hand each has its own separate identity and characteristics, on the other they are all one and the same. I do not argue against this nor do I find it easy to explain – although traditionally in the Church of England, as a curate it usually falls to their lot to preach on Trinity Sunday each year – so I better get my thoughts in some order by then!

The passage itself presents a beautiful image of being submerged beneath water, and then a figure rising in a sparkling cascade to see the sky above suffused with a pure light that is concentrated in a shaft centred on their head and a clear voice filling the air with a confirmation of their worthiness. What, it was suggested, if that figure were you?

So often we can feel unworthy, and could not imagine such a thing, but we are invited to do so by God as he offers us his love and grace. ‘This is my daughter… this is Linda… this is [insert your name here]’.

I don’t believe that God arranges for these things to come together without a purpose, so as I spend time contemplating that passage alongside my beautiful icon, I hope and pray that you too will accept that grace, knowing that you ARE worthy to receive it.

Matthew 3:13-17

Matthew 3:13-17

For more details of Tamara Rigishvili artwork, please do visit her website