St Mary, Balcombe Trinity Sunday 12th June 2022

 

Today we celebrate the revelation of God as an eternal fellowship of love, three persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendour, yet one God.

The doctrine of the most holy and undivided Trinity is challenging, relevant, intriguing and essential – four headings to steer our delving this morning into foundational truth and life.

Firstly it’s a challenge. Reason takes you so far in Christianity. We could never have invented God in three persons, its revealed truth. Then you have the question of weighing other revelations – Islam and Hinduism besides the Judaism from which the Trinitarian revelation came. 

Preachers go on leave this Sunday for fear of a seemingly cold, calculated, mathematical doctrine. Three in one and one in three. Why three? Why not one, says Islam, why not more says Hinduism, why not none says the atheist mocking our feeble attempts to get our mind round God three in one.

There’s the challenge set before us in Trinitarian faith but that challenge is based on historical events. These clearly reveal the nature of God in the coming of Jesus, whose death and resurrection we’ve been following up to Ascension Day, and the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost Day. It’s a challenge that might lead you to the library or the internet so you can better answer for your faith to those who believe in one God, no God or many gods as opposed to one God in three persons.

Secondly the doctrine of the Trinity is utterly relevant. I’ve been busy preparing couples for marriage recently and how good that’s been, yes, how countercultural even given the falling away in this commitment. Marriage as a union of life-giving love points us to the Trinity, because human beings are in the image of God who is himself a union of life-giving love. Keeping true to ourselves as human beings, and true to the life-giving nature of marriage is keeping true to God as he has revealed himself to us.  God as love within himself. How could God be so without the distinction of persons within him? 

Challenging, relevant – thirdly the doctrine of God should be intriguing. The eternal fellowship of love that is God draws us into himself. What after all is the Church for other than to serve God’s purpose to bring as many souls on earth as possible into fellowship with him? 

The doctrine of the Trinity is revealed first of all in Our Lord’s coming into a human family with Mary and Joseph, into village life in Nazareth, then into the missionary partnership of the disciples. That divine society continues after his resurrection and the gift of the Spirit as one, holy catholic and apostolic church which is God’s never-ending family!

How intriguing God is, and we are. If you want evidence for God look in the mirror and read Psalm 8 You have made (us) little lower than the angels and crown (us) with glory and honour. More than that, a human being in isolation isn’t a true human for, in John Donne’s words, no man is an island. What’s intriguing about God as divine society mirrors what we find intriguing about ourselves, namely our desire for society and friendship. This desire will be fully satisfied only in the communion of saints who can be thought of as standing near God as a corona or crown around the sun.

Challenging, relevant, intriguing – lastly the Trinitarian doctrine of God is essential.

It is essential because Christianity is a religion of salvation and that salvation stands or falls on the divinity of Jesus Christ. We read Jesus words in today’s Gospel all that the Father has is mine…the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you (John 16:15). 

Does my eternal destiny depend on my own good works, lacking as they are, or on a relationship freely offered me by God in his Son? 

In Jesus do we really meet with God himself? 

These, as they say, are the twenty four thousand dollar questions hidden behind keeping a feast day for the Blessed Trinity. 

The doctrine might sound cold and mathematical but it follows a logic of love, love beyond all measure, extravagant, unconditional love for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son Jesus Christ so that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

To believe this is to believe God isn’t One but One God in three persons. 

It’s challenging to so believe – God is God and has revealed himself in this way and not another way.

It’s relevant - the way we see God affects the way we see ourselves and steers us from unworthy pursuits.

It’s intriguing because the loving fellowship of God in three persons chimes in with our sociable nature and draws it to joyful completion in the communion of saints

It’s essential doctrine because without it the divinity of Christ falls, the word of God is emptied of power and the sacraments become empty ritual as God’s coming to us in Jesus and the Spirit is denied.

May all I have shared enrich the eucharist we now offer through, with and in Jesus Christ, to whom, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and for evermore. Amen.

St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath Abrahamic religions 30.6.21

If the seven and a half billion inhabitants of the world were but 100 we’re told there’d be: 33 Christians, 21 Muslims, 13 Hindus, 6 Buddhists, 12 people who practice other religions and 14 people of no religion.

Given these statistics, we, as Christians, need discernment over how we share about Christ and engage in as positive a way as we can in a context where awareness of the variety of religions is widespread.

I have a few thoughts on this as the weekday Lectionary centres on Abraham as father of faith. He is so for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the so-called Abrahamic faiths. In today’s reading from Genesis 21 we see the protection of Hagar’s son Ishmael seen as father of Muslims parallel to Sarah’s son Isaac revered especially by Jews and Christians. God promises Abram I will bless you and make your name great. So he has, as Paul says Abraham is the father of us all. His faith is in the same God we put faith in who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Romans 4:17

Our Old Testament reading reminds us both of our Jewish roots and our links with Islam. Earlier this year the great theologian Hans Kung died at a good age just short of his century. In his later years he was involved in inter faith dialogue and this must be one of his most quoted sayings: ‘There’ll be no peace in the world without peace between religions and no peace between religions without understanding between religions’.

Earlier this week I posted on Facebook one of my ‘Fifty Walks from Haywards Heath’, a circular from St Wilfrid’s to The Ascension via the Mosque. I did so among other reasons to help put the Mosque on the map. It's sad that many people in our town don’t even know where the Mosque is!

In John chapter 14, verse 6 Christ said: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me’ and in Chapter 18 v38; ‘Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.’ 

If everyone believed that life would be simpler and I wouldn’t be speaking as I am this morning!   Putting it in a more challenging way to you and I, the existence of other religions is proof of our failure to meet with Jesus at a deep level and become the heart to heart draw we’re meant to be through his magnetic love. 

What though of those who’re drawn elsewhere? We see distortions of Christ’s truth in faiths and also approximations. 

Saying yes to Jesus does not mean saying ‘no’ to everything about other faiths. It can mean saying ‘yes, but…’ or rather ‘yes, and…’ to other faiths, which is a far more engaging and reasonable attitude…. I say ‘yes’ to what Muslims say about God’s majesty because sometimes Christians seem to domesticate God and forget his awesome nature. At the same time, I differ with Muslims about how we gain salvation, because I believe Jesus is God’s salvation gift and more than a prophet.

Other faiths can wake us up to aspects of Christian truth that can get forgotten, like the awesome nature of God in Christ. When I visited our Mosque for Friday Prayers I was struck by seeing so many bowing down physically to God, especially as kneeling in Church seems to happen less.

‘There’ll be no peace in the world without peace between religions and no peace between religions without understanding between religions’ (Hans Kung). Bowing down to God is something all three Abrahamic religions, Jewish, Christian and Muslim have in common. Our God is an awesome God - may he build peace in the world through better worship and mutual understanding across faiths.

St John, Burgess Hill Trinity Sunday 30.5.21

Shortly after I was ordained priest I had a crisis of faith. I went back to where I had trained. It was a chance to work out what should happen next since I hardly believed in the reality of God anymore. While there I was taken under the wing of Fr. Daniel, one of the Mirfield monks. He gave me this advice: ‘Maybe, John, it is not God who's gone but your vision of him. Why not pray an honest prayer, like, ‘God, if you're there, show yourself. Give me a vision of yourself that's to your dimensions and not mine’. With nothing to lose I prayed Fr. Daniel’s prayer over two cliff-hanging days. Then God answered. He chose a leaf on a tree in the monastery garden. I was walking along with no particular thought in my head when my eyes fell on the leaf and it was as if it spoke to me. ‘He made you’, the leaf seemed to say. I was bowled over. As I moved forward I saw the great Crucifix that stands in the garden. ‘I made you. I love you’, the figure of Jesus seemed to say. ‘Father, Son...what about the Holy Spirit?’, my mind was spinning. The Father was saying ‘I made you’, the Son ‘I love you’. Could it be that the Spirit was saying ‘I want to fill you’? A group of monks prayed for me to be filled afresh with the Holy Spirit and from that day forward God has seemed closer to me in people and nature as well as in church. 

This experience has helped me understand what it means to pray ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen’. It was as if my vision of God had grown too ‘samey’ and needed to get ‘different’ and only God could do that, the living God who speaks to anyone prepared to lend an ear to him. In reminding me ‘I made you’ God used a leaf to speak to me – a leaf out of his book of nature!

God is different from us and yet the same as us. We humans are individual persons but God is three persons in one God which goes beyond reason. That is the great thing about God - his frontiers are beyond ours so he can invite us into new territories by what he chooses to reveal to us. The supreme territory is the life of the resurrection. Because of its core historical events, in Christianity talk of God is inseparable from a vision of him beyond this world. Austin Farrer makes this plain in one of his sermons: ‘You can equivocate for ever on God's very existence... but a God who reverses nature, a God who undoes death, that those in whom the likeness of his glory has faintly and fitfully shone may be drawn everlastingly into the heart of light, and know him as he is: this is a God indeed, a God almighty, a God to be trusted, loved and adored’. The Bible says ‘God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’ and the gift of reason is seen as the mark of that image within us. By reason we can evaluate the goodness, truth and beauty around us as pointing to God as being more of the same. Yet there are things our minds cannot grasp like suffering and death, people who forgive one another and the immensity of space. Such realities reveal themselves to us as being bigger than our minds or beyond reason.

God has sameness to us and difference from us. Since God is one in himself and one with us in Jesus Christ we can experience his sameness. He is our loving source and ending, our Father. We are the children he loves and wants to be with him for ever. God’s sameness appeals to us as reasonable beings. Since God is revealed in history as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons in one God, he is gloriously different from us, with space and power to bring all other persons into communion with himself. This space and power was revealed upon earth in a human life of 33 years. God’s space, power and holiness is so different from ours it needed bringing to focus, so we could see it, through God becoming a human being in the person of Jesus. ‘As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God’s light and fire to a point that sets fire to the spirit of man’. So wrote the great Christian mystic and writer Thomas Merton.

I got into a conversation at Sainsbury’s. The young man at the till didn’t go to Church but I’ll not forget what he said: ‘God’s all powerful but they make him to be a wimping wimp!’ This observation brought back to me a frequent complaint made by the great explorer Laurens Van der Post about the Church’s domestication of God which might be behind non-attendance of folk like my friend at the till. The explorer wrote: ‘One of the strangest ideas ever conceived is the idea that religion is the opium of the people, because religion is a call to battle.. human beings in their rational selves.. shy like frightened horses away from a God who is not the source of opium for people but a reawakening of creation and a transcending of the forces and nuclear energies in the human soul’.

Van der Post was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War Two and lived under the threat of execution. A date was set. The night before he records experiencing a tremendous thunderstorm outside his prison. He saw in this storm a strengthening as if from the awesome truth of a God so different he can raise the dead. The Japanese were not ultimately in control. The storm witnessed a greater than human power which in the end would decide all. He was spared execution. God’s all powerful - may he forgive us for making him ‘a wimping wimp’! 

May God also forgive those of us who put him into words and make him seem neat and tidy. Theology is putting together human words about a reality beyond words. It is necessary because God in Christ, so different from us, has made himself the same as us by taking flesh and bidding us write words about him. Scripture takes precedence over all such words, a library of inspired documents, presenting God as awesome yet accessible in Christ. 

All religions claim some sort of revelation of God. Hindus see many gods expressing affinity or sameness with ordinary life. Muslims see one God above and beyond us whose utter difference from us seems to exclude any sameness. Christians are in the middle with three persons in one God, a God who is personal like ourselves but also beyond us as the ground of our being. 

God for Christians is different from us not just because of what he says about himself through scripture - or to put it inclusively what God says about Godself - but on account of our experience of that difference as believers as I found in the monastery garden and the supermarket and Van der Post discovered in prison.

Engagement with God is a calling forth both of the light of reason and the light of faith which together lift us beyond ourselves into his praise. As the word of God written in the prophet Isaiah states: ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9).

Trinity 11 (22A) Archbishop Justin Welby 31st August 2014

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep Paul says in the continuation of Romans 12 set for today. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

As I read these words I recall with you what I shared last week about Romans 12-15 being Paul’s ethical application of the doctrine of Christ set forth in Romans 1-11. I also recall how a book I recently read chimes in well as a topical illustration of this teaching. Anne and I have both profitably read the newly published work of Andrew Atherstone with title Archbishop Justin Welby Risk-taker and Reconciler.

If ever there was a job to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep it’s that of a priest and even more so that of a bishop. As we all know leading Anglicans is no plain sailing whether you’re Rector of Horsted Keynes or Archbishop of Canterbury. Leading the Church of England is as easy as taking your cat for a walk!

Justin Welby is an impressive figure. From a successful career in the oil industry he was appointed among other reasons because he was easy in his own skin which seems rare among clerics. The lack of ease of his job is such that his predecessor as Archbishop talked of needing ‘the constitution of an ox and the skin of a rhinoceros’. Like many impressive figures he has shown great bravery working with Canon Andrew White now in Baghdad but formerly in Coventry where I briefly knew him and Justin when we were priests in a Diocese famous for its ministry of reconciliation. The Archbishop wears around his neck a cross built from nails found in the ruins of the bombed Cathedral which burned to the ground in September 1941. Before his appointment his work on international reconciliation brought him like Canon White on occasion within an inch of his life.  A year into the job as Archbishop  that track record for reconciliation has been extended through his establishing a settlement for women bishops, charting a way forward re same sex unions and setting forth an agenda for prayer, monasticism, church growth and kingdom-oriented social engagement that sees Churches reconciled with the Pope as a leading partner.

On the night of the women bishops vote he appeared on Newsnight literally to Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. Our Archbishop spoke directly to those found in deep pain that July night He has shared life sufficiently with people like me and my ecclesiastical neighbour Lisa Barnett at Scaynes Hill to be equipped to make what was bad disagreement into good disagreement. My ‘two cheers for women bishops’ in P&P has Lisa very much in mind and takes a leaf out of Justin Welby’s book.

When you share life with people, as we do here at St Giles, you grow through tolerance of difference to respect of difference. You really can rejoice when they rejoice even if what they’re rejoicing in is painful to you. Paul knew and taught this. So does our Archbishop and so should we! For example it’s not good enough to tolerate Muslims – we need to respect them, which means have the capacity to imagine ourselves in their shoes, something friendship can achieve.

Andrew Atherstone’s book on Welby is peppered with joyous life, growth and change far more typical of the Church of England than letters to Church Times would have you believe.  Sympathy with our Eton educated subject is won by tale of a broken home which sent him to boarding school and no doubt skills him in dealing with dysfunction in his Anglican family.

Intellectual brilliance made him a fast riser in the oil industry and the church as ‘risk-taker and reconciler…able…to synthesise a lot of information quickly and under pressure’ be that linked to collapse of oil prices or Anglican affairs. 

Throughout the book there are quotes of how Jesus on the Cross impacts him: ‘The cross is the moment of deepest encounter and most radical change. God is crucified – my Friend died – in some way, for me. ... A person caught by the implications of the cross will be a person who has found the fullness of the life which is the gift of God through him…  The cross is the great pointer where the suffering, and the sorrow, and torture, and trial, and sin, and yuck of the world ends up on God’s shoulders, out of love for us’. 

This profound sense of redemption underlies his strong sense of the church. Again I quote: ‘Because God has brought us together [as his Church] we are stuck with each other and we had better learn to do it the way God wants us to. That means in practice that we need to learn diversity without enmity, to love not only those with whom we agree but especially those with whom we do not agree’.  This sort of sentiment echoes that of Paul before us this morning in Romans 12. As Archbishop he says he isn’t trying to get everyone to agree but to transform bad disagreement into good disagreement, working for unity not unanimity. I quote: ‘Reconciliation among Christians does not have unanimity at its heart, or tolerance, but the capacity to love despite disagreement, and to differ and be diverse without breaking fellowship. The difficulty is where to draw the boundaries and decide that a difference is of such fundamental importance that a breakdown of fellowship is necessary’.

Speaking last year at a commemoration of the great 17th century Anglican writer Jeremy Taylor he describes our Anglican scenario in these words: ‘Like a drunk man walking near the edge of a cliff, we trip and totter and slip and wander, ever nearer to the edge of the precipice. It is a dangerous place, a narrow path we walk as Anglicans at present. On one side is the steep fall into an absence of any core beliefs, a chasm where we lose touch with God, and thus we rely only on ourselves and our own message. On the other side there is a vast fall into a ravine of intolerance and cruel exclusion. It is for those who claim all truth, and exclude any who question. When we fall into this place, we lose touch with human beings and create a small church, or rather many small churches – divided, ineffective in serving the poor, the hungry and the suffering, incapable of living with each other, and incomprehensible to those outside the church’.

This description brought me back to today’s section of St Paul. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; Paul says. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Our own readiness to accept and respect fellow Christians of different belief or, as with Islam or militant atheism, those far from our own conviction, will invest love which always brings a return.  Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. 

I close repeating one of the Archbishop’s quotations:  A person caught by the implications of the cross will be a person who has found the fullness of the life which is the gift of God through him... It is out of that fullness brought us here in the eucharist that we gain courage to say, and not just of fellow Christians, because God has brought us together we are stuck with each other and we had better learn to do it the way God wants us to.  So be it! Let’s apply it!

Lent 2 Abrahamic religions 16th March 2014

If the 6 billion inhabitants of the world were but 100, there’d be: 31 Christians, 21 Muslims, 14 Hindus, 6 Buddhists, 12 people who practice other religions and 16 people who’d not be aligned with a religion.

Among the last two groups there’ll be a good number who raise the thought we’re to engage with in this week’s Talking Points, namely the claim that ‘all religions lead to God’.

Given these statistics, we, as Christians, need discernment over how we share about Christ and talk forward from this assertion in as positive a way as we can in a context where awareness of the variety of religions is widespread, even in Horsted Keynes!

I want to get us thinking about all of this on a Sunday when the Lectionary centres helpfully on Abraham as father of faith. He is so for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the so-called Abrahamic faiths. In our first reading from Genesis God promises to Abram I will bless you and make your name great. So he has, as Paul says in the second reading Abraham is the father of us all. His faith as a Jew is in the same God we put faith in who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Our worship reminds us all the time of our Jewish roots. We chose for our entrance procession an Abraham hymn used to open Synagogue worship with last verse amended. The preface chant I sing at the Eucharistic prayer has beauty because it traces right back to Jewish worship, as does the whole idea of ‘eucharist’ or berakah, thanksgiving.

Let’s go back though, thinking beyond the three Abrahamic religions to list five approaches to the varieties of religion in the world today since we want to get our minds and hearts engaged with this key issue. It’s key if only because though in a sense religion is God-given it’s also heavily man-handled – even the Christian religion - and hence the source of division in the world.

This morning’s teaching is important since, as Hans Kung once said, there’ll be no peace in the world without peace between religions and no peace between religions without understanding between religions. Put this morning down to our going for deeper understanding from a Christian vantage point.

There are five possible approaches to the existence of different religions:

• All religions are false
• One religion only is true, the others completely false
• One religion only is true, the others mere approximations or distortions
• All religions are true in what they agree about; and false wherever they disagree
• All religions are true and any contradictions are superficial.

‘All religions are false’ is the first approach and such is the ownership of that approach we felt it right to run ‘Talking Points’ in Lent to help us better engage with our detractors.

‘One religion only is true, the others completely false’ is a view we can quickly gauge from ‘door to door religion sales folk’, Rector excepted – I mean Jehovah’s Witnesses and to some extent Mormons. Roman Catholics were said to hold ‘outside the church there is no salvation’ but  now clearly deny they do so, with recent teaching accepting in some degree the baptised of any Church and looking positively, from a salvation angle, on all who follow their conscience.

As you can guess as a good Anglican I’m aiming for the middle thesis that ‘one religion only is true, the others mere approximations or distortions’. I’ll come back to this.

‘All religions are true in what they agree about; and false wherever they disagree’ may have some truth about it in identifying a hierarchy of truth but it is over optimistic about the clash of truth claims there is between religions.

Lastly  ‘All religions are true and any contradictions are superficial’.

Again too optimistic – some of you may have heard this very beguiling story along those lines from Kevin O’Donnell’s book ‘Inside World Religions’ .

‘There were five blind Hindu holy men on the banks of the Ganges. A tame elephant wandered among them one day. One reached out and touched its body; he thought it was a wall of mud. One touched its tusks and thought these were two spears. One touched its trunk and thought it was a serpent. One touched its tail and thought it was a piece of rope. The last one laughed at them and held onto its leg. He said it was a tree after all. A child walked by and asked, ‘Why are you all holding the elephant?’

The story is quite seductive, a sort of ‘plague on all your houses’ that fits those who say ‘all religions lead to God’. The parable is used by Hindus to teach each faith has the truth but not the complete picture.

So where does this lead us? As I said earlier to the third thesis that one religion only is true, the others mere approximations or distortions’ which is the consensus of most Christian churches.

In John chapter 14, verse 6 Christ said: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me’ and in Chapter 18 v38; ‘Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.’

If everyone believed that life would be simpler and I wouldn’t be speaking as I am this morning!   Putting it in a more challenging way to you and I, the existence of other religions is proof of our failure to meet with Jesus at a deep level and become the heart to heart draw we’re meant to be through his magnetic love.

What though of those who’re drawn elsewhere? We see distortions of Christ’s truth in faiths and also approximations.  If you read my book ‘Meet Jesus’ it has a section on how I see other faiths where I write:

‘Saying yes to Jesus does not mean saying ‘no’ to everything about other faiths. It can mean saying ‘yes, but…’ or rather ‘yes, and…’ to other faiths, which is a far more engaging and reasonable attitude.

I say ‘yes’ to what Buddhists teach about detachment because Jesus teaches it and Christians often forget it. At the same time I must respectfully question Buddhists about the lack of a personal vision of God since I believe Jesus is God’s Son.  

I say ‘yes’ to what Muslims say about God’s majesty because sometimes Christians seem to domesticate God and forget his awesome nature. At the same time, I differ with Muslims about how we gain salvation, because I believe Jesus is God’s salvation gift and more than a prophet.’

Other faiths can wake us up to aspects of Christian truth that might otherwise get forgotten. What might happen, for example, if Christians were as serious in their spiritual discipline as many Buddhists are?’

In conclusion I invite you to think through this week’s questions along those very same lines – ‘What good do you see in people of other faith?’ Then, mindful of the Gospel reading this morning , that God so loved the world he gave us his only son, I invite you to think about what’s very basic to us as Christians namely the question ‘Can religion lead you to God?’ Our faith sees religion as expressing love in return for love since in Christianity it is God who leads us to God.

So it is this morning in the eucharist – we can lift our hearts to God in the eucharist only because God so loved us as to give us Jesus whose word and body are the subject of this service.