This is Our God

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Trinity Sunday and Father’s day, that is what today is, and on this day we have also baptized Paul Kratter. So three themes flow together, and I am pleased to say that they blend beautifully. Let me show you how as I try to present our God. Of course, only God can make Himself present, if He chooses to bless us today, since we are at His beck and call and not He at ours. (The reverse would be magic, and faith is as far from magic as it is from superstition). God has promised to be present when we come together in the name of Jesus, and we call His presence the Holy Spirit, so let us invoke that presence and start our reflection on three themes. The themes are God as the Father of Jesus and those who identify with Jesus, the nature of baptism as identification with Jesus, and the triune nature of God that follows from this starting point in Jesus.

The Holy Trinity is the name we use for God because we begin and end our knowledge of God with Jesus. If I were to look at the world without any knowledge of the divine self-revelation in Jesus I would probably not believe in God at all. I would probably be convinced by the uncertain balance of good and evil in human life, and the ultimate triviality of that balance since all life ends in nothingness anyway, - a river that dashes over the waterfall of death and disappears in the ocean of oblivion –that time and chance, control everything. I think that a reasonable person would agree with me in this view, and many do; but it is not my view.

It is not my view, because I have seen Jesus and learned from what he did and what he said, who he is, and I have believed His self-presentation as the only-begotten Son of God. God gave Him to us as an expression of His love. “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).” What love is this, that gives such a gift? Divine love! We can imagine giving our own life for another, or for some great cause, but the life of our child? I have accepted that gift with boundless gratitude; I believe a Christian is one who has accepted the gift. I cannot imagine anyone refusing it. “No thanks, God!?”

Those like us, and today especially like Paul Kratter, who accept the gift and identify with the love by taking upon ourselves in baptism the name of the Trinity, are born again into another world than the world of time and chance. It is a world governed by God, who is faithful to His promise to bless us. God’s governance is seen in and through Jesus Christ. When we look at the world through him we see not the uncertain balance of good and evil but the dominance of the good and the triumph of life, not a river that loses itself in a sea of oblivion but a Way that leads through Truth to Life, and the assurance of this is the Spirit in us who enables us to cry to God, “Abba! Father!”

So we touch the theme of Father’s day. Lately theologians have challenged the term Father as appropriate to God, because they claim it is a gender specific term and God is beyond gender. We Christians call God Father not because we think He is male, - indeed, the Apostle we are quoting says explicitly that in Christ there is no male nor female (Galatians 3:8), - but because the Holy Spirit causes us to cry out “Abba, Father!” and when the Spirit inspires us to say that He is putting the words of Jesus into our mouth. We call God Father simply because Jesus called Him Father, and the Spirit gives us that name to say. I believe that Jesus was first called the Son because when his disciples heard him pray to his Father they recognized a special relationship. Jesus is not just a son of God in the sense that we are all metaphorically God’s children because we are His creatures, but in a unique way. Jesus’ use of the term Father in prayer struck a chord of unparalleled intimacy and authority, and this was the beginning of address “Son of God.” Later the ritual acclamations of worship, inspired by the Spirit, had Christians calling Jesus Son of God as a matter of course, themselves adopted children of God through identification with Jesus, and the God behind all this, the incomprehensible, ineffable, inconceivable, invisible one, the Father. I personally am theologically frozen at that point, God for me is the one whom Jesus called Father, Jesus is for me the one whom God called Son, and the power that enables me to see and confess this we call the Holy Spirit. So you see how naturally the idea of God as one and three follows from the starting point of Jesus. God is the Father of Jesus, Jesus is the Son of God and the Spirit is the one who puts the words of Jesus, “Abba, Father” into our mouths and hearts.

Let me close with some brief examples of how this understanding of God accounts for our experience in the world. Firstly, we must accept that “the world” in this context describes humanity in so far as we are hostile to God, refuse to believe in Him, expel Him from our lives. It is the City constituted by the love of self to the exclusion of God, to quote St Augustine. Secondly we must accept that God entered this hostile city in the only way adequate to His purpose to change and save it, namely as a human being subject to the world’s power to hurt and harm. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory…(John 1:14).”

Given these two premises we are delivered from the most telling arguments against the existence of God: Firstly, the argument that God should have and should continue to prevent evil. That kind of God, - who can do what He pleases and whose power is like the power of the police force or the Marine Corps - does not exist. The existing God is the Father of Jesus Christ, and He could not rescue His Son from the Cross. If you bring to the phenomenon of Jesus an image of God derived from elsewhere, - from dreams of omnipotence, super hero comic books, omni-competent parents, - to the facts of the world, you must give up belief in God. The facts of life in this world refute the existence of the super hero God. If on the other hand you take your idea of God from Jesus, you find the one true God whose power is the power of suffering and victorious love, not the power of sheer force, nor moral manipulation, but enduring, indefeasible love. Like Jesus in Gethsemane pleading with his Father to be excused from the horrible task ahead, like Jesus before Pilate silently accepting the injustice of the world, like Jesus on the Cross absorbing the human rage against God for not being the heroic God of the last minute rescue, like Jesus on the day of Resurrection, forgiving his murderers and proclaiming peace to his betrayers, that is what the true God is like. This is the God of Jesus Christ, not the God of our fantasies and desires. This is the true God.

The second thing that the true God, who has entered our world as Jesus Christ, delivers us from, is the notion that a message is all we need, a law code, or a set of instructions, that we do not need God Himself to enter our lives and our world. I spoke of this last Sunday as settling for a map rather than a traveling companion on the Way to Truth and Life. The truth is that only a God who goes with us is adequate to our need, because the journey is part of the destination as the means is part of the end. If you do not want Life with you now as the way you will not want life with you then as the destination, and that life is God the Holy Spirit with us as the memory of Jesus.

Finally, this Trinitarian God delivers us from the unrealistic notion that if we are good and obey all the rules everything will go well for us. That is perhaps the cruelest hoax that the idea of God as distant lawgiver and guardian of an abstract retributive justice plays on us. Because of it we ask such pathetic questions as, “Why me? What have I done to deserve this? Why does that crooked s.o.b flourish while good little me does not? Why does God not protect the good, or just everybody for that matter?” The God whom Jesus called Father rules by going with us through all our trials, and triumphs in the end when it really matters, that is, when we leave behind this world with all its injustice, and all our successes or failures, and enter into eternal life. We are God’s heirs and God has a Kingdom for us to inherit. Christ is Risen and Ascended and we shall be with him in glory. That is where the Truth of the Way becomes clear.

So let the Holy Spirit sound in your heart the “Abba, Father” of Jesus and thus take you up into the inner life of the Holy Trinity.

Amen.