On Being a Christian

Sundays after Pentecost Proper 14 [19] Year B

A long time ago, right after I finished High School, I was offered a place at Mount Lawley Teacher’s College.  This was a very different kind of place to a university – where the goal is to increase your knowledge about whatever it is that you were studying – maths, science, history?  Whichever.

As a Primary School Teacher, I already knew more than I would need to know – so far as KNOWLEDGE goes.  What I didn’t know yet was how to BE a TEACHER.  There were indeed some very practical teaching skills I needed to learn, but the most important work I had to do there was learning how to BE a person who would inspire curiosity in children and empower them to learn – something that is much more easily said than done.

I think that many of the early Christians knew that BEING a Christian was also something much more easily said than done.

Our selection from Ephesians this week – 4:25-5:2 – takes up a challenge laid out in the verses preceding it.

So get rid of your old self, which made you live as you used to - the old self that was being destroyed by its deceitful desires.  Your hearts and minds must be made completely new, and you must put on the new self, which is created in God's likeness and reveals itself in the true life that is upright and holy.

This, of course, invites us to ask certain questions; like

            What exactly does all this mean?

            What does this new life look like? and

            How will I know if I am living it?

I think our selection today is trying to flesh out the answers to questions like these.

There are some interesting little rules in this selection.  Some seem to be echoes of Old Testament rules, while others have echoes from elsewhere in the New Testament writings and some even have an echo of the local philosophical ideas.  None of them are particularly striking, really, are they?

But the one thing that I think is interesting about them is that six times we are given a particular reason why we should behave in that particular way; and perhaps even more interesting is that none of these reasons are in the form of a threat; they simply appeal this sense of what the Christian identity is all about.

Truthful speech becomes a requirement for the Christian community because “we are all members together in the body of Christ.”  Now you realise that “member” in this context is something far more intimate that being on the parish electoral roll.  It means being a member like a body part is a member of your body.   Being untruthful among ourselves is like the eye telling the nose that it isn’t smelling an onion – it actually couldn’t do that.  So it should not be possible for a Christian to be less than truthful.

The little rules about anger are interesting.  Anger is a really powerful emotion – you only have to see a little kid getting scared of how strong their own reaction of anger is to realise this.  We can also think of stories of road rage in our own time to understand how our anger can lead us to doing really bad things.  Here we have an appeal to beware of forces outside the community that are capable of undermining our strength.

One thing we noticed about this part on Thursday morning was that we are not old not to be angry.  We are simply told not to let that anger lead us into sin.

The next one is a bit of a surprise, isn’t it?  Anyone who used to rob is told to stop robbing, not because robbery is wrong, but because it is far better for them to earn an honest living. 

The matter of our speech is raised again.  How easy it is to utter harmful words.  However, in the Christian community, we are here encouraged to do our utmost to build each other up with our words, rather than tear each other down.  Again, we have a positive reason given for behaving differently rather than a rule that we should not do this.

Did you notice the little reference to the Holy Spirit?  I love that idea that the Spirit is what marks us a God’s forever, but this reference is right in the middle of what we have before us and it seems to me this emphasises a vital consequence of our failure to live in the prescribed way – the Spirit of God is grieved.

The last area of behaviour that is focussed on is forgiveness.  This really is a hard area of life for us sometimes.  When someone hurts us we generally hold back forgiveness for as long as we think we can get away with it.  Along with these words in which we are encouraged to see the example of God’s willingness to forgive us our failures as a motivation to forgive those who have offended us, my three year old granddaughter has a message for us all from her favourite cartoon movie – “Let it go!  Let it go!” a song from the movie Frozen. 

There is an epithet of local wisdom going around that “withholding forgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”  It is a good analogy because I think it illustrates well the effect upon us of the poison.  But we are called to live differently – forgiving others because God has forgiven us through Christ.

So then, all these little rules and their motivating assertions come together like a climax in the final verses of our selection:

Since you are God's dear children, you must try to be like him.  Your life must be controlled by love, just as Christ loved us and gave his life for us as a sweet-smelling offering and sacrifice that pleases God.

Elsewhere we read about imitating Christ, and there is a sense in which this could be taken to mean the same thing.  I also take it to mean that in the same way that a child looks up to and imitate the parent – mother or father – so we should look up to God and imitate all that is good in the character of God, as supremely demonstrated in the death of Jesus which is here described as a sweet-smelling offering that pleases God.

There is some lovely imagery here interweaving the idea of the Gospel and our response to it.  God’s action in Christ in a sense demands certain behaviours of human beings, but alongside these comes the gifts that make them possible to yield to: our “membership” in the body of Christ, the seal of the Holy Spirit, and the forgiveness of God and love of Christ.

What's in a Name?

Sundays after Pentecost Proper 12 [17] Year B

Some of you may have heard me tell this story before and I ask you to be gracious towards me.

I was talking with Galal about how people got their names in Sudan.  In the basic system a child is given a name when they are born and then their second name is the name of the Father, and the third name is that of their grandfather.  So Galal is Galal Angalo Bashir, but his son is Nathaniel Galal Angalo and his daughter is Najila Galal Angalo.  And of course, we all know that women do not change their name when they marry – but they do carry their father’s name and their grandfather’s name.

I asked Galal if it could ever be, did he think, that a girl child would have her mother’s name and her grandmother’s name.  I was thinking that would be a nice modern and feminist twist on things.  Galal looked at me incredulous that anyone would even think of such a thing and simply said to me “That wouldn’t work.”

Of course in Sudanese culture that patriarchal line is important in determining who you belong to and Galal tells of his grandmother encouraging him and his brothers to be able to remember the names of their ancestors for ten to fifteen generations.  I had to look at it in a book but I could go:

John, Bruce, Will, Zeph, Will, John, John, Edward and Abraham

That’s only going back 8 generations and it takes my family time back to the early 1700s.

It cannot be denied that for many generations in our culture, when she got married, a woman took her husband’s surname – indeed not so long ago, Jan over there would have been known as Mrs Alan Salter.

So given this tradition we share of claiming our identity through our fathers and sometimes our husbands, what do you make of this opening sentence from Ephesians we read today (3:14-15):

For this reason I fall on my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth receives their name.

For me, these words affirm the idea found in other texts that we are known by God in ways that precede our physical life and which will continue when this life ends.

It affirms those words of Jesus in a number of places that we are children of our Father in heaven.

Happy are those who work for peace:

         God will call them his children.  (Matthew 5:9)

and

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in Heaven.  (Matthew 5:44-45)

But perhaps the most significant thing about this is the sense of God’s intimate involvement with us all – so intimate that it is from him that we have all received our name.

And that got me thinking.  What does it really mean that God is our Father?  

Near the end of Matthew’s Gospel he has a collection of little sayings that Jesus used probably many times and in many different places than just where this is found.  Jesus says:

You must not call anyone here on earth “Father” because you have only one Father in heaven.  (Matthew 23:9)

What I think he is saying is not that you should not call your priest “Father” but that you can call him Pastor, or even just John; rather he is saying that even your more intimate relationships on earth, like to your Father, are to take second place to your relationship to your Father in Heaven who has given you your name.

Indeed, Jesus clearly tries to distance himself from his earthly family when they come after him one time, wanting to speak with him:

 "Who is my mother?  Who are my brothers?" 

 Then he pointed to his disciples and said, "Look!  Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does what my Father in heaven wants is my brother, my sister, and my mother."  (Matthew 12:48-50)

Our primary relationship is with God who is our Father in Heaven.  Next comes our relationship with each other as brothers and sisters because we all share the same Father in Heaven.

Do you think this is hard?

I think it can be, because sometimes it looks like it means we have to neglect the relationship with our earthly family in favour of our relationship with God and our siblings in God.  Some of you may know stories of a person or another who chose this way and with tragic consequences for their real family for whom they had both a natural and proper responsibility to care for.

Fortunately this is not a case of either / or.  But our relationship with God is still our primary one and one that we should nurture every day.  We will go through times, I am sure, when many many things compete with the time we need to give to our relationship with God.  But we are not to give up.  We are not to lose sight of our true Father who has given us our true name.

A New and Living Way

Sundays after Pentecost Proper 11 [16] Year B

“Something new begins when God’s powerful love and loving power are acted out.”

So begins one of the sources I used to shape my thoughts for you today.

Our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures reminds us of the special place King David held in Israel.  The effect of David’s reign as distinct from Saul’s was that it gathered together the dispersed tribes of Israel into ONE nation and established their settlement in the “Promised Land”.

God says through the prophet Nathan:

I have chosen a place for my people Israel and have settled them there, where they will live without being oppressed any more.  Ever since they entered this land, they have been attacked by violent people, but this will not happen again.  I promise to keep you safe from all your enemies and to give you descendants. (2 Samuel 7:10)

This declaration of faithfulness to Israel through David is echoed in the Psalm in these words:

Once and for all

I have sworn by my holiness:

I will not prove false to David. (Psalm 89:36)

It is clear that for Israel, David was the embodiment of God’s astonishing fidelity to Israel, assuring them that God would always attend to Israel’s well-being.

Very early in the development of thought about Jesus, the first Christians saw him in a line of descent from David – which was a way of saying that Jesus was also the embodiment of God’s fidelity to the citizens of this new Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed.

So when we read the letter to the Ephesians, we get a sense that Jesus is even more than what David was as an embodiment of God’s fidelity.  Through Jesus something really remarkable is brought into being – a single community of humanity which over-rides our deepest divisions.

When you think of this unity as a result of Jesus’ action among us, as an embodiment of God’s fidelity to us, then we in the church should be ashamed of our predilection to divisiveness and exclusion.  If we are “one in Christ” then we cannot afford to accommodate divisions let alone be a party to creating them.

We need to remember how remarkable this call to unity is.  In Jesus’ day the world was divided into two basic categories – Jews and Gentiles – those who were God’s people and those who were not.  And within those two groups there were sub-groups. 

When Jews spoke disparagingly of Tax Collectors and Sinners they were speaking of their own – Jewish people who were collaborators with the Romans in collecting the taxes that supported Herod and kept the Romans at bay; and those Jews who for various reasons were insufficiently observant of their obligations under the law and so were referred to as sinners.  And of course they had a definite hierarchy of despicability that applied to the various Gentile groups of people.

Jesus challenged this more by the way he lived than anything he expressly said, although some of the stories he told pointed to it.  What I am thinking of here is what we might call his “meal practices.”  Frequently, Jesus is criticised for eating with Tax collectors and sinners – which he did.  The purity codes of the Pharisees created sharp social boundaries, and people who lived by them were very careful not to eat with people whose purity status was below theirs – because impurity was contagious.

But Jesus knew that we were all sinners – and that anyone who relied on this purity code to proclaim their righteousness was just kidding themselves.  He demonstrated this by eating with tax collectors and sinners.  But I think the more important thing for us to notice about these tax collectors and sinners is that in his day these were the marginalised people, the outcasts and the untouchables. 

Jesus’ example in this calls us into participating in actions that similarly challenge social and cultural divisions and proclaim our belief that we are all in the same boat, and because of that the barriers between us are gone.

Now the passage we read today concludes with this statement:

In union with him you too are being built together with all the others into a place where God lives through his spirit. (Eph 2:22)

I think that this sense of unity we have with each other in Christ should spill over into our other relationships – beyond the church.  One expression of this is the position of Christian pacifists who will not go to war.  War, for them, is the ultimate expression of antipathy between two people, and to participate in it is to deny that we share the same humanity.  Many many Christian people have stood in that place at great personal cost.

But this unity should also be reflected in our attitude and relationships towards others in our society who are marginalised.  Who are the marginalised in your community – people you know? 

·        Are they unemployed young people who just cannot get a break with a job and are constantly being penalised by Centrelink?

·        Are they those with mental health challenges that mean they too cannot hold down a job and so face social disdain?

·        Are they those who have lived for generations in poverty and taken the view that the whole system is against them so why bother trying to get ahead?

·        Are they those whose behaviour and lifestyle challenges our view of what is normal and acceptable?

I think that the challenge of our experience of unity in Christ is to find ways to reach out to these same marginalised people in the name of Christ, because it is a fundamental expression of the nature of God as revealed to us by Jesus.

If I could just finish with a reminder of something I said at our AGM.  

I said then that I wanted us to use the words of the prophet Micah to guide our life here at Holy Cross:

What does God require of you but this?

Do Justice,

Love Compassion,

Walk Humbly with your God.  (Micah 6:8)

Jesus picks up on these very things in his ministry and teaching and lays them before us.

When you distill Jesus' teaching to a few overarching things they are this:

1.     He reveals the character and passion of God to us; and

2.     He shows us a new way of living that is truly centred on God.

The character of God that he shows us a God who is merciful or compassionate, and he says this very clearly when he puts a new slant on an old Hebrew saying:–

Be merciful as your Father is merciful. (Luke 6:36)

He also shows us that God is most passionate about Justice for his people.  All that he says about the Kingdom of God is directed at contrasting this new Kingdom with the oppression and bondage of the world the people were living i: –

he has come to bring good news to the poor, proclaiming liberty to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind and freedom for the oppressed, and to announce that the time has come when the Lord will save his people.  (Luke 4:18-19)

The new and living way that he speaks of is one that is centred on God and probably the two best images for this are the ideas contained in what repentance means and what dying and rising to new life means.

Repentance is vastly more than feeling sorry for the bad things we have done.  Grounded in Israel’s experience of Exile, repentance means to return from that exile.  The Way of Jesus involves us returning to God from that sense of exile.

But another deeper meaning in this word is to “to go beyond the mind that you have”.  In other words it is about seeing things in new ways.

This centring in God, the one in whom we live and move and have our being, is about Loving God utterly: to year for, to pay attention to, to commit to, to be loyal to, to value above all else.  Some Christians would say this is what it means to BELIEVE in God.  I want to change that slightly and say BELOVE God.  And BELOVING GOD means loving everything that God loves – the whole world.

Blessed to be a Blessing

Sundays after Pentecost Proper 8 [13] Year B

When I graduated from Bible College, I think I really thought that they had taught me all I needed to know to be a Christian Minister.  I mean, the College Principal told us at our graduation that we were embarking then on a lifetime of learning, but I’m afraid I didn’t really believe him.

But, what do you know?  Just a couple of years later someone showed me something that I had never noticed before, something that we didn’t learn in our Old Testament studies.

In Genesis 12, we have the story of God calling Abram to leave his home and family to travel to a country God “would show him”.  And right up front God says to Abram:

“I will bless you … so that you will be a blessing,

And through you I will bless all the nations.”

This has stayed with me since then as a motivation about my work – if God has blessed me, I must be looking for ways in which I can be a blessing to others.

In our reading from 2 Corinthians 8 this morning we have Paul saying much the same thing:

“You are so rich in all you have: in faith, speech, and knowledge, in your eagerness to help and in your love for us.”

Then he asks them to give to his little appeal …

“… our Lord Jesus Christ; rich as he was, he made himself poor for your sake, in order to make you rich by means of his poverty.” 

Paul is on a mission here.  He is giving his best pitch here to persuade them all to help.

In “my opinion,” he says, “it is better for you to finish now what you began last year.  You were the first, not only to act, but also to be willing to act.  On with it, then, and finish the job!”  

So, what is it that we, here at Holy Cross, have begun, and now have to finish?

As you all know I have become involved in recent times with the affairs of the wider Sudanese Communities and I have been surprised at how different things are for those other communities compared to here.  I thought that what we had here was normal for those other places.

But, frankly, I think we are miles ahead of them on that settlement process.

We have a great mix of Anglo-Aussies and Afro-Aussies, worshipping together and support each other.

We have a great ministry partnership with Galal and me – both learning from each other.

And we are blessed with this wonderful property that others had the vision to build over 30 years ago and now it is paid for.

But last year we embarked on a mission to take up responsibility for all this – and the ministry costs – so that we could lead the way for the other Sundanese Communities.

The Archbishop was very kind to us when Galal was ordained as a priest by paying his stipend from the Archbishop’s Curacy Fund.  BUT that will end in December.  After that we will be responsible for his stipend.  No-one else will pay for it.  We have to.

This means that we really need to excel in our generosity to meet this responsibility we have taken on. 

Nothing is the way it seems to be.

Sundays after Pentecost Proper 6 [11] Year B

This statement makes us think so easily about the way Photoshop means that we can now no longer trust that a photo we are looking at is “real”.  Or maybe we think of the way computer-generated-imagery in movies creates fantastic scenarios.

But I think it is also a hint for us of what Paul is getting at in the selection we have read today from 2 Corinthians 5.

The first little section of what we read is very familiar to me in the context of funerals.  We take some comfort from the idea that those we love who have died are now “at home with the Lord”.  But I think this section is about something far more important.

Paul is really getting us to think about the fact that while we are all bound to the physical reality of life, we know that there is a dimension of being that goes beyond that – our life in God.  A few years ago when the atheists were raging about religion as something that denied scientific and factual realities, I remember engaging with some on social media.  How does science quantify or measure something we call LOVE?  They had answers for it, but they did not satisfy me.  We all know that there is a dimension to being human that goes beyond the scientific realm of chemistry and physics.

“Our life is a matter of faith, not of sight” which is an idea Paul explores in the few verses we left out of our selection and then picks up again at the end.  I think this is what I was referring to last week about people being able to tell that we were Christians, even without us saying anything.  And Paul is pointing us to this idea that it is not the outward, physical stuff that really matters.  When you look on the inside, when you consider the spiritual dimension of things in a person’s life – then you see what truly is.

Now we skip a few verses to get to the next section, and I wonder what sense you made of it when it was read aloud to us.  The imagery can take into several places.  Let me read to you a paragraph in a commentary I used this week.

“That Christ’s death was ‘for all’ means somehow that believers are bound up in that death.  For Paul, Christians do not watch the cross as if it were a scene ‘out there’ or ‘back there’ somewhere, displayed for them now so that they can understand the historical ramifications of this event.  Nor is the cross connected with believers only by virtue of some influence it has with God, so that the cross persuades God to forgive human sin.  The death of Christ on the cross involves believers directly, in that they die in it and now have lives that are not their own, but belong to Christ.”

It is probably fair to say that I am still thinking through the ramifications of that statement.  There are so many layers within it.  But one which I think makes sense to me is the ways in which we are called to “die with Christ”.  We participate in his death symbolically in our baptism.  But we are also called by him to die to self and live for Christ – Paul in his letter to the Galatians.  And of course it is true that we all die – as Christ died.

This dying has some very important implications for the life we now live.  It is through this that we are able to detach ourselves from the importance of our physical life – and what we see of the physical life of others – and be more concerned with our new life in God.

Which leads us nicely to the last two verses in our selection: “No longer, then, do we judge anyone by human standards.  Even if at one time we judged Christ according to human standards, we no longer do so.  Anyone who is joined to Christ is a new being; the old is gone, the new has come.”

Paul is saying that we should take our eyes off all those worldly, human standards by which we judge a person – for good or ill.  And his reason for saying this is his belief that when we are joined to Christ something changes so dramatically that it is as if we have died.  Our Good News Bible says we become a new being.  Your more familiar texts will say “there is a new creation” or “creature”.  To emphasise how comprehensive this change is Pauls adds – “the old is gone, the new has come.”

This changes everything about how we see ourselves, but perhaps more importantly how we see each other.

One of the things I have been musing about during the week is the capacity of the emphasis or not that we give a written word when we speak can completely change the meaning of a sentence. 

Think of Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus.  Pilate asks Jesus “Are you the King of the Jews?”  When you say those words flatly, it sounds a bit like a lawyer’s interrogation in a court.  A simple question.  Now listen to my voice and watch me.  “Are YOU the King of the Jews?”  Sub-text – “Look at you man.  You’re a powerless, peasant carpenter and you expect me to believe you are a king.”  Now that changes the meaning completely.

So with this last sentence of our selection.  If we read it flatly it could simply be expressing a fact that we become new persons in Christ, but if I add an emphasis on a word you might not expect, I can give it a new dimensions.  “ANYONE who is joined to Christ is a new being.”  Now it makes sense a different way – it becomes an emphatic declaration to us that it’s not just the good people who become new persons.  Absolutely anyone can be transformed.  No-one is beyond hope.  No-one is irremediable.  And knowing this should change the way we relate to each other.  It should lower those barriers of judgementalism that so easily creep into our interactions with each other.

Knowing this we are always full of courage, for we know that in Christ the old has passed away and the new has come.

Preach Always - only use words if necessary

Sundays after Pentecost Proper 4 [10] Year B

Over the summer, Eira and I tried to make a habit of walking along the beach at Mullaloo as many mornings of the week as we could.  We would go about 7am before it was hot and as the days went by we gradually came to recognise the faces of the regular walkers.

Something about one couple caught us and we would often chat about the beach and the weather.  For ages we didn’t even know each other’s names.  Eventually Taffy and Jane came to know us as John and Eira.

One day, we were talking to Jane while Taffy was walking on the soft sand and we mentioned that we would miss the next day because of church.  She asked and I told her that I was a vicar.  She laughed at once and then said that we would never guess, but Taffy had said just a few days earlier “I bet that guy’s a vicar.”  She called him over to share the news and we all laughed about that.

But it got me wondering what it was about me that made him think that.  Eira thought it might have been the hat I was wearing with the logo from New Norcia, but I am not sure about that.  Perhaps it just goes to show you that there are many ways of letting people know who the Lord of your life is.

This, I think, is at least a key theme in our reading from 2 Corinthians this week.  There may be other important ideas, but I would like to work with this one.

The selection begins with Paul quoting a verse from Psalm 116, but if you follow the reference in the footnotes of your Bible to it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, because Paul is quoting a Greek translation of the Hebrew Psalms and not a very good translation at that.

I think this whole selection is focussed on how important it is that we speak about our faith.  In some ways the text seems to be referring to public preaching and I have two very different cultural experiences of public preaching in this congregation.

I have talked with enough of the Nuba people in this congregation to know that street preaching in your villages and even in the streets of Khartoum was widespread, and that you got really excited about it when you were able to preach to Muslim audiences.  

In Australia we seem to need to be far more subtle than that – although just a little while before I came to Holy Cross I was in Kalamunda shopping precinct when a young man, encouraged by an older man, was practicing his street preaching to the rather bemused lunch-time crowd.

In Australia, there is one thing that one in four of our population fear more than dying, and that is public speaking.  Can you imagine that?  Well I think most of you can, because out of another one in four who fear dying most of all, the vast majority would put their fear of public speaking second.  Most of us are afraid to be asked to do it, and most of us feel awkward in the presence of someone spruiking their religion to us in public.

This passage might be about that kind of “preaching” but I think there is more to it than just that.  If you believe something, then surely you will want to find ways of speaking about that to the people live and work around.  Paul says “we speak because we believe” and I suspect that we Westerners need to recover some of that ability to “Gossip the Gospel” as the early Christians did in the book of Acts. 

I find it a challenge to find ways of talking about these things we believe in ways that non-church people can make sense of.  There is probably a lot we could learn together about that – if you wanted to.  Paul simply adds this encouragement – “For this reason we never become discouraged.”

But there is something in this text that suggests to me that our very lives will speak volumes about what we believe.  I think that he is reminding us that this spiritual dimension of our life – which is transforming the physical dimension – is itself part of the proclamation he is speaking of.  So we can all do that – words or not.  I am sure you will have heard the quotation that some people think St Francis said: “preach always – only use words if absolutely necessary.”  I guess That is why I told you that story at the beginning.  When you become a follower of Jesus, things about you change.  You might not even think they are very obvious, but maybe they are.  Maybe just the way we live is itself a proclamation of the Good News – this is what your life could be like!

As a final thought, I wondered if you considered what would happen if we did this?  Paul says “as God’s grace reaches more and more people, they will offer to the glory of God more prayers and thanksgiving.”  As more and more people come into a faith relationship with God, through Jesus, God’s own glory will be greatly extended by the prayers and thanksgiving these people will give.

Holy Trinity - the Faces of God

Sundays after Pentecost - Trinity Sunday

It is good to welcome here today the friends and family of little Eve Paterson.  You have come to church on an especially good day – for two very significant reasons. 

Firstly, its Eve’s Baptismal Day which is a bit like another birthday for her – more presents, especially from the God Parents (I’m not sure if I wrote that in the fine print for you).

Secondly, it’s the Sunday in the year on which the Church celebrates something it thinks is very important – the Trinity.  Has anyone got any idea what we mean when we use that word?

One God – Three Persons

This idea really tests our brain, doesn’t it?  How can the three persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – each of whom we say is divine – constitute One God, as we affirm so often in church?

At the heart of this conundrum that has troubled Christians for all of the 2000 years the church has been around is how was this man, Jesus of Nazareth, also the divine Son of God.

The first big attempt the church took to sort this out was the formulation of the Apostles’ Creed and shortly after the Nicene Creed in the 4^th Century.  Both of these are set out in three parts:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty …

I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son …

I believe in the Holy Spirit.

The words about Jesus are the most numerous, and I am not sure about you, but I find myself really struggling with what they mean.  When we say in the creed that Jesus is:

The only son of God

Eternally begotten of the Father

God from God

Light from light

True God from true God

Begotten not made

Of one Being (or substance) with the Father

What do those things mean to us today?  In fact why are they so meaningless to us?

Well, the answer is simple enough really.  The creeds were written 1600 years ago and in many ways they were examples of Christians using the metaphysical language of their day to try and make sense of a conundrum.  This means they used words in ways that we are not familiar with.  Jesus was said to be of one BEING or substance with the Father – meaning he was exactly the same as God (yet he was human).  And when they went on to speak of the TRINITY they spoke of ONE GOD in THREE PERSONS.  This is an important idea because so many things we do in Church is in the name of the Holy Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – most notably today, we will baptise Eve in those three names.

How do we make sense of all that today?  Let me offer a few clues – they might help, they probably won’t resolve all your questions.

Firstly, this idea of the Trinity affirms what Christian experience and devotion knows: that the Jesus we know after Easter – the risen living Christ as we would call him – is a divine reality.  Knowing this is not demonstrable or provable, but Christians still “know” it.

Secondly, this idea of the Trinity resolves that conundrum I mentioned before – of Christianity being monotheistic yet proclaiming Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three persons of that Godhead.  But to help you understand that we need to set aside some unhelpful language.  The Latin and Greek words behind the English rendition of “Persons” in the creeds does not mean what you and I mean when we talk about a person.  For us “persons” are separate individuals – even identical triplets are three different persons.

To understand the meaning you have to think about how ancient Greek and Roman plays were very often conducted – and much later on Shakespeare as well.  Invariably there were fewer actors in the troupe than there were roles in the play, so when an actor wanted to change roles he would simply put on a different mask.  One actor might have three masks for each of the roles he played.  Those masks represented a persona – but there was one actor behind each.  We use similar language in modern psychology, too, about people putting on a persona or wearing masks to hide their true identity.

This creates a helpful way for us as modern people to give meaning to that old concept.  To speak of God and three persons is to say that God is known to us wearing three different “masks” – or in three different roles.  Thus in our experience, God is one and known to us in thee ways – as Source and Creator of all things; as Jesus of Nazareth, the man of God who showed us the face of God; and as Spirit, the here and now experience of God that people will tell you about in different ways.

Finally, I want to draw your attention to something that the Creed does really well for us in regard to Jesus.  While it seems like it is very much focussed on staking the claim that Jesus was Divine, it claims very firmly that Jesus was also human – in fact fully human.  

The easiest way for our modern minds to resolve this is to refer to the one as the pre-Easter Jesus, and the other the post-Easter Jesus.  Before Easter Jesus was fully human – like you and me – yet he understood some amazing things about God and the way we should live.  One of the Christmas stories gives Jesus a name – Emanuel, meaning God with us, and the church has come to understand this to mean this man was the embodiment of the Divine Spirit – God.  After Easter, the Disciples and Christians ever since experience him as divine. 

I hope you find that helpful.  Essentially, the Christian life is something we experience, but some things we have to talk through so that we can make sense of it in a kind of rational way – and I think this idea of the Trinity is one of them.