Expect Much of God

Text: Luke 7:11-17 Other texts: 1 Kings 17:17-24 June 10, 2006

Bishop Dr. Munib Younan is the bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Lands. He spoke this past Friday to the assembly of the New England Synod, a once-a-year gathering of lay people and clergy. He was the keynote speaker. The churches that he shepherds are some of the very few Christian churches left in Palestine and Jerusalem.

In his speech, Bishop Younan said that “the power of faith is the driving force of justice.” Such a statement implies that God is an active participant in the affairs of the world and of human endeavors. Such a statement implies that God expects much of us and that we are instruments of God’s mercy. But it also implies that we are right to expect much of God, and that we expect with certainty that God can and—we hope—will, intervene in history. As scripture tells us God has done in the past.

You might have seen that the first lesson and the Gospel reading tell essentially the same story. Or rather two stories with the same plot, character, and outcome. This is probably not a coincidence. The stories are alike in many ways. In both, a widow has lost her only son. In both, a godly person—Elijah in the first, Jesus in the second—is moved and his heart goes out to the mother. In both, that person touches the dead son. In both, the son is revived. In both, the son is given back to his mother. Those who heard or read the story about Jesus would certainly have known and recognized the story about Elijah, and the power of the first story would have lent both power and credence to the second. They would have said, “Ah ha! This man Jesus reminds me a lot of the great prophet Elijah. He is like the prophets of old.” That being a good thing.

We who are always aware of the resurrection of Jesus should not be too distracted by the resuscitation of the dead in this story. The raising of the dead is not exactly the point of either story. The stories are healing stories, though healing of a sort of extreme kind. But the people of Jesus’ time would not have seen a ton of difference between raising someone from the dead and healing someone who could not walk or enabling a blind person to see.

Cases like this demonstrated most of all that the healer—Elijah or Jesus—was an authentic prophet of God. Which is how each story concludes. “I know you are a man of God” says the widow to Elijah. “A great prophet has risen among us,” the crowd says of Jesus. Raising someone from the dead is not seen as a sign of divinity, it is a sign of prophecy.

A prophet speaks for God. A prophet acts with the power of God. It is not the prophet who does the work, but God. It is God who does the raising. The extreme nature of the healing (that is, reviving someone who is already dead) confirms the authenticity of the prophet. But it is God’s power at work. For the people who first heard these stories, it would be obvious that God could do such things. Not only in a theoretical or theological way, that God has the potential, but in a practical and everyday way. That God has the interest in doing so. That God does do things like this. It would go without saying that God has the power. People would have been interested to see in what way that power works.

But the question for many now in our time is not how it works but whether it works. Stories like the ones we are talking about make people wonder what the trick was. What the explanation was, what was really happening. Though it still might be obvious that God can do such things, it goes without saying, almost, that God would not. Times have changed over the past two thousand years.

We seem invested in the notion that God is a hands-off kind of god—except in a way I’ll talk about in a minute. I wonder whether we have an interest in keeping God at arm’s length. Sort of a kindly rich uncle whom we like and for whom we are grateful, but who doesn’t really mess with important family affairs. Maybe we prefer the world to be predictable (which it is not when God interferes with things, especially things like physics and biology). Maybe we protect ourselves from the potential of being disappointed in God. Maybe we are afraid of the intimacy that God provokes when we let God get too close. Maybe we are ashamed of ourselves and think that we are not worthy of God’s attention. I don’t know. But it seems that we prefer a God who is less than actively involved in the day to day events of our lives. When we do this, we make God more like a chaplain, someone who comforts us in times of trouble and, as they say in counseling jargon, is a quiet presence.

That is not how people thought who saw God’s presence in Elijah and Jesus.

What is clear from the stories in the Bible, including the ones we are talking about today, is that God likes people. This is demonstrably so. That is, God demonstrates that in what happens. And when God acts, it is because God is really interested in people in a major way. When Jesus sees the widow whose son has just died, he has compassion for her, it says in our translation of the Bible. But other Bibles get it better. It was heartbreaking, says one. Heart-wrenching. The word in Greek means his gut was all twisted around.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, the song goes, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost and now am found. If you ask people who have hit bottom, the very bottom, and raised up by God, God is much more than a quiet presence. God is an active and powerful and truthful friend, boss, and mentor. They were down and God pulled them up. No question.

Our fear, our sometimes stunted imaginations, and our poor sense of humor can keep God out except in an ethereal way. But if so, the power of faith is muffled and the future of justice is darkened. We seem to allow that God may expect much of us. We need to be willing to expect much of God. If we desire to move forward in any frame of mind other than wishful thinking or despair, we need to be willing to expect God to act in the present.

We harm ourselves and the world if we put stories like the ones we heard today in the relics section of our minds. Probably this will not be the last time someone raises a child from the dead. We need to allow ourselves to think that that is so. To have that be our posture. For as shocking as it sounds, God is still working.

Trinity: The Nickname of God

June 3, 2007

Is it possible to love the Trinity? Is it possible to be loved by the Trinity? Not if the Trinity is an organization, an institution, even a team. Not if the Trinity is an association of three persons, like a small board of directors or a special task force. Who can love an organization, who can love a task force? How in the world would an association, a board of directors, love us?

Today is called Trinity Sunday. It is the only Sunday that is named for a doctrine. Who can love a doctrine? Did the church powers-that-be make a mistake? Or is there something else going on here?

Maybe we find a hint when we hear that this is also the first Sunday after Pentecost. This time in the church year is called ordinary time. Not a time, like Christmas or Easter, when we celebrate some extraordinary event in the life of Jesus. Not a time, like Advent or Lent when we prepare ourselves for those special events. Ordinary time is the time when in lessons, songs, and worship we focus on the day to day life of Christians. And, in parallel, the day to day life of Jesus as he went about the countryside, as he went door to door, as he went about his regular job—as we focus on his ministry. So Trinity Sunday is not part of any of the special seasons of the church. It is the first Sunday of ordinary time, and is therefore, we could guess, about our day to day life in the light of our following Jesus.

Yet it seems so complicated and weird and not at all connected to normal life. The Trinity is the idea that God is one God but in three persons. “God in three persons, blessed Trinity,” as we sang in the opening hymn. Some great theologians and philosophers—people who think about things like this—have dismissed the Trinity as unimportant or at least irrelevant in a practical way. When I was growing up, I asked my mother—a smart church-going person—about the Trinity, and she said to me, “Well, it’s a mystery.” By which I took at the time to mean: “Beats me. I have no idea.”

Yet something like the concept of the Trinity has seemed necessary from the very beginning of Christianity. It is an answer to some problems, which I’ll call problems number one, two, three, and plus. Three-plus problems.

Problem number one was an intellectual problem. Jews, Muslims, and Christians are pretty committed to worshiping just one God. There is only one God. God is one. I am your God; you shall have no other God’s. The worshiping of other gods besides God is represented in the Old Testament as adultery. But, says the intellect, then who is Jesus? If Jesus is divine—and the church was clear about that pretty soon—then is Jesus another God, making therefore two gods? What about the Holy Spirit, whom we are supposed to trust as the Spirit of God, the agent of the creation? Is the Spirit God, and if so, do we now have three gods? And wanting to keep God perfect and unchangeable—to my mind a dubious desire in any case—God cannot be divided or converted into modes, so to speak. So, primarily to protect monotheism in the face of the divinity of Jesus and the ongoing existence of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity says there is only one God (with a capital G) who exists in the form of three persons, equal, divine, and different.

Problem one starts with the oneness of God. The Trinity is about the inner life of God.

Problem number two was a problem of people’s experience of God. People tend not to treat the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the same way. Though you might know, intellectually, that the triune God—“triune” is the adjective for the Trinity—you might know that God created the universe, but you might have a hard time getting your head around the notion that Jesus created the universe. Even though we believe it and it even says so, sort of, in the Gospel of John. In a similar way, for a long time people had a hard time saying that when Jesus died on the cross that God died, too. What does that mean, God died? When you pray, you might say you pray to God or to Jesus, even though the word “or” there contradicts the notion that in essence there is only one listener. God or Jesus—isn’t Jesus God? The three persons seem different in our hearts and in our experience. We experience God in different ways at different times and, it seems, in different guises. So, to preserve our sense of the diversity of God in our own daily experiences, the Trinity says there is one God who meets us in different persons.

Problem one starts with the oneness of God. The Trinity is about the inner life of God. Problem two starts with the diversity of God. The Trinity is about the outer life of God.

Problem number three was an emotional problem. A problem of affection, maybe we can call it. People don’t only have thoughts of God. People don’t only have experiences with God. People also have a relationship with God. A relationship that is not just with one of three sorts at different times. When you come to church, whom do you praise, to whom do you sing? Not, I think, just one of three versions of God. Our relationship with God can be as complex—more complex—than with another person. God of the Bible—as opposed to God of the Greek and Medieval philosophers—is someone who had and has a relationship with God’s people, is open to prayer and grief, who listens to our arguments, who suffered as a person, and who guides us and comforts us [from LaCugna]. God and people act as friends, lovers, and sometimes worthy opponents. To know God in an ongoing and joyful and sometimes troubled relationship makes sense to us because that is how we live our own lives, in joyful and sometimes troubled relationships. Parent, child, friend, significant other, partner, associate, teammate. Physicists suspect that even the physical basis of all things is the relationship between fundamental particles, whose existence is called into being through interactions and relationships. The world is not things that interact but interactions that yield things. So, to acknowledge and praise the complex relationship we have with God, the Trinity says that God is not one or even three particles, but a being whose very existence depends on relationships with others.

Problem one starts with the oneness of God. The Trinity is about the inner life of God. Problem two starts with the diversity of God. The Trinity is about the outer life of God. Problem three starts with the affection of God. The Trinity is about the relational life of God.

Nonetheless. The concept of the Trinity in all these formulations is both too simple for God and too complex, and not simple enough and not complex enough. That is, who are we to say that we have figured God out so thoroughly? We know some things. God the creator is big—and little. God’s glory reaches beyond the stars, the psalm says. God in the person of Jesus is physical and earthy. God in the Sprit is near and surprising. But God is not just big. Not just physical. Not just near. Not just anything you can say or imagine. The Trinity is a way to say this. To say that God is “not just …”

Dorothy Sayers, mystery writer and Christian, once said “the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the whole thing incomprehensible.” Not to make fun—or not only to make fun—but to acknowledge the ineffable. What we can most know about God is that God is mostly unknown and unknowable. That is not a bad thing.

For God knows us. We know that God is mindful of us, as it said in the psalm “what is humankind that you remember them,… that you care for them?” We need to have a name for God, which is problem number three-plus. A kind of nickname, really. We know the name God told the Israelites. That’s God’s formal name. But we need a name that fits God like the nicknames we give our friends. Not a perfect name, nicknames never are. One that deals with God’s unity, God’s diversity, and God’s affection for us. So the church has picked such a name. The nickname of God, a name we can call God that seems to fit. The name is: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Trinity is one name of God. It reminds us that God and we are connected. It reminds us that God is “not just …” something we can pin down. It reminds us that this big, small, physical, near God, more than we can imagine, is the God we love and the God who love us.