Day: May 26, 2013

“To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?”

“No one hath ever seen God,” John reminds us, echoing the Old Testament sensibility that God by definition is beyond the things of this world and is not to be collapsed into them or even compared with them. There is a strong sense of negative theology in the viewpoint of ancient Israel and rightly so; it is the counter to idolatry, the tendency to confuse God with the things of the world, to collapse the Creator into the created.

But then, how to deal with the equally strong idea of God’s being with us, especially in the intimacy of our humanity in Jesus Christ? How to deal with the Creator becoming created, with God made man? Such is the Incarnation.

Trinity Sunday celebrates the revealed reality of God in his transcendence and in his immanence, how God is both utterly beyond and other and how God is intimate and near. It is the central mystery of the Christian faith. To negotiate between these two extremes is the paradox of revelation, the paradox of salvation. No greater mystery and none which is so compelling in its elegance and beauty. The whole challenge is to think the Trinity in the way in which we are given to think it. To think it is to discover the logic contained in the images by which God makes himself known to us.

The whole point of Trinity Sunday, and, especially in our Evensong readings tonight, is that the images through which we understand God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost are not of our making. (more…)

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“Behold a door was opened in heaven”

Today is Trinity Sunday. It celebrates the great, grand, and central teaching of the Christian faith. It is about the extravagance of God, how God is always more and greater than we can ever imagine. The Trinity is that greater extravagance – the extravagance of God, both in himself and for us. The Trinity is the mystery of God revealed, the mystery of love made known, the love that is God.

Think God and everything else comes after. But how can we think God? Only by the extravagance of God’s grace that embraces and enfolds us in the community of love, the communion of the Trinity.

And there is the extravagant grace of language, the language of adoration. The language of adoration is grace-given and spirit-inspired. God is always more – always of another order of reality beyond the mundane and the worldly, beyond what is merely human. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity,” as one of the classical and catholic creeds of the Church puts it, the Athanasian Creed – think of the Trinity in this way, the way which God in the extravagant grace of his Son has opened out to us.

(more…)

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“Behold a door was opened in heaven”

Today is Trinity Sunday. It celebrates the great, grand, and central teaching of the Christian faith. It is about the extravagance of God, how God is always more and greater than we can ever imagine. The Trinity is that greater extravagance – the extravagance of God, both in himself and for us. The Trinity is the mystery of God revealed, the mystery of love made known, the love that is God.

Think God and everything else comes after. But how can we think God? Only by the extravagance of God’s grace that embraces and enfolds us in the community of love, the communion of God. There is the extravagant grace of Holy Baptism when we are named in the intimacy of God’s own naming of himself as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is the extravagant grace of Holy Communion which gathers us into the community of love, the communion of the Trinity.

And there is the extravagant grace of language, the language of Creed and Liturgy, of poetry and song. It is the language of adoration. The language of adoration is grace-given and spirit-inspired. The Athanasian Creed, found tucked away in the back of the Prayer Book, for example, proclaims in the most extravagant language imaginable the mystery of the Trinity by way of negation and affirmation.

God is always more – always of another order of reality beyond the mundane and the worldly, beyond what is merely human. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity” – think of the Trinity in this way, the way which God in the extravagant grace of his Son has opened out to us.

(more…)

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