Jesus teaches us that the
greatest of the commandments is to hear, to take heed and obey, that the Lord
our God is the only God (that’s what he means by God is one.) and to love the
Lord our God with our whole heart and with all our soul and with all our mind
and with all our strength, and secondly to love our neighbours as ourselves. This is a very powerful statement of what we
call monotheism – belief that there is only one God as opposed to many, or
polytheism. Now, I’ve been around the
block enough to know that what people mean when they say the word “God” is
quite different. Let me throw some
scenarios out to you and see what you think.
In
World War II Allied leaders such as Mackenzie King, Roosevelt, Truman, and
Churchill readily spoke of and called on “God”, blessed our people and our
troops, and indeed portrayed that “God” was on our side in this global struggle
with evil…but so did Adolph Hitler.
HItler readily referred to “God Almighty” in his speeches and claimed “God”
was on the side of the German people and with them in their struggle to
overcome the unfair hardships that were imposed upon them by the Allied powers
after World War I. In the European
Theatre of WWII all the nations, Allied and Axis, were Christian, had the
support of their “national” churches, and for all shapes and purposes were
referring to the same “God”. Did one of
us not have the right God? Speaking from
an Allied perspective, had “God” abandoned the German people for being evil or
something?
When
Stephen Harper and Barak Obama finish speeches by saying “God bless Canada” and
“God bless America” do they mean the same God given that Canada and the States
have a completely different track record in the world? What if Justin Trudeau were to say it? Does the way a nation “loves’ its neighbour
and itself through governmental policy and practice say anything about what
they believe the word “God” means?
When
we in the predominantly no longer but still nominally Christian West refer to
“God” is it the same “God” that much more devout Muslims world over refer to as
“Allah”? When Muslims say “Allah Akbar”
which means “God is great” are they saying the same thing we are saying in the
simple table grace we no longer teach our children to pray that goes, “God is
great. God is God. Let us thank him for our food”? We’re both monotheists rooted in the faith of
Abraham, the Father of the Jews and Muslims.
If we are all monotheists, are we or are we not referring to the same “God”? What about when it’s the Taliban or ISIS
saying “Allah Akbar” or white supremacist Christian militias in Montana
somewhere, are these groups referring to a different God than the One True God
which monotheistic faiths profess?
Well, I dare to take a risk and say that if we
are truly going to be monotheists and say there is only one God, then there
indeed is only one God and all these different groups whether good or evil look
to the same God. The problem is that we
have different ideas about God that profoundly affect what our faith looks like
in practice. Let’s unpack this a bit.
One thing that sets humans
apart from the rest of creation is that God created us to be in a personal,
life-grounding relationship with him so that we can live as his image in
reflection of his glory in his creation.
We are the priests of creation who are to give voice to the Creation’s
worship of its Creator. To do this we
are the part of the Creation that must know God, but we in our sin have messed
all that up. We put ourselves in the
place of God. Due to our created purpose
and the nature as being God’s image-bearers we humans, for a lack of a better
way to say it, have a hole in us that only God can fill. Whether or not we are aware of it, the hole
is still there and we will consciously or unconsciously either embrace or
struggle against it. We have sought to
fill this hole on our own and created religions and served gods that are in our
own image. But to really fill it we must
be found by God and God must reveal himself to us which God has done among the
descendants of the man Abraham as Jesus of Nazareth the Jew, a people of whose
history he is an integral part. If we
want to know who God is we must look at Jesus and what we find is that the One
God is actually Trinity – One-in-Three, Three-in-One – Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Our God-shaped hole is only
filled by our participation in the Trinity’s giving himself to us through Jesus
Christ in the Holy Spirit.
Well, I’m going to wind up
getting way too theological for you at this moment so I’m going to back up and
come at this from a different angle and talk about the word “God” and what it
means. God never revealed his name to us
as “God”. We call God “God” because that
is the English form of the word that the Germanic peoples had that Christian
missionaries coming into Europe way back when adopted to talk about God. In their ancient language “God” means
ultimately “to call on” or “to invoke”.
These missionaries used an early form of the word “God” to translate the
Latin word for deity which was “Deus” which in turn was the word the Romans
used to translate the Greek word for deity which was “Theos”. “Theos” was the Greek word used to translate
the the Semetic word El or Al which for lack of a better word means “God”. Arabic speakers used the word “Allah” which
means “the God” to do the same. Long
before there ever was Islam there were and still are Arabic-speaking Christians
who called and still call God “Allah”.
So, please don’t think that the name “Allah” is strictly a Muslim thing.
Jews are reluctant to call
God by any name, but in the Old Testament God has three names. The first is El which was the highest-ranking
God in the Canaanite pantheon. The
second is Elohim which is the plural form of El and means “God of gods.” Third is Yahweh, the name that God revealed
to Moses from the burning bush which means “I am who I am and I will be who I
will be.” This was God’s way of telling
Moses that Moses could have no power over him as if he were just some god that
could be controlled by ritualized magic.
God had a particular
relationship with the Israelite people that began with Abraham through which he
has revealed himself. The Jews are his
people and he is their God. God even, at
times, called himself their Father. When
Jesus said “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your
God is the only God we are to hear an emphasis on your – the one true and living God has made himself known to all
peoples through his relationship with the Israelite people. Into this relationship comes Jesus, God the
Son become human who reveals to us that at the heart of the very nature of God is
not all-powerful domination but rather giving of oneself in self-emptying love
for the sake of others even to the extent of dying for others. This is the way
God is in his very self as Trinity. The
Father gives of himself in the Holy Spirit and there is the Son. The Son gives of himself in the Holy Spirit
to the Father and there is Love. The
Father and the Son give of themselves in the Holy Spirit and there is Creation
and Salvation and our inclusion by adoption and real participation in the relationship
of God the Father and God the Son. The
Trinity is God’s self-revelation to us that has come to us through his
relationship with Israel.
Gregory of Nazianzus who was
one of the drafters of the Nicene Creed once said, “When I say God, I mean
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” He meant
to distinguish what and who Christians believe “God” to be. God is a loving communion, a community of persons
who give their self’s to each other in self-emptying love so completely that
they are One – One-in-Three, Three-in-One – and this is completely
incomprehensible to us and only makes sense if we love one another as God has
loved us. Doing community in the name of
Jesus according to the way of Jesus through the indwelling presence and power
of the Holy Spirit in self-giving love according to the love and will of the
Father is our purpose as the church. It
is the image of God, the Trinity, restored in us. If we focus on anything other than
overflowing in the love of God for one another and our neighbours, we are
missing the boat.
Finally, it is very easy in
monotheistic faiths to go to war if our understanding of God is unitarian
rather than trinitarian. Christians,
Muslims, and Jews have all done and continue to do atrocities in the name of "God" whom we understand as simply an all powerful Creator and Judge. How different it would be if we truly
accepted God’s self-revelation as Trinity over and above our ideas of “God” and
focused on being healing and reconciling communities in his image of loving
Communion. Amen.
