What's in a Name: Ishmael

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Genesis 21:1-21

What's in a name?  One's name, particularly the first name, is important.  There are those who say the name a person is given will shape their character throughout life.  So, I thought I'd do a little research on our names and see what turns up.  First, me; Randall is an English variant of Randolf which means wolf shield, a shield against wolves.  How about our Clerks of Session?  Starting with our hosts.  Don is short for Donald.  It has Gaelic origins and roughly means world leader or proud chief.  Linda, if its origin is in Spanish, it means “pretty”.  In the Germanic languages it means “tender woman”.  In Old Norse, Linda means “snake”.  Eric is Scandinavian or Old Norse in origin and it means “always ruler” or “forever king”.  Will is short for William which comes from the Germanic Wilhelm.  Helm is derived from helmet and the whole name means “strong-willed warrior” or “strong-minded”.  Well, so it would seem we are well looked after by strong men bent on world domination and a tender, pretty woman who might be a little crafty if you know what I mean.  Sounds like the makings of successful TV ministry.

In the Bible and particularly in the Book of Genesis, a person’s name is significant.  Let me give you a few examples starting with the first family of Adam and Eve.  Adam in Hebrew is Adam.  Go figure.  Adamcomes from the word Adamah.   Adamah is the word for “ground” and it is a feminine noun.  Adam is its masculine counterpart.   Adam, as we know, is the name of the first human in the Bible and God made him from the dust of the ground.  Thus, Adam comes from Adamah to symbolize that there is a crucial relationship between humans and the earth, the dirt, the ground.  We do not exist apart from our relationship to the ground.  Looking at Eve.  Eve is the Englished-up version of the Hebrew word chavah which means “living” for she is the mother of all who are living.  Adam and Eve named their two children Cain and Abel.  The name Cain is rooted in the Hebrew word qanah which means “to bring forth”, “to produce”, “to be productive”.  When Eve gave birth to Cain in a statement of great surprise she said, “With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man.”, meaning, “I have produced”.  Abel, on the other hand, comes from the Hebrew word hebel which means “vapor”, or “worthless”, or “vanity”.  Cain worked the land and produced food.  Abel herded sheep.  Sheep were good for only wool back then as they didn’t eat meat.  When Abel sacrificed a sheep to God, it wasted the sheep’s life.  Then, when Cain murdered Abel, Abel's namesake came to fruition.  Cain wasted Abel’s life and made it amount to nothing.  

That was the first family.  Let’s now look at the first family of faith; Abraham and Sarah.  Abraham, which means “father of nations” was originally named Abram, or “great father”.  Sarah which means “the princess” was originally named Sarai or “my princess”.  God changed both of their names when he made the promise to Abraham to give him a land and make his descendants to be a great nation.  Their son Isaac is the anglicized version of Yitzchak which means “he laughs”.  If you remember Sarah laughed when she overheard the messengers of God telling Abraham that she would bear him a child in her 80's.  Getting closer to our text today, Hagar means “to flee”.  Earlier in Genesis when Sarah learns that Hagar is pregnant by Abraham, Sarah becomes jealous and deals harshly with her, so Hagar flees into the wilderness but then comes back. 

And so, we come to Ishmael, the son of the “other woman”.  Hagar was an Egyptian woman, servant of Sarah, whom Sarah let become a wife to Abraham for the purpose of bearing children in Sarah’s name.  What's in his name?  Ishmael means “God has heard”.  In our passage here, Sarah out of jealousy had Abraham send Hagar away for the crime that Ishmael happened to mock Isaac about something on his birthday as older brothers do; a harsh penalty for kid stuff.  Abraham cast them off providing only a bit of bread and a water bottle, a symbolic gesture of both divorce and freeing a slave.  Wandering off into the wilderness, the water gave out and Hagar, true to fleeing difficult situations, left young Ishmael to die of exposure.   She left him and she went a little way away and began to call out to God but rather self-interestedly.  She didn’t say anything like “God, save my child”, but rather, “Do not let me see the death of the child.”  Then the angel of God came to her and told her that God had heard the crying out of the boy as opposed to her own.  God heard the crying of Ishmael, as I said Ishmael means “God has heard.”  

God’s hearing Ishmael is something very spectacular when you consider how Ishmael has been portrayed in Scripture and throughout history.  He is not the child through whom God's promise to Abraham will be fulfilled.  In fact, he is the child of Abraham and Sarah's lack of faith.  He is the outcome of Abraham and Sarah trying to make God's promise to Abraham come about by their own efforts.  As chapter 16 of Genesis accounts Sarah does not trust the word of God that she will have a child in her old age.  So, she sends her Egyptian slave girl, Hagar, to Abraham so that the girl could bear a child for Sarah.  When Abraham divorced and emancipated Hagar, she began to wilderness wander back to Egypt.  But the angel of the LORD stopped her and sent her back telling her to name the child Ishmael because God has heard of her misery.  The angel also described to her a bit of what Ishmael's character would be.  “He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers."  He would apparently be the source of much conflict. 

Throughout history, the Israelites have been quite prejudiced against the Ishmaelites.  In the Bible, the Ishmaelites are regarded as just another group of Canaanites who bear the odious burden of being the ones who carried Joseph away to Egypt to sell him into slavery to Pharaoh.  This prejudice is even evident here in chapter 21 where the son of Hagar is never addressed by name.  He is just “the boy.”  This prejudice and hostility continue even to today.  

In the bigger picture of Middle Eastern History, the Arab peoples on the Arabian Peninsula trace their lineage back to Ishmael.  Islam goes as far as to say that God's promise to Abraham was fulfilled through Ishmael rather than Isaac.  There is a lesson to be learned here that even with Ishmael and the Ishmaelites being portrayed so negatively and with such prejudice, his name is still Ishmael, “God hears”.  God does indeed hear his crying, his misery, and harkens to it.  God still blesses Ishmael and makes him to be a great nation.  Yet, that is only half of the promise.  Ishmael did not get the land nor was it through Ishmael that salvation would come.

Ishmael and his name stand as a corrective to all those religious people that snobbishly say, “We are God's people and you are not.  God hears us and not you.  We are the holy and you are the heathen.  God is on our side, not yours.  God will not hear and bless you because you are not one of us.”  God hears the crying of the outcast, period.  He sees the misery of those who have to flee because of injustice and even if they aren't of the “right religion” God still hears them and will and does act to bring them justice.  Ishmael reminds us that God still inclines to hear even those who are “a wild donkey” of a human being and who mock the promise and faithfulness of God to his people.  God still hears even them.  Ishmael reminds us that there is lack of faith and a cruelty even among God's people and that God will indeed look out after the good of those to whom we have wrongfully been wicked in God’s name.  God hears the crying of the outcast no matter who they are.  Amen.  

The Kingdom Is Still Here

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Matthew 9:35-10:14

Y’all remember the good ole days?  How we used to just travel light going from house to house proclaiming the Good News that, “The Kingdom of God is right here with us now.  Come get on board.”  We’d go and actually bring peace to people in their homes, the peacefulness of God’s presence.  Remember how Jesus gave us authority, a real power, not power to get people to toe the line but power to heal; to heal the sick, the troubled, the broken.  We’d heal people…wow, remember that?  Jesus even gave us authority to set people free from those dark, sinister, sub-personal powers that had taken them over …remember that?  People used to come out in droves because it was obvious that wherever we followers of Jesus went things that only God could do happened.  The Kingdom of God was at hand.  Jesus was present with us by the Holy Spirit…remember that?  Those were the good ole days.  Remember?  Things were booming, moving forward, growing.  Sure, sometimes we’d get run out of town, but hey, that’s their loss.  The good ole days.  How I long for the good ole days.  Remember?

Now, let me guess.  You’re saying to yourselves, “Randy, those aren’t the good ole days we remember.”  In fact, that sounds a little weird, even scary.  We didn’t go to people homes.  They came to church and if you didn’t go to church, you knew you should.  We remember when we had 150, 200, 300 or more in church, whole families, lots of children.  We had Sunday School classes for every grade and a children’s choir and Bible School, a junior and a senior youth group.  There were more than thirty-to-fifty people in the choir with lots of men singing.  Even though the best nap you got all week was during the sermon, this place was full.  We had money for this and money for that.  Generously supported an overseas missionary.  We were thinking about building a bigger church building.  Everybody used to be Christians back in those days, even politicians.  Randy, those were the good ole days we remember and long for.  Remember?

Well, I do remember those days too and to be honest, every couple of generations of the church over the centuries and millennium has had their good ole days to look back on and long for as the Church has changed, adapted, morphed, evolved over the centuries.  Societies change and so has the church.  In the beginning, Jesus’ first disciples went forth proclaiming the Kingdom of God is here, at hand.  They proclaimed peace and brought forth healing.  They formed small communities that met in homes and were known for the way they loved one another.  They virtually eliminated poverty in their midst.  It was obvious that God was present and reigning in their midst as opposed to the world around them that was ruled by corrupt leaders who had the Roman military enlisted to be their thugs.  

A few centuries later after many outbreaks of persecution, the church had grown and became a more predominant social force, Emperor Constantine realized he needed a common religion to bring unity to the Roman Empire and started the wheels rolling to make Christianity into that unifying religion.  Over the next couple of centuries, the church grew politically powerful and the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire and instead of bringing the peace of Christ kings and bishops got people to kill in the name of Jesus.  Thus, the Age of Christendom where Church and State walked hand in hand in an unholy alliance.  The Church served the purpose of God-stamping the work of the State as well as being that organization that defined acceptable, moral, societal conduct.  So often we got it wrong like when we called slavery and racism good.

Outside of occasional renewal movements that changed the course of history, the Kingdom of God as the first disciples knew it stayed eclipsed behind the illusion of Christendom, but still present.  Oddly, those renewal movements began in homes and usually involved meals.  First-hand accounts often reflect that Jesus was felt in their midst, present in their midst through the Holy Spirit.  The peace that Jesus breathed on his disciples on Easter evening when he appeared to them as they hid behind locked doors afraid for their lives was felt among these renewal movements.  Healings and other “miracles” are attested as well.  The Kingdom of God has always remained “at hand”.  Another marker of those renewal movements was a noticeable lack of political affiliation.  In fact, they were too often at odds with the powers that be, particularly when those powers were situated in the Church.

The good ole days that we remember are likely situated in the 1980’s and over the last twenty years we have witnessed the greatest decline in religious affiliation in Western History if not World History.  The good ole days that we remember are likely, hopefully (if you will pardon my hope), the last hoorah of Christendom.  Though an inordinate number of individual “church members” are associated with mega-church Christianity which is also in decline now, 80% of congregations are less than 60 in membership, meet in a big building like we do, and average attendance is 20-25 on a Sunday.  5 years ago in Canada, there was at least one church closure a week.  I haven’t seen recent numbers on that.  It may have peaked.  The people who attend these small churches are getting on in years, faithful, kind, prayerful, hospitable, generous, back-bone of the community kind-of-people.  They also have formed the backbone of volunteer organizations in the community that like the local church are disappearing as people just don’t have the time to be community oriented anymore. 

This is a harsh reality for us to face, we whom I’ll call the remnant,.  The emotions we predominantly feel are not good: sadness, shame, guilt, disillusion, regret, fear, overwhelmed, confusion.  These emotions are not what God’s faithful remnant should feel.  Joy and gratitude ought to be toping our list.  In a world that thinks faith in Jesus Christ is either irrelevant or a scandal, you folks are still inclined to pray, to hope.  For some odd reason you still have faith; not just beliefs, but faith.  You know the Solid Rock upon which you stand.  If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here.  Just getting out week after week and letting God know whose side you’re on is what I would call “rocking it” these days.  If God wanted more from us, then God would make it possible.  

This is probably a bad analogy. Forgive me if it is.  We recently had to say good bye to one of our cats.  He wasn’t that old, but he got kidney disease like old cats do.  The last year and a half of his life I spent a lot of time scooping a lot of litter, making sure he ate the special food I put out for him (and not his fat buddy).  He had the world’s worst breath.  If he started to clean himself, the smell would gag you.  He started to look really scruffy.  But that last year of his life, pretty much every morning when I sat on the couch praying and reading Scripture, he was there in my lap.  He, and I, needed that time of familiarity in his last months.  Jealous Nellie, the dog, would gather there too with her head on my thigh and where two or three are gathered, Jesus is there in their midst.  God’s faithful remnant still gathering to pray and just be with one another…well, that’s us in the familiarity of our congregations. Jesus is still in our midst.  He’s still here.

That said, the Kingdom God is still at hand.  There are new ways of being church that are developing out there where people are gathering in homes around tables.  The peaceful presence of Christ is in their midst.  Healings are happening.  People are being set free from dark, sinister, sub-personal powers that have taken them over.  New, wonderful, and powerful things are happening even in the Presbyterian Church in Canada.  The harvest is plentiful and the labourers though few are out there.  That said, that doesn’t mean we can’t try new things.  Home gatherings, gathering for fellowship and meals and prayer and study at times other than Sunday morning are a good and welcome thing to do.  Anything we can do to share the familiarity of the sense of loving community that we enjoy with each other is a good and welcome thing to do.  Opening the doors to the community for community events is a good and welcome thing to do.  But, in the end, the most powerful thing we can do is to keep coming out to worship and to pray.  Amen. 

Go and Learn Mercy

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Matthew 9:9-34

I’m sure you folks are familiar with how when there’s a pink elephant in the room, people will generally refer to it as “it” or “this”.  “What are we going to do about ‘this’?”  I bet you didn’t notice but there’s a whopping big “this” in our reading where the story of the healing of the two blind men comes in to play.  They are following Jesus up the road yelling out over and over again, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.”  Jesus goes into a house and they come up to him.  Jesus just asked them, “Do you believe I am able to do this?”  They answer, “Yes, Lord”.  I’m kind of curious as to what exactly “this” is.  Restoring their sight hasn’t been mentioned.  We just assume that’s what Jesus is talking about but the story never says what “this”, what mercy is.  That intrigues me.  

These two blind men were just begging all along the way, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.”  That is what you say when you petition a royal.  They were begging maybe even groveling for mercy as they would if maybe King Herod was parading up the road.  That’s what beggar’s did.  But here they were begging for mercy from the one they believed to be the Son of David, the foretold king from King David’s lineage who would bring about God’s kingdom and rule righteously as David had.  In essence, their asking for mercy was asking for a royal favour.  They were asking King Jesus, the righteous king, to regard them as true citizens of the Kingdom of God and extend a royal favour to them.  One would expect that favour to be something like giving them a coin and some bread or a raison cake.  But…

Well, Jesus asked them, “Do you believe I am able to do this?”  So, there’s the “this”.  What is “this”.  Is Jesus maybe asking them a bit of a sarcastic question that goes like, “Do you believe I’m just some sort of king who can show you a royal favour and just give you a coin and a raison cake to make you go away?”  Jesus’s answer on the mouth of any other king could quite easily be understood as a response of dismissal that would sound like, “Who do blind beggars think you are to ask me for a favour?  The nerve.  Somebody give them a raison cake and get rid of them.”  But Jesus isn’t like any other king and they indicate this with their answer, a simple “Yes, Lord.”  There’s only one person a Jew is going to call Lord, and that’s the God of Israel. Apparently, these two blind beggars see who Jesus is when the religious authorities and the disciples of John the Baptist are quite obviously having difficulty seeing “it”.

            Since they believed that Jesus was the Son of David who was able to show them mercy, Jesus really shows them mercy.  He touches their eyes and says, “According to your faith let it be done to you.”  Suddenly they could see.  King Jesus, Son of David, their God somehow with them instead of a pittance of a hand out, he restored them to being able to live fully and with dignity among people and to be able to earn their keep instead of having to beg alongside the highway on the outskirts of town.  You see, they were reduced to begging because the religious authorities had decreed them to be cursed by God as evidenced in their blindness; cursed for some horrific yet unknown sin they had committed.  The penalty for being cursed was that they were no longer considered citizens of Israel, no longer children of God and so they were to be cast out from the city.  A healing act of God, a life-restoring act of God, was the “this” that Jesus did in accordance to their faith.

            I puzzled over this text for several days wondering why it was that sight was the “this”, the act of mercy that was done to them in accordance to their faith.   In some Christian circles this passage comes up as one of those faith-as-magical power texts where if you believe hard enough then Jesus will do it for you, and conversely, if Jesus doesn’t do it for you, it is because you don’t believe hard enough.  But, as I said, these blind beggars were not asking to see again, they just wanted to be treated fairly by Israel’s true king with some act of royal favour.  So, I pondered.  

            Not surprisingly, the answer came to me in one of those bathroom moments.  Fortunately, I was only brushing my teeth before bed Tuesday night.  It has to do with what faith is.  Faith isn't simply just this head and heart thing, an inward believing or trusting.  The German Theologian Karl Barth in his commentary on Romans defines faith in a very helpful way.  He says that faith is what happens when the faithfulness of God encounters the fidelity of man.  It is better here in this passage that we say, “In accordance with your fidelity let it be done to you.”  Their fidelity here is that they, two blind men were following Jesus.  You have to be able to see to be able to follow.  Though they could not see Jesus, they could “see” that he is the Son of David somehow indwelt by the God of Israel and they were following him along the way hoping for a royal favour knowing that Jesus could grant it.  So, in accordance with their being able to “see” who Jesus is and the act of fidelity in trying to follow him, Jesus indeed granted them a royal favour.  He restored those two outcasts to the full community of God’s people by healing their blindness.  

Something else we have to note is how Jesus showed these blind men mercy.  He touched their eyes.  He touched the part of them that they and everyone regarded to be cursed, the part of them that made them unclean which meant not allowed to come into the presence of God at the temple.  Anyone who touched a diseased person particularly the diseased part of that person especially if it was discharging something also became unclean and so also the toucher was not allowed into the presence of God for a period of time.  This is true if you touched the dead or come into contact with a woman during menstruation as in the stories immediately preceding this one.  Thus, in this passage three times Jesus shows what mercy is.  It is touching the cursed and taking to oneself the curse of the cursed and the result is their healing.  It is touching people at the point of their deepest needs, their most shameful places.  He touched with love and acceptance and that unleashed the power of God to make them whole.

            Well, moving on, these acts of mercy, these restorations of people to wholeness from cursedness, come about in the context of Jesus confronting the religious authorities, the Pharisees.  The Pharisees had the audacity to claim the authority to be able to declare who was in and who was out with respect to the people of God.  The confrontation began, of all places, at a meal that Jesus was sharing with his disciples and some “tax collectors and sinners.”  The Pharisees in all their bigoted authority found it quite objectionable that Jesus kept company with such as those.  Jesus says to them “Go and learn what it means, ‘I desire mercy, rather than sacrifice’.”  Jesus is most likely quoting from Hosea 6:6 which reads, “For I desire steadfast love (mercy) and not sacrifice, the knowing of God rather than burnt offerings.”  And, the point of that passage is God basically saying, “If you want to know me, you won’t find me by acting religious.  Show mercy, show steadfast love, and you will learn who I am.”  The Hebrew word for mercy is chesed and is better translated as steadfast love. 

In the Old Testament when God shows chesed it means he is being steadfastly faithful and kind in providing for his people even when they worship other gods.  This love too often comes in the form of God not giving us what we want and instead discipling us or even disciplining us to seek his presence and guidance to break us of our unwholesome attachments delusions and in the end restoring us to himself so that we have a greater knowing of him as being steadfastly loving and faithful.  When we humans do chesed, it is showing our love and adoration for God by doing kindness to others especially in their brokenness.  Acting religious does not please God as there is no love in action involved. But rather, showing steadfast love to others especially when they are broken and hurting somehow teaches us something about who God is.  

So, the main point of this passage from Matthew is that following Jesus; i.e, fidelity displayed in touching others at the point of their “cursedness” or shame and attempting to restore them to health and healthy community is the way that God makes himself known through us.  So, steadfast love, love in action, rather than just trying to go through the motions of being good religious people, is what God desires from the disciples of Jesus Christ.  May we go and learn mercy that we may come to know God all the better.  Amen.

I Don't Believe in god Almighty

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2 Corinthians 13:11-13

It is no surprise that people do not see things the same way.  I remember a few years ago at our house we repainted some dining room chairs.  Dear wife said the previous colour was light blue.  I said it was light green.  I knew better than to push the issue…so I asked the kids.  Daughter also said light blue and Son said light green.  I said "Hmmm. There just might be a difference even in the way women and men see colours."  We were looking at the same chair and seeing two different colours.  

Two people can behold the same sunset but not perceive its beauty the same way…and so it is with the way we regard God.  Some people will boldly say, “I experience God to be like this…”.  Another person will say, “I have had no experience of God.  How can we know there is a God?”  One person will say, “This is what I believe about God.”  While another will say, “That’s nice, I believe this.”  While another will say, “You believe the wrong things about God.  My beliefs are right.  Believe like I do and God won’t get you.”

People understand God differently and so it is not a stretch to say that what a person believes about God will have an affect on how that person treats other people.  Let me ask a rhetorical question.  How will I treat people if I believe that God is the Almighty Creator who gave order to his creation by putting in place rules that must be heeded or the consequences are grave; that the rules are revealed in the Bible and, therefore, people owe it to the Almighty God who made them to study the Bible and do what it says; and that as part of God’s ordering of his creation he endowed civil authorities with the power of the sword to keep order and therefore civil authority must be obeyed – how will I treat people if that is what I believe about God?  Many of you may be saying, “That’s what I believe.”  I grew up believing that.

Well, to answer my question, here’s an example from history.  Adolf Hitler readily made references to god Almighty in his speeches.  He seems to have believed what I just outlined excepting the read your Bible part.  The majority of German churches supported him and believed that god Almighty was somehow blessing the German nation through Hitler.  With that support in his pocket, he added to these beliefs that as part of God’s ordering of his creation God made a superior race of people, the Arian race, whom all other races must serve.  The majority of German churches apparently accepted his thoughts on that as well and either stood blindly by or willfully participated as he systematically exterminated the Jewish people, God’s chosen people, in Europe.  

Nazi Germany teaches us a hideous lesson: It is incredibly easy to get good people – good, church-going people – to do atrocious things by appealing to a belief in god Almighty.  Moreover, they will do those atrocious things believing that they are serving that god Almighty’s purposes by doing what civil authorities ask them to do believing that serving god Almighty makes a nation great.  

I want to go on record as saying that I don’t believe in god Almighty.  Yes, there are occasional references in the Bible to God being almighty and one of the Old Testament names for God is El Shaddai which many Hebrew scholars say we mistranslate as God Almighty.  El means God.  Shaddai most likely means “of the mountain”.  Jewish rabbi’s have traditionally taken it to mean “sufficient in oneself” to make it correspond to the name God gave Moses to call him by; Yahweh, which means “I am who I am, I will be who I will be.”  The word “Shaddai” has nothing to do with power the way we seem to understand power, which “the capacity to get others to do what I want.”  

If we want to stick with the word almighty to describe God then we need to check our definition of power with God’s definition of power.  God’s power is the power of love which God most clearly demonstrated in the weakness of Jesus dying on the cross once and for all.  Jesus could have called down the armies of heaven to annihilate his enemies and set up the Kingdom of God…but he didn’t.  He died and from death he was raised and by that death and resurrection God defeated all of the so-called powers that make claims to be almighty.

Let me tell you the God I do believe in.  I believe in God the Trinity.  I believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  I know it is more difficult to conceive of God as Trinity – Three-in-One, One-in-Three – than to just go the easy route of believing in the one god, the god Almighty thing.  But, hey, try understanding what physical reality is made of.  Scientists tell us that our universe basically consists of energy and matter.  Oddly, we can only see 1% of the energy that’s in our universe meaning that what we presume to be empty space is full of something called dark energy that’s causing everything to accelerate away from everything else.  They also tell us that we see only about 8% of the matter in the universe meaning that what we think of as empty space is also full of stuff we can’t see or interact with.  That’s weird and incomprehensible. So, should we expect that the God who created this universe out of nothing should be any easier to understand?  Just asking.  Thinking about God requires work.  We can’t just say God is God and that’s that for the reason that our inclination is to wind up with god Almighty.

God is Three-in-One, One in Three.  That’s what we find when we read the Bible.  God revealed himself in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth who died on a cross.  From that self-revelation we garner that Jesus called God in heaven, Father.  This God in heaven called Jesus ‘my Beloved Son’ and poured the Holy Spirit upon him, and the Holy Spirit remains present with us now as God we know and encounter.  These three separate persons are somehow (and we will never understand how) all the same God.  They are the same stuff whatever God-stuff is.  Like a Trillium flower…three petals, one flower, same DNA throughout.  

So, to say that God is Trinity is to say God is not a single individual with all power.  Rather it is to say that God is essentially a relationship of three persons who are the same God-stuff.  God is relational in himself as opposed to simply being individual and the nature of that relationship is the love Jesus showed us.  

Looking at ourselves, to say that we humans are created in God’s image does not mean that at the core of our human nature we are autonomous, rational, decision making individuals patterned after god Almighty.  When we go behaving like mini versions of god Almighty, we do monstrous damage to ourselves and to each other.  Rather, being made in God’s image means we too are relational beings.  We need to have relationships with God, each other, the creation, ourselves just even to know who and what we are as individuals.  We do not exist apart from relationships.  We are relational beings whom God made in the image of God’s own relational self.

I know that’s some thick theology and I apologize for taxing your brains.   But, we need to start perceiving of God as Trinity, as relationship rather than as this individual god Almighty.  My belief in God as Trinity culminates in understanding God as the communion in love of the Three co-equal Persons of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit who give themselves to one another so completely in mutual, unconditional, and sacrificial love that they are One.  The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love one another in the same way that Jesus loved us on the cross: an unconditional and sacrificial giving of oneself for the good of others.  In and as this love The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is/are One.

Back to my basic assumption that our beliefs about God will affect how we relate to other people.  If a person believes that God is the loving communion of the co-equal persons God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit who give themselves to one another in mutual, unconditional, and sacrificial love so completely that they are one, how will that person relate to other people?  Well, as we are all made equally in the image of God, there is no room for societal structures that allow one person or one group of people to oppress another.  There is no room for racism, for bigotry, for poverty, for extravagant wealth, for weapons, for abuse of power.  People who believe that God is Trinity and love as Jesus loved will give themselves to others so completely in love that through them God will heal humanity of these evil blemishes.  These people will stand against these abuses and selflessly involve themselves in the Trinity’s work to overcome these energies of darkness that pervade human relationships and communities. What we believe about God matters and these beliefs will become evident in the way we relate with others.  

Church, God is not god Almighty.  God is Trinity – the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who give themselves so completely to one another in mutual, unconditional, and sacrificial love that they are one.  Who we believe God is has dire consequences…dire consequences… particularly for us people of faith.  We are the ones the Triune God of grace, mercy, love, peace, and justice has summonsed to come and faithfully serve the One who is best referred to with the pronoun “We”.  We, us, are the witnesses of “We” to the ends of the earth.  We need to ask ourselves whether we serve the God whose power is self-emptying love or are we simply in league with the raw, coercive power of god Almighty and being co-opted into being religious validation of all those “ism’s” like racism that humans are so famous for?  Who is your God?  Amen.