COMMUNITY ON A PILGRIMAGE
TRINITY SUNDAY
St Michael’s Vaucluse – 30 May, 1999
2Corinthians 13.11-13, Matthew 28. 16-20
Last week I had a meeting with the Archbishop of Sydney about a particular
matter, and he looked at me rather intensely and he said, ‘Yesterday I met the
rock from which you were hewn’. I puzzled about this biblical allusion, and
he then said that he had met my father at the funeral of Sir Eric Willis at St
James’ Church. It was clear to the Archbishop that this was obviously
someone who was related to me. So when I went home I looked at a number
of photographs on the piano in our house, and found one of my father and me
with Nigel. I looked at it and thought, yes you can see these three people do
have a kind of similarity about them. Long jowls, and all of that sort of thing,
but in some way they were each different. There was a commonality, but
clearly some difference.
One of the puzzles in life is the way in which we can see things which are
similar and yet are reminded of something which is often quite different.
It is a bit like beauty. If you looked at the scene outside this church towards
the harbour, you would see a scene of great beauty and great coherence
framed by the trees. All of the bits and pieces are in some ways quite raggy.
Ships going here and moving there. There is no great plan about the picture
outside it just happens to be there, and yet there is a certain kind of beauty,
order and coherence about it which is immediately apparent to anyone who
looks at it.
I enjoy ballet. One of the things about ballet is the beauty of the overall
impression of poetry in motion, where different parts of it contribute to the
whole.
Ordered uniformity, everything in line, is not often related to beauty. Beauty
requires different diverse elements in the parts in order that the whole might
be seen as great beauty.
Diversity is also related to creativity. One of the problems that the early
Christians faced was exactly that. They were Jews who knew God as one and
that was their constant confession. The Lord our God, the God of Israel is one
and you shall worship the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and
mind. Yet these Jewish people came to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was also
Lord. Indeed, that became their key confession about Jesus. So how did that
fit with the Jewish confession that God was one? It was worse than that in a
way because Jesus himself spoke to them of another kind of divine presence, a
comforter called the Spirit who would follow him, and who would testify to
him and to the Father. Those early Christians with their Jewish background
were therefore faced with a considerable problem.
This problem was not as great, and in a sense not quite as important, as the
more profound problem created by the presence of God in their lives. They
knew the forgiveness which came to them from Christ. Paul speaks of being
justified because of the death of Christ. He makes it the key plank of his
gospel. These early Christians knew it well. They also knew that the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ was their God as well. They experienced God
in that way, as Lord and as Judge. At the same time they also experienced
God as inner inspirer and comforter. Their experience of God was marked not
by singleness and uniformity, but by diversity, difference, beauty and
creativity.
That is also our common experience of God as well. We experience God as
Saviour, as Inspirer, and as Judge. In our pew bulletin there is a note about
that. Even in prayer we experience God in different ways.
The only way that I can understand god as Trinity is in my own
personal experience of God. For simple-minded people like me,
when I kneel down to say my prayers I am trying to get in touch
with God and I know that what is prompting me to pray is also
God: God so to speak inside of me. But I also know that all my
real knowledge of God comes to me through Christ the man
who was God – that Christ is standing beside me helping me to
pray. You see what is happening in prayer is that God is the
person to which I am praying – the goal I am trying to reach.
God is also the person praying with me which is pushing me on
– the very power that motivates me. I know also that God is also
the road or the bridge along which I am being pushed and
motivated. So that the three-fold life of the three personal beings
is actually going along in that ordinary little bedroom of mine in
an ordinary person’s prayer. We understand the idea of Trinity
when God becomes a personal reality in our lives.
That is what we call a Trinitarian experience of God. It is the same God yet
there is diversity in the character of the experience. There is a three foldness
about what God has revealed in history of himself and the way in which we
experience God. Our own personal experience is like that and why today we
celebrate Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday follows on Ascension and Pentecost
which speak about the completion of Jesus’ ministry and the coming of the
Spirit. It brings together both our experience of God in different ways and the
historical revelation of God in different aspects.
That is the great truth about the Doctrine of the Trinity that it is not a
theological conundrum, but an experience of life. It is how we know God.
In 1968 I was at Basel University in Switzerland, Karl Barth, who was one of
this century’s greatest theologians, was about to start a series of seminars on a
German theologian called Frederich Schleiermacher. We had all read up our
Schleiermacher, to be ready. Then Barth announced, apropos of nothing,
"don’t ever discount the Doctrine of the Trinity, it is the finest creation of
Christian theology". I thought to myself, I have got the wrong Seminar!
Something was obviously on his mind, and I have often reflected on what he
was saying. In a sense the Doctrine of the Trinity is the finest creation of
Christian theology, but the fact of the Trinity is the everyday experience of
any Christian person.
Today, however, I want to focus on something a little different from that,
another aspect of our Trinitarian experience of God, that is, on the Church as
a community of people who experience God in this way. God not only relates
to us individually in this way, he creates a community to which we belong in
this way as well. If you look at the church as a community of people, what is
it like? Well it is very diverse. In the church there are diversities of gifts and
talents, there are diversities of experience and background. We are all very
different. According to the New Testament, those diverse gifts are not an
accident of who your father or grandfather was, but as a result of God’s
activity. God’s creative activity in the community which is the Church, is by
creating and giving different gifts in the church.
That truth in the experience of Christian community was a great trial to the
apostle Paul! People always want to do their own thing. Anyone in any
bureaucratic position is concerned about of that. What Paul said to the
Corinthians, who were a very diverse and erratic group of people, was that
they needed to stand together on certain principles. He ran a very dangerous
argument, and I want to run through it with you.
When Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he underlined that in the life of a
community of Christians there is always difference. Each member has a gift,
and that the gift comes from God, whether it is administration being an
apostle or a prophet, speaking in tongues, teaching. Whatever you are, your
gift in the Christian community is a gift from God. What Paul is saying first
up as a fundamental truth, is that diversity and difference is the ground rule
of the Christian community. This congregation, or this church which is
created and sustained and renewed by God, is marked by God given
diversity.
Having established the God given quality of this diversity Paul the offers an
image to suggest how this diversity might be. He gave them an image of a
body. One is a finger, one is a foot, one is a head, and you should respect all
parts of the body because when the body functions it works together in
harmony and creativity. It is a helpful image. Here is a body made up of
different parts which is clearly working as a coherent unit. The difficulty was
however, that Paul had said that there are some gifts that are more important
or more useful to the congregation than others, indeed you should aspire to
some of these more useful gifts.
So here is a problem. If a finger wants to become an ear, or a hand, or a foot,
or a something, what does that do to the symmetry of the body image? Paul
realised that the image of the body was somehow too static. It kept people in
the one place. Once a finger always a finger was not a truth he was
comfortable with. So at the end of 1Corinthians 12, he says, ‘I will show you a
better way, a more excellent way’ of understanding how this diversity can be
creative and also be in the image of God. He goes on to talk about love. The
qualities of love, how love does certain kinds of things, how love behaves in
certain kinds of ways. Though he speaks with the tongues of men and of
angels and has not love, he is nothing. Paul runs through the kinds of
differences that might emerge in a Christian community, and says that
without love these things are nothing. Paul’s point is that the diversity in the
Christian community becomes creative when it works together according to
the fundamental character of God, namely love.
That is a very risky strategy for an organisation, because it relies on all being
in contact with, and responding to, the presence of God directly. It is because
it is risky and open in that way that Paul is forced to go on and point to
another truth, that a Christian community which lives in that Trinitarian God
image way is always going to be a community on pilgrimage to the last day.
That is why he talks about seeing through a glass darkly, how we now know
in part, but then we know as we are known.
So that community in its diversity and its creativeness given by God is
sustained and kept together by the people in it acting according to the
character of God in love towards one another. That community is always a
community on pilgrimage to the last day. It does not live here, but lives there.
And because of that,
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It can be creative
It can be a community in which people change.
It can be a community in which there are rough edges
This is a community in which people move and are renewed individually and
recreate the kaleidoscopic unity of a church that is created in the image of
God.
Trinity Sunday is a day to remember the character of the presence of God
amongst us in the community, creating a diverse and loving pilgrimage
people.