Reclaiming the Trinity as Kin: a thought experiment on Sorry Day

Texts: Psalm 29; Romans 8.12-17; John 3.1-17

Today marks the 27th anniversary of the tabling in Federal Parliament of the Bringing Them Home report, an enquiry of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission into the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from our families. The report found that the practice, which began in the earliest days of British colonisation, had persisted well into the 1990s and was specifically designed by the state to destroy the indigeneity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The report noted that children removed from their families were far less likely to speak their language and practise traditional culture. At the same time, they were far more likely to suffer the spiralling effects of childhood trauma. Unsurprisingly, if you try to remove the indigeneity from Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander kids and superimpose a toxic form of whiteness in its stead, Indigenous kids grow up with a sense of spiritual homelessness. Cast adrift in a world which simultaneously denies our indigeneity but also loudly and publicly blames us for it, we invariably retreat into the large hole inside ourselves where our country, family and culture used to be. A very dark and lonely place, usually.

The removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids from our families was a cruel and hideous policy which, despite beautifully crafted apologies from church and state in the intervening years, continues unabated. The rates of child removal are arguably higher now, in 2024, than they have ever been. That is why ‘Sorry Day’, which is commemorated on this day each year, must continue to be commemorated. For it reminds the Australian community of both the damage done by past practices and the damage it continues to do.

Now, as it happens, today is also Trinity Sunday in the calendar of the Western Church. The Church that came to this country as part of the colonisation project. The Church that continues to enculturate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into its spirituality. The fact of this correlation creates an occasion when an Aboriginal preacher, like myself, might engage in something of a thought experiment. And the thought experiment goes something like this: where would Christianity be if Jesus had been removed from his Jewish family and placed in the ‘care’ of a non-semitic culture and society. Would Christianity even exist? Would its God, the God named in the bible as ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ even be thinkable? Now, I rarely answer my own questions with any degree of nuance, but here perhaps is a start.

You will have noted already, I hope, that the trinitarian dogma is irreducibly familial in its language. It speaks of the divine as a little kinship network, a family. The historical Jesus, who apparently lost his father, Joseph, well before he reached his maturity, called his God ‘abba’, one of the more intimate names for ‘father’ in Aramaic. For him, the divine was not simply the progenitor of all creation or, in that very general sense, the father who watched over the Jewish people. For Jesus, the divine was his father. One who cared for him and taught him how to be a responsible member of the community as all good Jewish dads did.

It follows then, or so the trinitarian dogma would have it, that since the ‘daddy’ of Jesus was divine, the creator or all heaven and earth, then Jesus himself, precisely as a son, also had to be divine. That is point of the birth narratives constructed by Matthew and Luke, is it not? Yes, the evangelists say, for all earthly intents and purposes Jesus was Joshua ben-Joseph, the son of Joseph. But at a more profound level, he was also the son of a divine ‘father’: not simply ‘created’ by divine power but ‘begotten’, conceived not by the passage of sperm into his mother Mary’s uterus, but by the action of the Holy Spirit.

This ‘Holy Spirit’ cannot, at one level, be imagined in familial terms at all. Neither male nor female in the basic grammatical constructions of New Testament Greek, the Spirit is variously described in the biblical texts as fire, as water, and as air or breath. None of these images are particularly familial. Not if you are a hurried reader, that is. Dwell a little longer, however, and you will pick up some connections with maternity and with mothering. Take the passage we read from John chapter 3, for example. Here Jesus tells Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council, that entering the region of the divine involves being born of water and spirit. The image here is multilayered. Water is both the amniotic fluid that protects a child until they are born, but also the amniotic fluid of the new birth in baptism, which has been placed in round, womb-like, fonts since the earliest of Christian centuries.

In the same passage, the children of God are said to be born of the breath or wind of God, a more literal translation of the Greek pneuma or ‘spirit’. Here the mysterious breath or wind takes on a decidedly maternal function. The Spirit gives birth to God’s children and then imprints them with a divine identity and vocation. In the passage we read from Romans 8, the children of God are only able to recognise God as their familial ‘father’ because the Spirit cries out a breathy ‘abba’, daddy, within them. Here the children are being led by the actions of Spirit who has given them birth and imprinted them with its own DNA. Just as a mother does with her children.

Of course, in Christian discourse, the Spirit is never simply female, in the gendered sense. Because the Spirit also carries the imprint of the Father and the Son. The texts very often name the Spirit the ‘Spirit of God’ or the ‘Spirit of Jesus’. In this sense, as the Uniting Church version of the Creed notes, the Spirit can be said to ‘proceed’ from the Father and the Son, with all their maleness. This means, in the end, that the Spirit is that dimension or experience of the divine which resists simple binary categories, especially if those categories are gendered, whist retaining a crucial role in the parenting of every single Christian child. The Spirit takes all that is nurturing in the being of God—whether that nurturing be imagined in masculine, feminine or more gender-neutral terms—and makes it real and active for you and I in the nursery that is the church.

So, let me now return to the question I asked a few minutes ago: where would Christianity be if Jesus had been kidnapped from his Jewish family and community, and placed in the ‘care’ of a far way, non-semitic culture? Where would the Christian understanding of the divine be? Would it be anything at all? Well, possibly not.

For the Christian experience of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is predicated upon the experience of a thoroughly semitic Jesus with the divine, an experience almost entirely derived from his formation as a Jewish child, raised in a Jewish home, according to the nurturing practices of his Jewish parents in their Jewish homeland and kinship networks. His experience of the divine as a nurturing family—male, female, and neither male nor female—draws deeply from the well of semitic culture and spirituality. Were Jesus removed from this environment as a young child, he may not have become the spiritual teacher who was able to imprint his followers with that experience and understanding. Were Jesus to have been kidnapped by an invading force, for example, and placed in a society where the divine was understood not as a nurturing family but as an emperor . . . well, Christianity may have ended up being an imperial religion of war and of conquest rather than a trinitarian religion of family, and of care, and of kinship.

But wait! Isn’t that precisely what happened with Constantine and with Charlemagne and with the colonising empires of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries? Did they not kidnap the kinship religion of Jesus and put it in prison? Did they not absorb it into a patriarchal and colonial religion of empire and of force that gave rise, in the end, to the practices of child removal that have so damaged the Indigenous children of Australia and many other places? Well yes, actually. Yes.

On this Sorry Day, perhaps we should remind ourselves of the faith and spirituality of Jesus, whose religion was deeply imbedded in a particularly semitic experience of family, of kinship, and of care. And perhaps we should remind ourselves, on this Trinity Sunday, that the dogma of the trinity is essentially about being part of a loving and caring family and the blessing of having one. And finally, perhaps, on this Sorry and Trinity Sunday, we should commit ourselves anew to practices of nurture which allow our Indigenous children to become who they are. Proud Aborginal and Torres Strait Islander kin.

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Garry Worete Deverell

Pitt Street Uniting Church, Warrane/Sydney, 

Sorry Day/ Trinity Sunday 2024

Losing Ourselves to Gain Ourselves for Justice

 Texts: Acts 16.16-34; Revelation 22.12-21; John 17.20-26

Five years ago, two hundred and fifty Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders gathered at Uluru to sign a ‘Statement from the Heart’ which called upon the Australian people to join with them in working toward a ‘makaratta’ or treaty between our peoples, built upon truth-telling and a constitutionally recognised Indigenous ‘voice’ to the national parliament. Two days ago, at a ceremony on Gadigal land in Sydney, nine national religious leaders signed a resolution calling upon the federal parliament to work towards a referendum on the ‘voice’ as soon as possible. The religious leaders represented Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. I’m grateful to God that there were also Catholics, the Uniting Church, the National Council of Churches and, yes, even Anglicans. Chris McLeod, our national Aboriginal bishop, represented our Primate, Archbishop Geoffrey Smith, on this occasion.

One of the pleasing things about this ceremony was the fact that none of the nine religious leaders gave a speech. Rather, they listened. They listened to an oration from Rachel Perkins, an Arrente and Kalkadoon woman, a prominent filmmaker, and the daughter of Charlie Perkins, the man whose 60s activism played a key part in the recognition of mob as human beings in the 1967 referendum.  Ms Perkins used her oration to call for unity – amongst mob, in the general community, and in the faith communities – unity in supporting the Statement from the Heart and the call of the religious leaders for a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament. For this is the only way, she argued, that we are ever likely to see something like justice arrive in our nation, the nation of Australia, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

It goes without saying, perhaps, that you only have to call for unity if unity isn’t actually there. And it isn’t. Demonstrably. None of the communities Ms Perkins was addressing can claim to be agreed, even within themselves, on either the Statement from the Heart or the urgency of a referendum. I can tell you, with some authority, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are not agreed. Many mob do not even know what the Statement from the Heart actually says. And the same is surely true with the Anglican community. Perhaps even more so. The ministry conference I attended during the week made it quite clear to me that a voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – indeed, even as simple a matter as listening to the mob who are part of us, who live and work in our midst - is really the very last thing on our ecclesial mind.  The very last.  What seems to be uppermost in our Anglican minds are things like the intrusion of the state into our affairs and . . . you guessed it, sex (who can have it, and what kind).  Which, on my most buoyant days, attracts little more than a gentle eye-roll but, on others, a feeling of deep despair at just how tone-deaf and narcissistic we have become. Honestly!

That’s why I really feel for the Jesus of John’s Gospel, whose earnest prayer for unity appears in today’s lections. Let’s listen in to his prayer once more, the prayer he offered, according to John, just before he was arrested and crucified:

I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

(17.20-23)

Now there’s a few things in this passage which require some clarification. First, when Jesus prays for ‘those who will believe in me through their word’, the ‘their’ in this sentence is the disciples, the apostles, who will go out to preach. ‘Those who will believe in me through their word’ are therefore the Christian communities these apostles will found and, ultimately, everyone who decides to become a Christian because of the apostolic witness. So that’s us, my friends. Jesus is praying for us.  Not for someone else, some historical community on the other side of the globe. For us. For our conflict-ridden community.

A second and crucially important clarification. When Jesus says that he has given us his glory, the glory already given him by his Father, he is not talking about fame and fortune, or even about victory or success in any conventional sense. For when John talks about glory, in this his gospel, he is in fact talking about crucifixion and the sacrificial pouring out of one’s life for others. Allow me to quote from an earlier passage, that scene at which Judas leaves the supper to betray Jesus to the authorities:

So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘Do quickly what you are going to do.’  So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night . . .   When he had gone out, Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.

(13.26-27, 30-31)

 And an even earlier passage, in chapter 12:

‘Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life . . .

 

‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—“Father, save me from this hour”? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ . . . Jesus said, ‘This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.

(12.24-25, 28, 30-33)

I share these passages at length to convey the sense in which John uses the concept of ‘glory’. For him, the pinnacle of Christ’s glorification by the Father is not, in fact, his resurrection or ascension to the Father. It is his crucifixion, that moment when he surrenders himself entirely to his Father’s will out of love for the people to whom he was sent. So let’s be clear, let’s make no mistake. When Jesus talks about glory, he is talking about sacrificial, cruciform, love. A love that bears fruit only at great personal cost. The cost, even, of death. So, this is what Jesus prays for us: that we might live into his cruciform glory; that we might suffer and perhaps, even die, for the sake of the world and our fellow Christians;  that we might be as one in such love, that the world might know and learn of God’s love by the way we pour out our own lives for others.

A third clarification, if you will indulge me. When Jesus talks about unity as ‘oneness’, he is not talking about ‘uniformity’. He is not talking about us all becoming carbon-copies of each other in body or mind, and thus simply unable to disagree with each other. No. The model Jesus uses for ‘oneness’ is not the cookie-cutter but the circular reciprocity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In this earliest example of mature trinitarian thinking, John has Jesus pray that we might indwell each other – as the Father does the Son, and the Son the Father – not to the point where we simply become each other, without any hint of differentiation. For the Father is NOT the Son and the Son is NOT the Father. Each comes to ‘indwell’ the other, rather, in something of the manner that dancers and jazz musicians do, by their intuition about where the other is going next, and their choice to cooperate with each other out of a deep and abiding care and respect. That is why the Cappadocian fathers of the church called the trinity a circle-dance: a mutual yielding and cooperation of each with the other, even as the possibility for dissension and disagreement remains forever at hand.

This, then, is what Jesus prays for the church. And, if I may speak quite personally again, it is why I remain a Christian even though many of my fellow-Christians regularly wound and drive me crazy. It is why I am a Christian even though the church has never come to terms with its leading role in the attempted genocide of my people. It is why I remain a Christian even though the church remains racist. It is why I remain a Christian even when mob are ignored and rendered invisible by our Councils and theological colleges. It is why I am a Christian. Why? Because I believe in the sacrificial love of Christ for sinners as the only hope for us all. The only hope. The only hope. For I, too, regularly hurt my kin. I, too, am blind to the sufferings of others and too much centred in my own hurts and fears. I, too, am in desperate need of grace: the undeserved favour that is offered to us all for the making of the church, and of a society, and of an ecology that is finally reconciled, made one, whole and at peace.

That is not to say that we are equal in our sacrificial callings. We are not. It is incumbent upon the more powerful partner to do the lion’s share of the work to close the yawning gap between us, whether that gap be economic, cultural or theological. So let’s call a spade a shovel. The social and economic rules in this commonwealth, the cultural assumptions of this colony, and the theological imagination of this colonial church, are all those of white people, of colonists whose forebears are in Europe. If you are not from Europe, or your forebears were not – and especially if you are Indigenous to this country, with its 300 clans or nations – the only way to survive is to adapt to the colonial rules and imagination.  Doing so is enormously costly and regularly depletes and exhausts the personal and economic resources all of us who really prefer to live from and to country. Yet colonists do it with relative ease, and white people assume that there is no other way to live. The playing field is therefore deeply and structurally uneven. The fight is fixed, the mare has been hobbled, the dice have been loaded. And this is especially the case if you are ‘the wrong kind of black’. So, if we are really the church, if we are to take Christ’s call to sacrificial love seriously, it is incumbent upon the strongest to do most of the sacrificing. Which, let’s be honest, is deeply counter to everything we are taught from an early age.

I’ve not even attempted, today, to explore the other lections. I’ve not explored the ways in which the gospel frees slaves and interrupts the accumulation of wealth (as in the Acts reading). I’ve not explored what ‘washing one’s robes’ might mean in order to eat from the tree of life (as in the reading from Revelation). Strong hint, though. It has something to do with dying to the basic principles of this world and rising to a completely different set of values.

But let me conclude with this. If we are ever to be reconciled, if we are ever to come to terms with the hurt and the injustice we render, one to another, in this colony called ‘Australia’, we must discipline ourselves to live into the prayer of Christ to his Father. If there is ever to be something like justice, we must be prepared to put aside all our many forms of cheap and trivial grace, our many band-aid solutions and duct-tape fixes. Instead, if we are colonists, we must learn what it means to love at great cost, to embrace genuinely cruciform solutions to end our cultural and economic warfare against the last and the least. If Christ, whom we claim to worship, was willing to give himself entirely for our salvation - to pour out his life even to death, for the sake of all this world’s most little and vulnerable ones - what prevents us from so giving ourselves for this great work? What? What precisely? Is it the fear of losing ourselves? Losing our treasured control? Losing our sense of moral and intellectual superiority, our sense of being on the side of the angels? Is it a fear of losing what we believe is rightfully ours to possess?

Please, friends, don’t be afraid. Listen to the wisdom of country once more, the wisdom which Christ embraced and shared with his disciples: ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’ In reality, there is nothing to lose, my friends, nothing but fool’s gold and false promises. But look at what you can gain! Justice for the vulnerable, peace for the troubled, a home for the exiles. And friends. Friends who love you and have your back. A community in which you can laugh, and cry, and dance and sing. A communion of all creatures which includes the plants and the animals, the waterways, the starry host and the earth itself. A veritable body for Christ, who fills and embraces all that is alive. So, please, don’t be afraid to lose all you have for the sake of justice. For you will receive back a hundredfold everything you ever could lose.

Garry Deverell

7th Sunday after Easter, 2022

St Paul's Cathedral, Naarm/Melbourne

Your Pain will turn to Joy: racism and the Trinity

Proverbs 8.1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5.1-5; John 16.12-23 

Today is the beginning of what is called ‘Reconciliation Week’ here in Australia.  The week is used, in various ways and by various groups, to promote reconciliation and peace between Indigenous Australians and those who came here more latterly from across the sea. This year there is a focus on the continuing scourge of racism, in the form of a call for its eradication from both every day society and from the constitution of Australia. For who can doubt that racism is still very much amongst us?  The exchange between a football fan and dual Brownlow medallist Adam Goodes at the Sydney/Collingwood game on Friday night - when Mr Goodes was branded an ‘Ape’ - is a powerful reminder of that fact.  It is also a fact that our national constitution still pretends that Aboriginal people do not exist.  It is a thoroughly racist document in that it fails to recognise that Australia was not an ‘empty land’ when the Europeans came; that it had been inhabited and cultivated by another people for at least 60 thousands years; that it was taken from that people by force, and without lawfully recognised treaty, and that the effects of this taking are still amongst us in the form of huge levels of social, psychological and spiritual trauma amongst Indigenous people.  As you know, I am an Indigenous Tasmanian, so I know about the effects of colonisation ‘up close and personal’, as they say.  The way I look at everything – the landscape, society, the church, political and theological ideas – is profoundly influenced by that experience of loss and trauma. But I shall return to this later.

Today is also, for the Christian community, the feast of the Holy Trinity.  It is a day when we reflect explicitly on themes that are regrettably (for liberal Protestants such as ourselves) much more implicit during the rest of the year: namely the nature and mission of God as a Trinitarian communion of three persona, the ‘Father’, the ‘Son’ and the ‘Holy Spirit’.  The lections for today seek to encourage such reflection.  The reading from Proverbs speaks of ‘Wisdom’ as if she were a person, a person who cannot be simply separated from God as yet another of God’s myriad creations.  Wisdom is here spoken of as the very ‘first’ of God’s possessions, appointed ‘from eternity’, begotten of God rather than created out of nothing.  Wisdom is furthermore both a witness and co-worker with God in the act of creating the universe, a master craftswoman at Yahweh’s side.  It is clear that many early Christian theologians understood this passage, and its sister passages in the apocryphal Book of Wisdom, as Jewish presentiments concerning Jesus Christ.  We are all familiar with the opening poem at the beginning of John’s gospel: 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was the same as God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in him was life, and that life was the light of all people . . .  The true light, which enlightens everything, was coming into the world.  (1.1-9).

Like Wisdom, the Word exists in the beginning with God and shares in the divine action of creating.  The Word, like Wisdom, may be understood as some kind of emanation from God.  In other words, the Word is born of God, not made by God out of non-divine material.  And finally, like Wisdom, the Word is imagined as a divine light which enlightens the world.  Much recent scholarship concludes that Lady Wisdom is the model out of which John created the divine Logos which became, in short order, the second person of the Trinity, the divine Son.  The Son shares in the deity of the Father, but cannot be absolutely identified with the Father, certainly not without remainder.

Look at John’s careful treatment of the relationship between the Father and the Son in our gospel lection for today.  ‘All that belongs to the Father is mine’, says Jesus. He also says ‘My Father will give you anything you ask for in my name.’  Names are important in New Testament imagination.  Names represent a person who is not present.  They are the same as the person themselves, yet they are different from that person also, because they can stand for, or represent, that person in their absence.  So when Jesus says ‘The Father will give you anything you ask for in my name’, what he is really saying is this: ‘I am the exact representation and presence of my Father.  If you cannot see the Father physically, yet, in looking upon me and listening to my voice you can see and hear the Father, for everything I am, I received from my Father, and everything the Father is has been given to me. So ask in my name.  To do so is ask of my Father what I has already been given you in me’.  According to John, then, Jesus of Nazareth is the same as the pre-existent Word of God who was begotten of God the Father before the creation of the world and shares in his Father’s deity and power; in Jesus we therefore see and hear all that we can, as human beings, see and hear of God.  Jesus is the Father’s face and arms and voice for the material world of flesh and blood in which we live and move and have our human being.

What of the Holy Spirit, then?  Well, according to John once more, the Spirit clearly shares in the divine being of the Father and the Son.  Jesus says that the Spirit will come once he, the flesh-and-blood Christ, has passed from this world.  The Spirit will guide the disciples into the truth of God, a truth the Spirit will repeat and echo into our hearts exactly as it is spoken in the life of God, in the divine conversation between the Father and the Son.  The Spirit possesses everything that the Father and the Son possess.  The Spirit shares in the divine being of the Father and the Son, but also in the relationship of non-identity they share with each other.  Some theologians have speculated that the Spirit is the relationship between the Father and the Son, the very intangibility of their love and regard for each other, the substance of their conversation and their care.  That may well be true, for the Spirit is indeed less ‘solid’ than the Father and the Son in terms of character and identity.  The Spirit is a tad more wild and mysterious in her workings, like a wind that comes from nowhere and goes to nowhere.  And yet, what she brings us from her divine companions is something very valuable indeed: truth, hope and joy.  She is the midwife of these things, John tells us, the one who assures us that they are real and that they will one day belong to us, even as we weep and grieve and labour in this valley of tears we call our world.

The reading from Romans makes a similar point.  It makes the claim that all who believe in Jesus Christ and have received the justification that comes from him as a free gift of grace, have also received the gift of the Holy Spirit, who is nothing other than the vessel in which the love and mercy of God arrive.  This gift, says the Apostle, gives us hope when life is difficult.  She helps us to rejoice when there is little to rejoice about.  She helps us to persevere and to be disciplined in the face of difficult circumstances.  For the promise is there for all who believe, that our pain will turn to joy and that our weeping will one day turn into laughter.

Now, it is unfortunately true that around our church today there will be a great many sermons that skip over the feast of the Trinity and over trinitarian theology, because so many of our preachers simply do not have the knowledge or the will to know what to do with it.  Many, unfortunately, see the doctrine of the Trinity as something of an irrelevance, an ancient curiosity that really has nothing to say to our contemporary world or faith.  Nothing, of course, is further from the truth.  What such preachers fail to appreciate it that the doctrine of the Trinity, like all doctrine, is a story.  A story of God, and God’s dealings with the world of human beings that unleashes the power to transform our despair into joy, our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh and feeling.  The doctrine of the Trinity is shorthand, in other words, for everything the Christian faith has to offer by way of truth, faith, hope and love.  It is the grammar out of which we may start to comprehend our world, our society and our church as the arena of God’s action for forgiveness, justice and peace.

‘Why is racism wrong?’ for example.  Have you ever asked yourself that question?  What story, what grammar do we depend upon to render the denigration of another person (on the basis of nothing more than their skin-colour or ethnic origin) as fundamentally wrong, false, evil, immoral?  Well. For Christians, it is the doctrine of the Trinity!  The Father gives the Son into the world of flesh and blood in order to show us how to live, to reveal to us what is right and what is wrong, what makes for life and what makes for death.  In the face of the Son we learn that God does this out of an infinite love for 'the world', for us all (cf. John 3.16). God longs for our life, not our death, for our flourishing, not our diminishing.  In the face of Christ we learn that God is no bully, but is nevertheless prepared to come amongst us in the vulnerable form of the Son, to remonstrate and plead with us, that we might choose the way to life.  God does this even to the point of being misunderstood or, conversely, understood very well, but ultimately rejected. Even to the point of death, death on a cross.  Not that death can kill God’s love, for in the power of the Spirit the Son is raised to life as a sign of hope that all who follow in Christ’s way will themselves be raised, will themselves transcend death’s dominion when the racists and the death-squads come to exact their terrible revenge. 

So, racism is wrong because God is a communion of love since all eternity, and wants to include everyone, without remainder – whatever their skin colour or ethnic origin – at the table of mercy and hospitality shared forever by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Racism is wrong because God is willing to put everything on the line in Jesus Christ - and, through the Spirit, also within the very human and therefore fragile history of the church - in order to make that message resonate loud and clear within the arena of our inhumanity toward one another.  Racism is wrong, finally, because it will not have the last word. The last word is love, the love shared between the Father and the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit, a love that is always going out of itself in creative and hospitable action.  In the gift of Christ we who believe are empowered to rejoice in the final victory of that love even as the evil of racism continues to permeate our world.  For the Spirit is a deposit, a guarantee of that which is to come: a sign in our midst of that final peace-making, the shalom of God, when all who are reconciled to God are also reconciled to one another.  In the work of Christ and the giving of his Spirit, every sin is both forgiven and forgotten and the idea that someone might be used and abused because of their race has become absolutely laughable. Racism is wrong, in summary, because God is a trinity, a threefold relation of divine equals who go out toward one another and toward the cosmos in love and mercy.  In this story and this grammar is the indispensable plumbline of care and regard and justice . . . for the church, for human society, and for the whole of creation.

The Wind Blows Where It Will

Texts:  Isaiah 6.1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8.12-17; John 3.1-17

When we choose to give ourselves to God in baptism, thus calling on Christ to come and live with us by the companionship of the Holy Spirit, we also choose to cede, or put aside, our right to do whatever we would like.  When we choose to live God’s way, we also choose to die to our own way.  In the language of John’s gospel, at baptism we are re-born ‘from above’.  We cease to live according to the many wills associated with our first birth, whether those of self or society.  We start to live according to the unfathomable will of the Spirit, who has mid-wived us into a broad new land, a land in which the only thing that matters is the utterly extravagant love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—a love so broad and deep that it spills out into the world of human beings, inviting them to love and be loved as the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father.  At baptism, according to John, we are caught up in the wild and excessive love that is the divine will of the Spirit, a will and a way that cannot be domesticated.  ‘Like a wind that comes and goes according to a hidden purpose, so it is with everyone born of the Spirit’, says John.  When we are baptised, we vow ourselves to a God who might take us in directions entirely opposite to the ones we had planned ourselves. 

Take Isaiah, for example.  It is likely that Isaiah was originally a priest or a Levite, a male member of that tribe of Hebrews who were given no land in Israel but set aside, instead, to serve Yahweh in the worship of the temple.  The Levite, even more than other Israelites, could expect that life would unfold according to a particular plan or pattern.  In early childhood he would begin to learn his father’s trade.  At his father’s workplace, the temple in Jerusalem, he would learn how to keep the altar fires burning, how to slaughter beasts for religious sacrifice, how to lead the temple rituals and shepherd the people in their religious observances.   He would also learn the law of Moses by heart, and take his turn preparing meals for the other temple servants.  At the moment he was born, this was the life prepared for Isaiah, a life of service in the temple of Yahweh.

But one day, while he is going about his duties (perhaps he is polishing the silverware or some other rather humble task), Isaiah is suddenly caught up in an extraordinary vision.  He sees Yahweh himself, awesome and kingly, a presence which fills the whole temple.  Isaiah immediately falls into a fearful panic, for he knows the stories of Moses very well.  He knows that Yahweh does not show himself to sinful mortals, for they cannot bear the purity and truth of his holy gaze.  ‘Woe is me!’ he calls out. ‘I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live amongst a people of unclean lips’.  This is another way of saying, ‘I honour the Lord with what I say, but not with what I do.  My people and I are liars.’  Isaiah was right, of course, for if one reads the rest of the book that bears this story, you will discover that the Jewish nation was in pretty bad shape at the time.  On the one hand, the Jewish people made quite a show of going to the temple to worship, and of keeping the many feast days and festivals that marked the history of their liberation by God from Egypt.  But the moment worship was over, the nobles, the politicians and the landowners would go back to what they did with most of the time, that is, increase their wealth by stealing small farms on the edge of their existing lands, squeezing their workers for more production at less cost, and bribing the bureaucracy so that their plans and schemes could go ahead with a minimum of interference from the law.  As a Levite, it is more than likely that Isaiah himself was caught up in all this bribery and corruption.  For the Levites doubled as a kind of civil service for the aristocracy.  They handled the affairs of state, as well as the apparatus of the temple.

So at the moment he has the vision, Isaiah knows that he is done for.  For in the searing light of God’s glorious presence, the shadows hidden in darkness come to light as well.  Isaiah knows that there is little point in hiding what he is, or what his people are.  Covenant-breakers.  Liars.  Cheats.  Exploiters of the weak.  Yet, God has not come to do away with Isaiah, or even to chastise him.  Why chastise a person who is already aware of their darkness?  No, God has come to change the course of Isaiah’s life.  Taking a burning coal from the altar where sacrifices for sin would have been made day after day, a seraph, one of God’s servants, touches it to Isaiah’s lips and says:  ‘Your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out’.  In other words, 'I know jolly well that you are a liar and a hypocrite.  But you are forgiven.  From now on your lies have been burned away.  From now on, your lips will speak only the truth.’  For what happens then is this:  that Isaiah the Levite, whose life had been pretty cosy and predictable up until now, is suddenly called to become a prophet, a man whose speaks the truth to kings and priests and businessmen, and cops a fair bit of flack for his trouble.  ‘Whom shall I send, and who shall go for us?’ says the Lord.  And Isaiah, who can hardly believe that he is still alive, responds in the classical manner of prophets from time immemorial: ‘Here I am; send me!’

Now, in the Christian grammar of baptism, it is not only special people like prophets who are called to live and speak the truth.  It is all of us, all who are born by water and the Spirit into the realm of God’s love.  For at our baptism, we encounter a God who knows jolly well who we are—sinners who betray God, others and self every day of the year.  Yet God is not particularly worried about who we are at that moment.  In baptism, certainly, we are forgiven our sins; they are washed away just like dirt from a grubby child.  Yet God has more in mind than the miracle of forgiveness.  God also wants to change our lives, from the inside out, to give us a new vocation in life, a new purpose.  Like Isaiah the prophet, who was called to speak the truth whether it is fashionable to do so or not, every baptised Christian is also called to live a new life, a life determined not by what we want, but by what God wants.

The difference between life with God, and life without God, is simply this, you see:  that life without God leads to death; but life with God leads to yet more life.  That is why the apostle Paul calls Christians people of the Spirit.  ‘Spirit’ can also mean ‘breath’, the very breath that animates our bodies and make us alive.  In that sense, all who live are spiritual beings.  Yet, in Christian perspective, one can be alive and breathing, and yet destined to run out of breath because one is not plugged in to the true source of life and breathing, the Spirit of God, the very Spirit who not only animated the daily doings of Jesus of Nazareth, and also raised his dead body into the radically new life of resurrection.  What God wants to do for us, then, is exactly what God did for Jesus.  God wants to fill us so full of the life of his Spirit, that there is little left in us of all that is dying or dead.  God wants to catch our lives up into the life and energy that is the extraordinary love between the Father and the Son.  God wants us to let go of everything that holds us back from the giving and receiving of divine love.  God wants us to receive this love, the love that is the Spirit, and make it real in the world through what we do and what we say.

You will remember that I spoke, a couple of weeks ago, about what the love of God looks like in practise.  I spoke about God’s love as a three-fold movement of solidarity with the weak, hospitality toward the stranger, and the costly giving away of one’s life that another soul may grow and flourish.  What I also implied at that time, I will say more explicitly this morning.  That the one who loves others in this manner, is also loved in this manner by God.  The power that makes it possible for us to love others in this way is the very power that loves us in this way.  This means that, for Christians, there can be no fear that we shall somehow be depleted or used up by our loving.  Not if we are also believe that we are loved by God, and especially by God as he is embodied in both the rituals and relationships of the Christian community.  For the Spirit who comes to dwell with us is the Spirit of life itself, life that is always enough and never runs out.  That means that no matter where this Spirit take us, or whom the Spirit puts in our path, there shall always be life and love enough to go around.  As long, that is, as we are willing to live the life of the Spirit, and not simply the lives that we might choose for ourselves.

I conclude with this. If you are baptised, you belong to God, and the Spirit of God has come to dwell with you.  You have given yourself into the hands of God, and God is absorbing you into the life and love that circulates, like the energies of a dance, between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  But God is not a bully.  The power of love is a power that can be refused.  If you resist God, he with plead with you, and argue, and remonstrate forever.  But God will never make you do what you do not want to do.  That is why the promises of baptism need to be renewed day after day.  Each day, when you get out of bed, God promises Godself to you once more: to love and to cherish you, to lead you into the freedom of the children of God.  But that cannot happen without your say-so.  The humility of God is such that God requires our agreement to move forward, a promising that responds to God’s own promising with faith and trust and obedience.  My prayer on this Trinity Sunday is that God may give us grace to so surrender our lives, that the life of God may come to flourish in our hearts and in our world.

Garry Deverell

Rublev's Philoxenia

Texts:  Genesis 1.1-2.4; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20

Today is Trinity Sunday, and that excites me a great deal.  You may find that surprising.  To the modern heart and mind, and even those of Christians, the Trinity can sound like an anachronistic formula from the mystical and magical past.  One might fairly ask questions about both the intellectual integrity and the social relevance of the doctrine.  Does the idea that the one God is really three make any sense?  And even if it did make sense, what difference would that make to anything important?  Would it stop Aboriginal deaths in custody, for example?  Or the war in Yemen?

I could spend the next fifteen minutes trying to answer those questions.  I could tell you that theologians of every confessional standpoint have rehabilitated the Trinity as perhaps the most important of Christian symbols, a symbol which mirrors and represents the whole history of God's identity and mission.  I could tell how the post-modern imagination has been drawn to the Trinity as a quintessential icon of the reality in which we live, composed as it is of that splendid interplay between identity and difference.  I could tell you how political and liberation theologians have found in the Trinity a model for re-making both church and world in the image of a God who is, first of all, an egalitarian community of love . . .   But I'm not going to go on with all that.  There's no need.  Because it is all present in this wonderful painting from 15^th century Russia.  It is all contained in Andrei Rublev's marvellous icon, know as the Philoxenia.

Why don't you look at it for a moment?  Take your time.  What do you notice? 

There are three figures in the painting, sitting at a round table.  Each wears a cloak and bears a staff, indicating that they are resting a while in the midst of a long journey.  The figures have androgynous features, that is, we can't be certain if they are men or women.  But we do know that they represent the three persons of the Trinity. The figure in the middle is Christ.  He is looking to the figure on the left, which is the Father; the Father appears to be gazing at both Christ and the Spirit, who is the third figure; the Spirit seems to be looking at both the Father and the chalice of wine which sits in the middle of the table.  There is only one cup of wine, which is apparently being shared by all three.  But if you look carefully, you will notice that the shapes of the Father and the Spirit form the silhouette of a larger chalice, which actually surrounds and contains Christ.  Finally, note that in the background of the picture are three objects:  a house or temple, an oak three, and a mountain.  You yourself, as you look at the picture, are in the foreground.

What does all this mean?  Many things, but I have time only to mention a few.  First, the seating arrangement of the three speaks of an equality between them.  There is none who is more important than the others.  There is none who sits at the head of the table, because the table is round.  God, you see, is more like a circle than a pyramid.  No one is the boss because all three are the boss.  They make their decisions together, and there is no room for hierarchy or for lording it over another.  Second, the three gaze at each other as if they are in love.  There is an uncanny knowing between them which can only be described with words like respect, deference, trust, hospitality, communion, peace.  The word communion is reinforced by their use of a single chalice of wine.  It is, of course, the Eucharistic cup, which stands for love poured out by a profound sacrifice of the one for another.  This sign of Christ’s crucifixion therefore says that at the centre of the relations between Father, Son and Spirit is a mutual self-giving for the other, a laying down of life that the others might be made alive. God, then, is a circle-dance of love where each is constantly being enlivened by the sacrifice of another.  In this view, God continues to be God only by a never-ending movement of mutual hospitality and giving.

Third, the painting invites its observers—that's you and me—to take our place at the table with Father, Christ, and Spirit.  There is a space spare, and its shape is a chalice filled with Jesus.  Here Rublev, who is from the Orthodox tradition, wants us to understand that we, too, may become part of the divine community:  if only we will accept the grace of God which overflows into the world in the shape of Christ crucified; if only we will take the cup of sacrifice and receive from it the renewing life of God;  if only we will accept the cruciform mission of the Trinity, to lay down our own lives for the sake of another.   The message is clear.  We may all become children of God if we will walk the way of the Christ; if, in baptism, we are willing to put aside the life of self-aggrandizement, and embrace a new existence controlled by Christ’s neighbour-directed compassion and mercy.  There's something in there, I think, about changing the world, about becoming involved in a revolution of radical hospitality.  Perhaps if Christians were to take that seriously, then the bloodshed in Australian holding cells could indeed be stopped?  Perhaps we could put aside our differences as Roman or non-Roman Christians, and share at the Eucharist together?

But what of those objects in the background of the icon?  The house of God, which is the church?  The tree of life, which is at the end of our journeys?  The mountain of revelation, where we meet the Lord and hear his word?   Each is there to remind us that God is forever present, to be encountered in any number of places along the way.  The trick is to make one's way with eyes and ears open and expectant.  Otherwise a house might just be a house, and a tree just a tree, and a mountain just a mountain.  It is the life of daily prayer, prayer immersed in the stories of God in the bible, which enables us to recognise God in all the business of life.  How is your prayer life going?  Have anyone ever taught you to pray?

Finally, Rublev's icon remind us of the Trinitarian form of that ritual we call the Lord's Supper or Holy Communion.  He wants to show us that wherever or whenever the supper is taken, the Trinitarian God is present and active in both church and world.  Have you ever noticed that the classical Communion prayer, sometimes known as the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, has three key elements?  The first is a prayer of thanksgiving to the Father-Creator (eucharistia) for everything that he has done to save us from our sins and make us whole once more.  The second is a remembering of Christ (anamnesis) and his sacrifice for the sake of the world.  This part culminates in the narrative of the last supper which Jesus shared with his disciples.  The final part invokes the creativity of the Holy Spirit (epiclesis), to make real the presence of Christ in the bread and wine, and make that presence real and effective in the mission and discipleship of the people of God, who go out from the feast as the newly constituted body of Christ.

A picture paints a thousand words.  But I hope this icon will inspire us to move beyond words and into an active communion with the Trinity of love.  Use it in prayer.  Allow God to draw you into the divine community, there to experience its grace and its love.  Allow God to send you out into the world, there to serve the poor and despised as Christ did; there to make your sacrifices for the sake of love and of peace.

Glory be to God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit­ - as in the beginning, so now and for ever, world without end. Amen.