When I pray,
I often find it helpful to use short prayers. The kind of prayers that can be
repeated many times as you try to settle down, concentrate on God and drive
away the distractions that are all around us. The prayer I began with is the
sort of thing I mean. My favourites are the Jesus prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ,
Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner’, and a prayer given to me by
one of the Clewer sisters during a retreat when I was preparing to get married:
‘Lord, may my whole being be directed to your service and praise’.
For the
people of Israel, the short prayer that came – and comes – most easily to the
lips is this one: ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one’. From a
young age, Hebrew children learned to recite this prayer frequently. Morning
and evening, in the rhythm of travelling and in stilling oneself to pray: Hear
O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God,
the Lord is one. The words were given by Moses (we find it in Deuteronomy 6.4)
in his summary of all of the law. The words to memorise and teach to your
children – Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.
St Mark tells us that Jesus repeated these words when asked what the most important
law was.
In ages when
many cultures believed that there were multiple deities, the Jewish, and then
the Christian, insistence that there is only one God seemed barmy. Most
cultures saw deities as more powerful variants of humanity – more akin to today’s
comic superheroes than to the Jewish and Christian idea of God. So that
constant reminder to oneself that the Lord is one was vital – a reminder of the
real power and grace of the creator God when one was surrounded by idols.
Some
outsiders, looking in on Christianity, find today’s festival a confusing one.
If we insist that there is only one God, and indeed that it is the first of the
commandments that we accept that there is only one God, why does it look as
though we have three? We speak of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Some theologians
during the twentieth century developed ideas of what was called ‘the social
trinity’, talking about the father, the son and the holy spirit communicating
with each other, being in relationship with each other, even somehow dancing
with each other – and this emphasis has made it easier to visualise three
separate beings and to give the impression that we worship three gods.
Hear O
Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. One God, experienced by human beings
in different ways, ways that we describe as three persons. Why do we find
ourselves needing to describe God this way? Because God is far too immense for
us to understand. No human mind could ever understand the fullness of the
living God.
St Augustine
tells a story that reminds us how limited our human understanding is. He tells
of taking a break from writing one of his great theological works, in which he
was attempting to define the trinity – the Threeness of God – and going for a
walk along the seashore. There he saw a small boy (who was of course an angel
in disguise). The boy had dug a hole in the sand and was fetching bucket loads
of water from the ocean and pouring it into the hole. Augustine watched him
running to the sea, filling his bucket, running to the hole, pouring it out,
over and over again. Eventually he could not resist asking the boy: ‘what are
you doing?’ ‘I’m putting the sea into my hole in the sand’, said the boy.
‘Don’t be daft’, said Augustine, ‘you can’t put all that water into that little
hole’. ‘Neither can you, with your human mind, put into it all the
understanding of God’, replied the boy.
Well, we
could give up. We can’t possibly understand God. But God wants us to understand
just enough to be able to trust him for the rest. And so God comes to us and
shows us what we need to know in order to believe that we are loved, and that
because God loves us we are freed from sin, forgiven, and given life for ever
with God, if we believe and trust in him.
And as, over
the centuries, we’ve listened to each other’s stories of how we’ve experienced
God, we have learned to think of God in three distinct ways. Each of those ways
describes the same God, but each is quite distinct. By the fourth century,
Christians had developed the idea of the Holy Trinity as the way to describe
those ways of encountering God.
You have
each been given a postcard today. The image on it is a photograph that I took
earlier this year while on sabbatical leave and visiting the lovely church of
Santa Maria Novella in Florence. It is a 13th century fresco painted
by an artist called Masaccio, and depicting the Trinity in a way that is
particular to northern Italy in this period. We see God the Father, the
universal creator, crowned to represent the glory that is described whenever
the Bible speaks of visions of God in heaven – like the one in our first
reading.
Jesus called
God Father, and taught us to do the same. Whenever you pray, Jesus said, say
‘Our father in heaven…’ Here the loving relationship between the father and the
son is shown in a very moving way. If you look carefully, you will see that the
father’s hands are supporting the weight of the cross. God so loved the world,
Jesus told Nicodemus, that he gave his only Son, that everyone who believes in
him may not perish, but may have everlasting life. God’s loving support of
Jesus in the image is his loving taking of the burden for every one of us. God
came amongst us to share the burden of the world and to lift it from us – if we
are prepared to let him. Part of the conceit of the painting is that although
Jesus is shown here as dying – and in some variants of this painting, he is
shown dead, lying in the father’s arms – we all know that Jesus is the one who
brings life. He is, he told us, the resurrection and the life. The image
captures a moment in the action of God in the world, but it is not the moment
we live in. Jesus is risen, he is alive, and his life is the gateway to life
with God for every believer.
That giving
of life has been happening since the first moment of creation. In the beginning,
we see God creating and the spirit of God – the breath of life – hovering over
what was being created – and the word of God being spoken and bringing things
into being. In the new testament Jesus explained that God is spirit, coming and
going as unpredictably and uncontrollably as the wind. We often use the image
of a dove to represent God as spirit, because St Luke described the spirit
arriving at Jesus’ baptism as being like a dove. If you look closely, you can
see that Masaccio has painted the dove between the father and the son’s heads
in his fresco. It is as if the spirit of God is moving from father to son in
order to give that resurrection life to the son. In this frozen moment the
father supports his dying son and sends the spirit that restores him to life.
The son in turn sends the same spirit to us, bringing us the same eternal life,
and helping us to live well as followers of Jesus while we are in this life.
And so we
see in this painting one God, three ways: God the creator, loving us into being
and loving us as his children. God the son, by his death and resurrection
offering us the grace of salvation. And God the holy spirit, bring us life,
guiding us into becoming a church that reflects the image of the one God.
We
experience and speak of God in three ways, but the Lord our God, the Lord is
one. So when we remember the command to
love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our souls and with all our
strength, we are commanded to love God who is revealed in the bible as our
creator and father – the one who made us and loves us; to love God as he is
revealed in scripture as son and saviour, the one by whose grace we are freed
from sin; and to love God as she is revealed in scripture as the spirit of
wisdom and the bringer of life, the one who draws us together as communities in
the fellowship that we call church.
St Paul,
always a good and faithful Jew, taught us that there is ‘one Lord, one faith,
one baptism, one God who is father of all’. And as we seek to love and serve
our one God, it was St Paul who also gave us another short prayer, one that
enables us to pray to God naming the three ways that we encounter him. In 2
Corinthians 13.13 Paul wrote the prayer that we all know very well, a prayer of
blessing for the people he loved in Corinth, praying that the great gifts that
God offers us will be theirs – and as we use the prayer, we claim the gifts of
God as ours.
The grace of
the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion (fellowship) of the
Holy Spirit be with you
all. Amen.
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