Trinity Sunday

June 11, 2006

Karl Ruttan

Where is God?  Where is God today when we most need God?

            Do you think God is in the hands and hearts of the terrorists who blow themselves up taking with them innocent civilians?  They think God is there.

            Do you think God is in the hands and hearts of our soldiers struggling in Iraq?  I hope to God he is?

            Do you think God is in the children and the widows and those suffering from war.  I know God is there.

            Our Christian Formation committee met yesterday to review our programs and think about the fall.  And I realized that more than anything I want our children to know God’s presence and love in good times and bad.  So if our children are in trial or war, or suffering they know they are not alone.  And with God  they will have a moral compass to do what is right.

            Where is God for you today? Is God still there in your frantic, super-busy,  tiring lives.  Do you see God in the beauty of this day, and this valley, in the sunlight and the hills and the river?  Do you see God here in each other this morning?  Or  how about in the dirty unwashed face of the poor man who comes to eat in our soup kitchen?

            Where is God for you?  Maybe God seems absent from you know- or maybe you have missed God or maybe God is very near.  But I know you are here because you have a God hunger in your heart.  Maybe you want to re-connect with the God you have experienced.  Or maybe you want to encounter God for the first time.  But you seek God- and God is present even in your seeking.  Today we affirm in our being here that we are not alone- there is something more in this world than just our egos- and we want to connect with this greater reality of creative love.

            Today is Trinity Sunday- the only Sunday given to a doctrine.  This is he Sunday where we talk about our images of God and how we know and articulate God.  The Trinity gives us a picture of God, a description of  the mystery of God.  God cannot be reduced to a any simple image or doctrine- but our theologies push us to see a bigger and picture of God to grasp the mystery who is God.  That is what the Trinity does for us.

            Moses had a god hunger. Although a Jew, he had been raised as a prince of Egypt.  As a young adult, when he saw his people insulted he killed a man and fled. I wonder where God was for him.  Did Moses run away from his people’s God?  Then when things seemed to be getting back to normal, he heard a voice call to him: “Moses” it called from the burning bush. “Moses, Moses”- the voice called him from the depth of fire. “ I am the God of your ancestors- Abraham Isaac and Jacob,” it said.  Perhaps Moses had a particular God hunger at this time because he had forsaken this God and was being called back to a living relationship with a vital God.  Moses was terrified and afraid to look.  This God was an awesome, frightening all-powerful God.  And Moses was never the same again.

            Maybe you have had such an encounter when God called you and you had to listen. Maybe you have had such an encounter that changed your life.   Probably it didn’t happen so specifically or with such power.  I know the God I knew as a child was a big powerful, loving- but somewhat- scarey God.  As a child my grandfather with his big belly, suspenders and grey hair would come to visit.  I loved him- but he was a bit scarey. I would crawl up into his lap and he would tell me the most bizarre and entertaining stories.  I kind of thought God was like that. 

            In time I grew out of that image.  I know God is not the old man in the sky like my grandfather- and yet that old image gives me some reassurance. Recently  someone gave me a picture Mama God- the grandmother God- and I like that because you see God does not easily fit into our little narrow images of God.  And life will test our pictures again and again.

            At some time in my life, I began to think God was the harsh judge and that I was a bad boy.  I was feeling very guilty about something I had done- when suddenly while I was  in a church- a felt God close to me, forgiving me. I think that has a lot to do with why I am priest- because God has always been close to me.  I know that some people only awaken to God much much later in their lives- but God has always followed me with a sense that God wouldn’t let me go.  I have always had a God hunger- but for some this comes much later in life.

            As a teen I began to see God more abstractly. There needed to be a God I reasoned.  People are better, indeed the world is better, if we have a God.  And how else do you explain this world without a God creator? What else gives this world meaning except that we are created by God for a purpose?   My God was mostly abstract and pretty impersonal- but yet there were the moments like when I was teen alone and thinking near lake Erie and storm came across the lake - and I felt God was so very near.

            In the Gospel story today Nicodemus. one of the Jewish teacher, came to Jesus at night to see who he was.  Perhaps he came at night because he was afraid to let the others know his questions.  Perhaps he himself was in darkness- hungering for God but no longer knowing a God that made sense to him. His picture of God was too small- maybe his God was remote impersonal empty.  Perhaps Jesus had stirred up something deep and profound in him. 

            He said to Jesus: “I know you are of God.”  Jesus talked to him in a way that seemed o so confusing.  Maybe the mystery of it all changed his life- or maybe It left him scratching his head.  Jesus responded to the God hunger is Nicodemus: “No on can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born from above.”  Now what does that mean, it asked in confusion.   Nicodemus got into all this literalistic discussion when Jesus meant it figuratively.  To be born from above  means it comes  from God.  God comes to us like the wind- we don’t know when it comes or where it goes.  But God who is something other than our selves- something more than ourselves- comes to us.  Can we be open to this gentle presence of the holy?

            “God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whosoever believes in him will have eternal life.”  Eternal life- does not mean life after death- it means the kingdom opening now.   It means eternity breaking into each moment- it means God-encounter now. 

            When I was in my twenties. I was trying to make the world a better place.  God seemed very far from me- I struggled and shrugged and God became more and more absent.  I had a God hunger which I lived out in all my busy activism.   Than I discovered the Gospel in a new way- God did not require me to be perfect.  I couldn’t save the world. God already did that by entering our flesh and redeeming it.  God enters this world and takes on its suffering and pain.  When I learned this my picture of God changed.  Jesus became for me the way I encountered God.  Jesus became my guru, my teacher.  But more than that he was my doorway or  my portal that helps me step into a new reality, the kingdom of God. 

            Jesus is our intimate personal connection with God.  Much later in my life, Jesus became even more intimate to me as I learned to meditate on icons. In sitting before the loving expression of Jesus, I encountered Jesus as friend my guide, my  brother- he who helps me to encounter the living God.

            Who is your God?  My image of God has grown and changed and deepened.  I now believe that all my pictures of God are inadequate- God is so much bigger.  But I also know that I need a picture, an image to help me know and connect with God in a personal and real way.  God is bigger than any picture -and yet Jesus becomes the way I encounter God.

            The Trinity gives us different picturers of God - three and yet one.  Different modes of relating to God and yet one God.  God who is creator- first principle, and transcendent like a father  Jesus who is imminent- incarnate my brother who is with me.  Holy Spirit who is alive among us.  One of the best description I know of God is to think of the God who made us- and the Christ who is in us and that each of us has the Christ in us yearning for the father creator- and that the Spirit is the love and yearning between them. Christ is in each of us yearning for the father- and that yearning is the love of the Holy Spirit released in us if we can open our hearts to it.  God is in the very God-hunger in our souls. 

             I also know that all our images are too small and sometimes we need to think of the Holy Spirit as the feminine creative Sophia or Wisdom in the Old Testament.  Or sometimes we might pray to God our mother.

            The Trinity says to me that God is bigger than I can comprehend or understand- God is a mystery.  The trinity pushes me and my images to go further go deeper.  Ultimately our knowing God  it is not so much about head learning but relationship- learning to related to the living god

            Finally there is one solid principal to help us know that we are encountering the true God. If our God helps us to love more deeply our fellow creatures this is good relationship and good faith.  God’s love frees me to love.  That is God hunger.