Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

The early Christians adopted a simple drawing of a boat with a cross for a mast as one of the symbols of the church. In an age of persecutions from the outside and controversy and conflict on the inside, in their experience, the emerging church must have seemed like a boat on a storm-tossed sea. Recalling the story of Jesus' calming of the sea, like those first disciples in the boat, the early Christians must have joined in their desperate prayer, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

Little has changed in the intervening years. The winds of change and the waters of chaos continue to beat hard on the worldwide church and the people of faith. Christians are still being martyred in shocking numbers in tribal, ethnic, and religious wars around the world. At home, the church is fiercely divided around issues of authority, liturgy, sexuality, and cultural diversity, so that Synods and Conferences can start with feelings of foreboding as they look to the business before them with suspicious eyes, preparing to build alliances of power to bolster their respective sides. Today, the prayer of many in the church is: "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

Our private lives are not spared stress and storm as our individual little boats are tossed about by the waves of economic uncertainty and change, war, divorce, sickness, and death. Hardly a week goes by that we do not face the fearsome realities of these events, either impacting us personally or our neighbours or our friends in the church, and nightly the troublesome images of television news intrude into our homes from the larger world. "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

In today's Gospel, our Lord calms the wind and the waves and says to the tense disciples, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" He surely intended the link between faith and fear. The opposite of faith is not doubt or unbelief; those tend to be doctrinal differences. No, the opposite of faith more often as not is fear. We fear the unknown. We fear the undiagnosed lump in the breast, or the persistent cough. We fear infections or, Swine Flu. We fear losing control of our bodies and our health because of aging. We worry about how changes in politics, technology, or the economy will influence our jobs and the income from our savings and retirement funds. We fear people who are different to us, that is why the BNP has managed to get 2 seats in the European Parliament, fear. Fear is like waves ever seeking to knock us off our footing -- our faith footing.

The story that follows, one of faith in a potentially fearful situation, was told by a Church minister. He told of his days as a Navy submariner during World War II. "We would often come under depth charge attack," he said. "The other sailors would be trembling with fear, while I just leaned back and read a book. One of them asked how I could be so calm. I explained to him that in my childhood I had very little supervision from my parents, so I spent many hours each day at the beach. Sometimes a huge breaking wave would catch me by surprise and drag me under the water, rolling me in the sand. But I learned when I would just relax thousands of air bubbles like the fingers of God would catch me up and lift me to the surface. Now, whenever I find myself in trouble, I just relax and wait for the fingers of God to reach under me and lift me up."

Faith is a stance toward life. According to psychologist Erik Erikson, faith is a confidence that is typically acquired very early in life when a child learns to expect his or her environment and the people in it to be reliable and trustworthy. During the Cold War, when we were all living with the possibility of nuclear annihilation, some researchers interviewed children to see how worried they were of nuclear war. What they discovered was that the children with the least amount of fear were those whose parents were active in nuclear disarmament efforts, or who regularly attended church, or who were deeply involved in the social issues of their communities. These parents did not feel hopeless in the face of tremendous challenges. They invested themselves in actions to change the world around them and remained optimistic that what they could contribute would make a difference. As a result, the attitudes of the parents infected the emotional and intellectual stance of their children. These children did not feel helpless. Rather, they saw that their parents and their church and the other involved citizens of their community maintained faith and were doing something toward resolving problems.

I once met a man who, several years ago, within a period of six months, lost his last surviving parent and grandparent, as well as a favourite aunt and uncle. It dawned on him at the time that all of the people in his life who loved him unconditionally were dead, and that he was out in the front of the line. About the same time, he was made redundant because of lack of funding. In those painful and challenging months, he wrote down his own definition of faith. I share it with you: Faith is the simple trust that life still can be good despite the fact that it is very painful and difficult. Out of the worst of experiences that he could have imagined, he found many little bubbles of love, joy, and hope in the form of friends, family, and church lifting him upward like the fingers of God. And the worst year of his life was followed by what he declares to have been one of the best years of his life.

"Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" In these rather impatient words directed to his disciples, our Lord brings into focus to the polarities of faith and fear. Faith is a stance and how we stand up to those things that would threaten us and how we manage our fears makes all the difference. In the midst of troubles, try reaching up your hand to God and saying, "Help!" And when you reach your hand out to others around you and say, "Help!" the fingers of God will never fail to reach down and lift you into new and reassuring experiences of God's grace. AMEN.

Trinity Sunday 2009

As Christians we have a different and distinctive way of understanding God, one that sets us apart from everybody else. And even though the prayers, the creeds, and most of the symbols we use in worship are thoroughly Trinitarian, the bulk of our thinking about God is not.

So, since today is Trinity Sunday, the day when Curates traditionally preach (because the Trinity is such a big subject), we are called upon to pay special attention to the way God has been revealed in the Christian faith, we should consider the Trinity. Of course, God is a whole lot bigger than anything we can say or imagine, so all references to God will be at best metaphorical and incomplete. At the same time, this vision of the Trinity of God is true, and it matters, and it makes a difference.

There are two basic perspectives we can bring to the Trinity, to the doctrine that one God exists in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On the one hand, the Trinity describes the way that we, as Christians, experience God. We know God as God is revealed in the person and life of Jesus -- and this revelation happens by and through the Holy Spirit. That is, the Trinity speaks to how we discover and experience who God is. This is the perspective usually offered when talking or preaching about the Trinity.

But there’s more. The doctrine of the Trinity also talks about who God is; it talks about what God is really like inside. This is where the mystics and the theologians sort of run together, and speak perhaps with more poetry and awe than precision. But let’s look for just a minute at what they say about God, borrowing some language from the third century.

Once upon a time, way before the beginning of everything -- not at the beginning, but before the beginning -- God the Father, who is love and who therefore must love, God the Father speaks his own name; He says his own word. And God the Son is begotten -- true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father. The Son is the second person of the Trinity. Later, after the beginning, the Son will become incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and will be born as Jesus of Nazareth. The Son is what happens when the Father expresses Himself, when the Father reaches out in His love. Now, the Son loves the Father, for the Son is the Father’s word, the Father’s self. And the Father loves the Son, totally and without reservation, and so the Father and the Son are bound together in love.

This love, which binds together the Father and the Son, is also real. This love is God the Holy Spirit -- the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. And the Son and the Spirit are of the same substance, the same stuff, as the Father; that’s the only stuff there is. In this way the Godhead is complete. Three persons, each distinct, each real, each from before the beginning, each and all are one God. The one-ness of God is discovered precisely in the free act of love by which the three persons of the Trinity choose to give all to each other. This relationship is what makes God who God is. Put another way, God is what happens when the Father loves the Son in the Spirit.

St. Augustine says this about the Trinity: “Now, love is of someone who loves, and something is loved with love. So then there are three: the lover, the beloved, and the love.” This relationship of love, God the Holy Trinity, is the foundation, the bedrock of the universe; it is the heartbeat of all creation. Everything that is begins here, has its purpose and its meaning here, and will find its fulfilment here.

Such is the living centre of the Christian understanding of God. We insist that God is not a mean old man with a beard; that God is not some unconscious force out of Star Wars; and that God is not that peculiar little committee -- two guys and a dove -- that we often imagine. Instead, God exists, at His heart, as a relationship of love -- one God in three persons, the well-spring of existence.

That’s a quick look at the Trinity, at our alternative to the “mere monotheism”. It is a complex, dynamic, and exciting understanding of who God is and what God is like. Like any good theology, it has consequences, and it sets the stage for how we can live.

If you think about it for a minute, it’s no wonder, as Peter says, that the Church learned very early that they could tell whether they were truly entering the mystery of Christ by how well they were managing to love one another. Relationships of love are what God is all about.

And it is no wonder that the one new commandment that Jesus gives us is the commandment to love one another; which is the commandment to imitate Jesus and his life -- to imitate his life as a human being among us, and at the same time to imitate his life as the only begotten Son.

It is through this command, seen in the light of our notion of God as the Trinity, that we can begin to see what God really wants from us and what God really wants for us. God’s will for us, God’s desire for us, is, first of all and most of all, that we choose to share his life -- that we become more and more deeply a part of that conversation of love, that constant, obedient, and joyful relationship that is the very core of who God is.

After all, we are created in God’s image -- in the image of the Trinity. So, the more our lives are shaped and formed by the life of love we see in the person of Christ and in the life of God, the closer we get to our best and truest selves. The more we become who we really are.

This business of the Trinity is not just abstract theology, it is very immediate, and very personal. In some very important ways, it is about us -- about us here and now; and about us forever.

The heart of creation is love, and we are both created and invited to enter that love, and to share that love. The divine love is our source, our vision, and our final end. That is good news. It is good news about why we exist; and it is good news about our destiny. It is worth paying some attention to.

Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Amen.