30th May 2010 - "The God we worship"

Stephen Fielding
St Peter's, Tewin and Ayot St Peter

This morning, I want to talk about God. I mean, the sort of God we can believe in, the sort of God we can love. Perhaps you would expect me to talk about God on this Trinity Sunday.

My Oxford law tutor at Christ Church used to sit on the patronage board that the college had for all the livings - the churches - of which the college was patron, all 67 of them. And he'd go along to the interviews to interview the candidates who’d applied to be vicar or rector of the churches that the college was patron of. A funny old system but a real system nevertheless. And if he was doubtful about any clergyman presenting himself as a candidate  - perhaps he was too liberal, didn't say his prayers, or if he was going to drive through the modern liturgy in defiance of a congregation that preferred the old form of worship, he’d ask the candidate a simple question: do you believe in God? Wow! An exocet of a question, don't you think?

What sort of God do we believe in? What should we say, on this Trinity Sunday, when our capacity to tie ourselves in knots can be at its greatest and our tendency to dig doctrinal holes and then fall into them risks being at its most marked?

Come back with me to that scene in the book of Exodus that a number of us explored last Wednesday at our study group on the Lord's Prayer when we looked at the phrase ‘hallowed be thy name’ – ‘May your presence, Lord, be holy’. The scene is of course the burning bush in the 3rd chapter of Exodus. The burning bush. Moses is tending the sheep of his father-in-law Jethro, and he sees something in the distance… it seems to be a bush that is on fire but it doesn't burn out. And Moses says to himself – ‘I must go across and see this remarkable sight. Why ever does the bush not burn away?’ And God seeing Moses turn aside calls him out of the bush:‘Moses!’ He tells him to take off his sandals because the place he is standing on his holy ground and he says: ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I have seen their misery in Egypt, I've heard them crying out because of the wretched oppression of the Egyptians, I know how bad it is for them, I really do know, and I've come down to rescue them from their suffering and from the power of the Egyptians, and I will bring them into a new place, a new land flowing with milk and honey. And you Moses are the man who will effect their deliverance. You are to go and tell Pharaoh to set my people free.’ As we know, Moses is astonished and says: ‘what me?’ And if I go, who should I say has sent me, what's your name?’ God says ‘I am who I am’… ‘I will be who I will be.’ ‘Tell them ‘I am’ has sent me to you’.  

From this picture of a burning bush that doesn't burn out - this symbol of the inexhaustible God, full of inextinguishable life, we can perhaps note three things.

First God is known and identified through his description of himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - important formative figures who worshipped God. He is their God, and they are his people.

Second God is known through his compassion for his people, for whom he cares and whom he wants to liberate. Remember  - ‘I have seen the sufferings of my people and I've come down to rescue them.’

Third, the God who says ‘I will be what I will be’ is a God free, unconstrained, and always capable of doing new and unexpected things.

Please ponder the burning bush in Exodus chapter 3 and see what you think it tells you about the God who is known through the figures of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who worshipped him, the God who has compassion for his people, and the God who is utterly free and capable of acting in new and unexpected ways.

But…. but the burning bush is not enough, at least the burning bush is not enough to make sense of Jesus in relation to God and I want to say a word about that on this Trinity Sunday.

The followers of Jesus came to see him as being one with this God - who became the God not merely of Abraham Isaac and Jacob but also the God of Jesus too. Through Jesus in his crucifixion, God was involved and suffering with them, in a dark and brutal moment of human history. In the resurrection of Jesus, here is God operating in new, free and unexpected ways. And if the life and death of Jesus came to be seen as having unlimited meaning, and inexhaustible goodness, inseparable from God, his life was also seen as being available for sharing in unlimited and unconstrained ways. Witness the risen Jesus who breathes the Holy Spirit on his disciples after the resurrection, or the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost that we heard about last week. So God acts; and so God is. Jesus expresses God's acts in his life, death and resurrection. And you and I are transformed through the spirit of God that comes through him.  ‘ I will be what I will be’ says God, and God's decisive self-expression and self-giving are there in Jesus and in the Spirit. It is completely in line, is it not, with the God of the burning bush - the God who has acted in Jesus in a new and unexpected way.

Well, so what? What relevance has this to you and me in our practical day-to-day lives? What conceivable application can this have to understanding God and Jesus and the Spirit? Well I would like to suggest three things;
1.    We are to seek this God, a God who longs to be found by us, a God who longs to share his goodness and his life with us, who communicates richly with us in all sorts of ways, in nature, in Scripture, in prayer, in other people, in goodness and so on. It means, I think, trusting that he is the kind of God which we've described this morning and it's a trust that for ourselves the search will be worthwhile and that we will find him and know ourselves and him better. It's essentially a matter of prayer, of going deeper into God. A matter perhaps of recalling that day so many of us spent last year, when we tried to go deeper into God in our prayer life and our spiritual life. That's the first thing. I suggest we try to seek this God.
2.    Secondly, I think we can pray for others in need with a much greater sense of confidence, because we have to do with a God who suffers and is involved in the sufferings of humanity, just as he suffered when he saw his children groaning under the weight of slavery in Egypt and brought them out, just as he saw his son groaning under the weight of the cross and brought him out and up and raised him from the dead. We will pray for others more confidently because we know that God is not a remote God, but a God near, longing to act and longing to use us to act as well. So we will and should put ourselves alongside others who are suffering and will ask of this God by his Spirit to be the go-between to heal, to bless and to strengthen.
3.    And finally can I suggest one other thing? Can I urge us all to believe - and repeat to ourselves as if we did indeed believe it - that just as God is free, so he wants us to be free. ‘I am free’ – free because of what God has done in Jesus. Free, reconciled, filled with the divine life, free as having the hope of God and the hope in God. Free to glorify God. Free to act in new and unexpected ways.

AMEN