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A few years ago when I had to preach on Trinity Sunday one of the ushers asked me, “What are you going to say?” I told him I wasn’t sure and he said, “Just say it’s a mystery and sit down, they’ll love it.” I decided not to do that, even though I am sure he was right as to the response I would get!
Someone once said: “God is a verb not a noun.” In some ways that just sounds wrong, we all know God is not a thing that can be described as a verb or a noun. But it does say something very important and very Christian about our relationship to God, namely, that God is not, first of all, something static, a formula, a dogma, or creed that demands our agreement. God is an “action word,” a flow of living relationships. A trinity, a family of life that we can enter, taste, breathe within, and flow through us.
“God is love,” scripture says, “and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him or her.” Too often, we miss what that means because we tend to romanticize love. It might be better translated this way: God is community, family, parish, friendship, hospitality and whoever abides in these abides in God and God abides in him or her. God is a trinity, a relationship among persons. If this is true, and scripture assures us that it is, then the realities of dealing with each other in community, at the dinner-table, over a bottle of wine or an argument, not to mention the simple giving and receiving of hospitality, are not just everyday worldly experiences but the stuff of church, the place where the life of God flows through us.
By definition, God is beyond imagination and beyond language, even the best language of theology and church dogma. God can never be understood or captured adequately in any formula. But God can be known, experienced, tasted, related to in love and friendship. God is Someone and Something that we live within and which can flow through our veins. To make God real in our lives, therefore, we don’t need to sneak off, shamrocks and triangles in hand, to try to somehow picture how three-can-be-one and one-can-be-three. We don’t need to read academic books on theology, valuable though these may be. No. God is a flow of relationships to be experienced in community, family, parish, friendship, and hospitality. When we live inside of these relationships, God lives inside of us and we live inside of God. Scripture assures us that we abide in God whenever we stay inside of family, community, parish, friendship, hospitality.
This has huge consequences for how we should understand religious experience: Among other things, it means that in coming to know God, the dinner table is more important than the theology classroom; the practice of grateful hospitality is more important than the practice of right dogma; and meeting with others to pray as a community can give us something that long hours in private meditation cannot. Such a concept also blurs all simple distinctions between “religious” and “purely worldly” experience. Finally, importantly, it tells us that, since God is inside of community, we should be there too, if we wish to go to heaven. Simply put, we can’t go to hell, if we stick close to family, community, and parish.
The most harmful and destructive heresies that block us from properly knowing God are not those of formal dogma, but those of a culture of individualism that invite us to believe that we are self-sufficient, that we can have community and family on our own terms, and that we can have God without dealing with each other. But God is community – and only in opening our lives in gracious hospitality will we ever understand that.
Someone once said: “God is a verb not a noun.” In some ways that just sounds wrong, we all know God is not a thing that can be described as a verb or a noun. But it does say something very important and very Christian about our relationship to God, namely, that God is not, first of all, something static, a formula, a dogma, or creed that demands our agreement. God is an “action word,” a flow of living relationships. A trinity, a family of life that we can enter, taste, breathe within, and flow through us.
“God is love,” scripture says, “and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him or her.” Too often, we miss what that means because we tend to romanticize love. It might be better translated this way: God is community, family, parish, friendship, hospitality and whoever abides in these abides in God and God abides in him or her. God is a trinity, a relationship among persons. If this is true, and scripture assures us that it is, then the realities of dealing with each other in community, at the dinner-table, over a bottle of wine or an argument, not to mention the simple giving and receiving of hospitality, are not just everyday worldly experiences but the stuff of church, the place where the life of God flows through us.
By definition, God is beyond imagination and beyond language, even the best language of theology and church dogma. God can never be understood or captured adequately in any formula. But God can be known, experienced, tasted, related to in love and friendship. God is Someone and Something that we live within and which can flow through our veins. To make God real in our lives, therefore, we don’t need to sneak off, shamrocks and triangles in hand, to try to somehow picture how three-can-be-one and one-can-be-three. We don’t need to read academic books on theology, valuable though these may be. No. God is a flow of relationships to be experienced in community, family, parish, friendship, and hospitality. When we live inside of these relationships, God lives inside of us and we live inside of God. Scripture assures us that we abide in God whenever we stay inside of family, community, parish, friendship, hospitality.
This has huge consequences for how we should understand religious experience: Among other things, it means that in coming to know God, the dinner table is more important than the theology classroom; the practice of grateful hospitality is more important than the practice of right dogma; and meeting with others to pray as a community can give us something that long hours in private meditation cannot. Such a concept also blurs all simple distinctions between “religious” and “purely worldly” experience. Finally, importantly, it tells us that, since God is inside of community, we should be there too, if we wish to go to heaven. Simply put, we can’t go to hell, if we stick close to family, community, and parish.
The most harmful and destructive heresies that block us from properly knowing God are not those of formal dogma, but those of a culture of individualism that invite us to believe that we are self-sufficient, that we can have community and family on our own terms, and that we can have God without dealing with each other. But God is community – and only in opening our lives in gracious hospitality will we ever understand that.