Trinity...!

This is absolutely an off-the-top-of-the-head ramble, just to get my mental cogs turning.
Why shoudl we care about the Trinity when there are 'real' problems in the world which demand our attention so much more urgently. Take suffering. To be specific, let's tek the case of a little boy in one of our villages who is undergoing treatment for a tumour. He is suffering. His family is suffering. His friends are suffering. The whole school community is suffering. (all these to varying degrees, obviously). And in the face of all this not one person has yet asked me to expound a theory of the Trinity. Odd, that.

But (and you were just waiting for that weren't you) I think that how we handle the crises and suffering of life and how we think about God are intimately related.
If we think there is no God, then there is no anguished question 'why?' - stuff happens, people get ill, even little people, and there really is no reason.
But if we think there is a God, we are left with the question 'what sort of God is it that let's a little boy suffer?'.
What do we really think God is like?
If God is the one who is in charge of everything, why can't he just stop all cancer from happening?
Does God actually care about what happens to any of us, or has he created a world, wound it up & let it go, relatively unconcerned about this cosmic experiment?
Or have we got it all wrong & is God not much more than a comforting idea on a cold night?

Whatever else the doctrine of the trinity says into this situation, it says that God is complex, not easily understood, but also both dynamic & active and caring of the fate of humanity.
The God who creates and cares in the Father cannot impassively watch his children suffer.
The God who comes to us and suffers alongside us in the Son will not simply leave us to our fate.
The God who moves among us in the Spirit has power to act, yet not a power which merely over-rides our human condition and our physical laws.
The God who is all three - and yet one - is a God of inter-relationship, complexity, love.
This is a God who is with us in our questioning, but who defies simple answers and straight-forward definition.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Faith and Guidance

Genesis 12: 1-9; Romans 4: 13-25   It’s been quite a week for politics. Whatever your party affiliations, there has been a lot of unpredictability and upheaval  - there are going to be 3 by-elections very soon - and we might all be left feeling breathless and wondering ‘what happens next?’.   We might wonder what guidance we might expect our political leaders to seek. And we might, this week, have had our own moments of wondering where to turn for guidance or direction in the turmoil of life.    So it’s rather helpful to look at the story of Abram.   Like all good stories this one is long and multi-faceted and well worth exploring.   Just before the part that we heard, we are told (in Genesis chapter 11)  that Terah, the father of Abram, took his son Abram, his grandson Lot (son of Haran, who had died) and his daughter-in-law Sarai, Abram’s wife, and set off from Ur of the Chaldees for Canaan. But when they reached Harran they settled there, and there Terah died, leaving Abram as the h
Read more

Abraham and Isaac - a good question!

Genesis 22: 1-14       Matthew 10: 40-42 Isidor Rabi, who was born in Austria in 1898, moved to the United States as a child and won the Nobel prize for physics in 1944. He was once asked by an admiring friend, “Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in your neighbourhood?” Rabi responded: “My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: ‘So? Did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. ‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’ That difference – asking good questions – made me a scientist.” I think we could say that living in a relationship with God – which for us means following Jesus Christ – is based on the same principle. Did you ask a good question today? What might our ‘good questions’ be as we read the scriptures today? Let’s look closely at the story of Abraham, bei
Read more

Epiphany 2: Nathanael... & Jacob

Genesis 28: 10-22 (not the lectionary reading!); John 1: 43-51 I love the Sundays of Epiphany – starting with the visit of the Magi (which we celebrated last week) and then moving on to other stories of God’s presence on earth being revealed to people. I think what I most love is the idea that we don’t just pack away the Christmas decorations and forget about God’s love being incarnate in Jesus, but we allow the story of Jesus’ coming to earth to open our eyes to other ways in which God’s love is present to us.   What can be better to start the new year than a series of reminders that God is with us and that we can expect to meet with God in 2024.   Today we heard two very related Biblical stories of God’s presence.   The first is the vision given to Jacob, when he saw angels going up and down a ladder between earth and heaven.    You might think that Jacob is a specially holy person to be given this vision: nothing could be further from the truth. Jacob is the twin who was born holdin
Read more