On June, 8th I wrote of the changes required to right-size the financial plans of St. Andrews. Below is a change being implemented for a lot of the same reasons.
As you can expect there will be other changes that track the realization we can no longer just follow normal operating modes into the future. One aspect of worship that needs a tweak is the way communion has been staffed. For those of you that pay attention, a full communion required ten Elder/Deacon/Servers. Full communions are observed in March, June, October and December in any given year. The dates move a bit in response to the calendar year but remain relatively static. I’d like to demonstrate how we can reduce the servers from ten to just seven without affecting the service or efficiency. It will as well maintain the solemn decorum of these proceedings.
Back in the day, we had a very large Session of almost 30 Elders at any given time. Scheduling was relatively easy – well scheduling is never easy but you get my point, I hope. Today we have roughly 20 some Deacon/Elders to choose from with the same four full communions and four intinction communions. Even allowing additional servers from non-commissioned members of the congregation has not been enough to fill the roster for communions. Note Session informally revised the requirement from only Elders to allow Deacons and longtime congregational members some time ago.
Trying as we might, finding sufficient servers for any particular service remained daunting. Some of you have commented on why the flurry of activity at the last minute…now you know. Life has changed dramatically since the day of 30 Elders. The number of servers at full communions needs to be reduced. Intinction services require much fewer servers (between 0 and 6) to complete and will remain unchanged.
So the diagram shown arranges the same full communion with just seven servers. You may have never seen the communion roster depicted and I'd like to allow all to see the mechanics of it. There are two servers on the dais assisting Rev. Scott and the five remaining each serve an aisle as shown. Easy pea’sy we have created a solution to scheduling issues (hopefully).
Comments, suggestions, and advice are always appreciated – give me a ring sometime! Rob, COS
Today at St. Andrew's we had a special lunch to celebrate our really wonderful group of volunteers who help out regularly at Hope Clothing. We couldn't help all of our local families as we do without their faithful assistance.
Want to know how dedicated these people are?
They are so dedicated that we almost had to drag them out of the room where they were busily and happily sorting and folding clothes so that they would come and eat the special meal we had prepared to thank them.
Thanks to Jean, Carol, Joni and Karen for preparing the lunch and thank you (so much!) to Creme, Hespeler's wonderful corner café, for donating some really tasty pastries for dessert!
I have spent some time reflecting on the Lord's Prayer this week - especially the opening word in the original language: "Father" (because I'm working on a sermon for Father's Day).
Now, I am hardly what you would call a Greek scholar. What I learned in school is a bit rusty, but I was struck by some of the things that you see when you read it in the original language. The prayer, as it originally appears in the Gospel of Matthew is in Greek, although Jesus himself likely spoke Aramaic and would have prayed in that language.
The prayer, at least as it appears in Greek, has a poetic structure that is simply impossible to get across in an English translation. When you read it in the original, you see that most of the prayers and petitions are written in parallel phrases.
The first word is "Father." The second word is "of us." From there the prayer seems to bounce back and forth from the deeds of God to the needs of humanity - from the concerns of heaven to the concerns of earth.
The pattern is repeated too many times for it just to be an accident. I think that Jesus (or his Greek translator) wanted us to understand something from this structure. But unfortunately, we English readers can't see this structure. That is why I created this graphic which lays out the Lord's Prayer by maintaining (for the most part) the actual word order in the Greek.
Can you see the structure? What do you think we are supposed to learn from it?
St. Andrew's Hespeler will be celebrating in some pretty special ways this Sunday. I hope you can be with us as we rejoice together. Some of the highlights for this Sunday:
We will be celebrating the wonderful dramatic abilities of our children who have been part of the St. Andrew's Stars this year as we hand out our "Academy Awards!"
The Youth Band will be playing a couple of pieces of music that they have just been begging us to be able to play all year: "If I Could Fly" and also the "Doctor Who Theme" as a part of the Academy Awards ceremony.
We will recognize our Sunday School Students and make some special presentations to them.
We will recognize and thank our Sunday School teachers and also recognize a very special achievement by Joni Smith.
A very special guest soloist will be performing Max Reger's "Aria" for us on the cello.
The sermon, "Was Jesus an 'atheist' because he taught that God is insurgent," will continue to examine some of the radical things that Jesus taught us about God.
“If you were unable to attend the Annual General Meeting on Sunday, February 28, 2016, you may not know that the 2016 budget has been refined to eliminate some of the year-end shortfall. In the past few years, we have witnessed debts that have been recurring and even increasing. Session, the Operations Committee, the Stewardship Committee and task groups, empowered by Session have struggled to find a solution to these shortfalls. As a result, a motion was passed at the AGM to identify how to retire the accumulated debt in 2016 - 2017. In the near future, a team will be assembled to recommend how this can be accomplished. More information will be available after the plan has been formulated.” Clerk of Session Blog early 2016
I wrote the above early in the year to advise the congregation of the way St. Andrews’ would change in 2016 – 2017. Everyone attending our church in the past few years could tell you that: attendance is down, finances are strained and many hours of intentional work had not found a solution. Every attempt to explain why has been in vain also. There is hope to this dilemma and I will explain the path forward that many feel will make lasting change at St. Andrews.
Last night: Session, The Operations Committee, the Stewardship Committee and a new Task Group you may not have heard of; called the “Sustainability Task Team” finalized a spirited assault on the issues. We believe that with the program laid out and everyone playing a part lasting results can be made. In order to explain the plan, I’ll need to detail what we see as the obstacles in front of us and then the remedies.
Background Issues:
St. Andrew’s is carrying $24,225 plus in debt that has accumulated between 2013 and 2015. This amount does not include additional debt that may be created in 2016.
While substantial efforts were made to reduce expenses for the 2016 budget year, the initiatives envisioned as revenue generators in 2016 are unsustainable in the long term. Those initiatives include at least 4 events/fundraising initiatives to be scheduled throughout 2016 with a target of raising $20,000 in revenue.
Capital expenditures and maintenance costs need to be compiled and prioritized to mitigate surprises and emergency repairs also.
The church has become involved in a valuable outreach program that includes Hope Clothing, a site for a Food Bank depot, Thursday Night Supper and Social, Alcoholics Anonymous support groups and counseling services provided by a community organization. The church needs to determine whether it wishes to provide funding to sustain these outreach programs from its own resources in 2016 and beyond.
Projects/Liabilities Needing Consideration:
Estimates show that budgeted costs will be $10,000 less than anticipated and plate offerings will be 10% less than anticipated. This means $26,000 in Special Event fundraising would be needed to break-even on the 2016 budget. This excludes the cumulative year deficit of approximately $24,225.
Due to changes in office staffing, there will be anticipated savings of $6,000 in 2016.
Share the Warmth has $14,252 remaining in unspent funds. These funds were donated to St. Andrew’s for the purpose of funding the heating project at St. Andrew’s in 2014.
Various non-endowment funds have positive balances that could be used to alleviate the overall indebtedness. Funds available for capital projects (as of March 31, 2016):
üCapital Purchase Fund - $10,449 üShare the Warmth Fund - $14,252 (funds remaining from 2013/2014) üVideo Project Fund - $1,615 üCapital Endowment Fund - $3,476 in earned income available
The 0% interest loan/grant from Presbytery of Waterloo repayable at 10% of $25,000 principal yearly (we have an 8-year repayment schedule left) needs to be managed in the most advantageous way possible.
The roof over the church extension, that house: the offices, gym and Sunday school level needs replacing at a quoted cost of $19,500. Shingles are starting to curl so we recommend that we do it this year before leaks appear.
The Audio/Video equipment project with an estimated cost of $30,000 - $33,000 has been approved by the congregation “when the funds are available.” $1,615 has been donated to this project as of March 31, 2016.
Hope Clothing has received gifts and grants that will sustain the organization until mid-July 2016. The current contract of the coordinator has been extended to June 30, 2016 at $590 per month. Sustainable funding needs to be realized.
Recurring scheduled maintenance of the Organ needs to be started before damages accumulate. The est. cost of cleaning/adjustment of the organ is $9,750.
The plan to recovery
That remaining funds from Share the Warmth, the Capital Endowment Fund and any giving doors opened in response to the need to re-roof be used to replace the “new” addition roof in 2016
We fundraise specifically for the Organ repair (“Buy a key” campaign)
We keep the Video projection system on a “warm pause”.
We fund any shortfall in our commitment to Hope Clothing not raised by donations as follows (70% from the Mission fund and 30% from the Memorial Fund).
With respect to the loan from Presbytery, we recommend repaying it over the remaining term ($2,500 per year over next 8 years). No use of the balance is currently scheduled. If you will it is a savings account or emergency fund held in reserve.
Session endorses the following fundraisers between now and the end of the year: üA late September Meat Pie sale (estimate of $4,000 in proceeds). üA late November Christmas Dream/Wish Auction (estimate of $7,000 in proceeds). üA fun and visible initiative to collect loose change (estimate of $3,000 in proceeds). üSponsorship of bulletins (details are not fully developed).
Please Note: Session will charter a task team in September to focus on systematic, growth/outreach to the community. Also formally reaching out to those who we do not see at church.
This recovery operation has been brought to you by a group of dedicated individuals and I’d like to tell you who they are: Members of the Sustainability Task Team are Ray Godin, Jane Neath, Scott McAndless, Ron Paddock, Vern Platt, Steve Marsh, Joni Smith, Donald Paddock and Patrice Wappler.
Cooperating and assisting members include the Stewardship Committee, the Operations Committee, and Session.
In every sense this was a team dedicated and detail oriented, working to make St. Andrews’ Hespeler vital and sustainable for another 160 years with Gods’ helping hand.
The next step is in the congregations hands to help make the dream a reality. We simply need to work the plan and you are invited to help whenever and however you can.
There is one very big assumption that lies behind all of our religious and spiritual practices. It is an assumption that is so taken for granted that I think we almost forget that it’s there. The assumption is this: we assume that God exists out there somewhere.
It is an assumption that goes with the very idea of existence. Existence, as an idea, implies existence within a certain space. Now, of course, we may not know where that “somewhere” is in the case of God. We would actually resist being very specific about the place where God exists because we’re really not very sure about that.
People used to talk about God being “up there,” but I’m not so sure we’re as comfortable with that phrase anymore. People used to mean it literally. They actually imagined God as being right up there – just beyond the solid blue dome of the sky looking down upon us – but we got a little bit too sophisticated (what with things like space exploration and satellites and such) to think about it that way anymore. So we tend to be careful not to be too specific about where God is out there, but everything we do in our religion assumes that God is somewhere.
This assumption has driven most religious activities for millennia. The things that human beings do in our temples and our churches – rituals, sacrifices, hymns, prayers – have all been carefully designed to attract the attention of whatever deities people have worshipped and to persuade those gods to send their blessing, salvation and healing our way.
In ancient times this might have been something as simple as sending the smoke of your offering up into the sky as this giant beacon to attract God’s attention with both sight and smell. There are places in the Bible that talk about sacrifices in exactly those terms. As ancient societies developed, worship practices became more sophisticated. Some cultures developed musical and dance traditions. The Greeks invented theater which was, in its origins, a sacred practice that was meant to earn the favour of the gods with performances. In fact, most forms of art had their origins in the attempts of humans to get their gods to pay attention. It is one of the great contributions of religion to human culture. In fact, if religion never gave us anything more than the music of Mozart and the paintings of Da Vinci, that would be enough to say that the whole enterprise was worthwhile.
And then, of course, there are the prayers that are such an essential part of our spiritual and religious practices. Prayer is, generally, seen as a way of communicating with a God who exists somewhere out there. Somehow, it seems, God is out there monitoring the things that we say – especially when we take on certain religious postures or enter religious places. When you get on your knees and clasp your hands and bow your head, it is like you are putting out an antenna to better transmit your signal. When we enter together into a place like this and enter into prayer with one another, it is like we are entering into a broadcasting booth – into the heart of spiritual equipment that has been designed to boost and amplify signals by joining them all together.
Of course, one of the other things that we do to get God to notice us is the same kind of thing that we do in most any social situation. When you want to be noticed in your social group, what you usually try to do is make sure that you stand out from the group in some meaningful way. We try to be better or stronger or wittier or sometimes needier than everyone else and think that that will get us more attention. Sometimes it even works. When we apply that logic to our relations to a God who is somewhere else, people often try to get God’s attention by being better or more righteous or more pious than other people.
This is how it has always been – how religion has always worked. And it has always been based on that one key assumption that God exists out there somewhere and that we need to make contact with God. But what if that assumption – the one that all religion is built on – is false?
I know what you’re thinking: that’s blasphemy. That is a denial of God because if God doesn’t exist somewhere then God doesn’t exist at all and that is atheism.
Well, if that is what atheism is, then it might just make Jesus an atheist. Now, of course, Jesus believed in God – he talked about God and trusting in God all the time. But Jesus certainly had some very interesting ideas about how we were supposed to connect with that God. In particular he had some very strong ideas about religious practices and especially about prayer.
Jesus taught his disciples, “whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.” Now, part of what Jesus is saying there is that he really has no patience with people who use external displays of religiosity and piety as a way to advance themselves and their standing within the community. This kind of thing was very common in Jesus’ time and he absolutely found it annoying and hypocritical.
But there is something more in this teaching of Jesus than just a disdain of hypocrisy. I mean, yes, Jesus dislikes how people are more interested in impressing other people than they are in connecting with God, but he seems to be equally concerned that the God that they are looking to connect with is not where they think God is. God is not out there but rather in here. God is not in public but rather in secret. So Jesus goes on to say, “whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
The God that Jesus is talking about here is completely different from the general concept of God that is and has been common throughout most of human history. Now, that is not to say that Jesus is the first or indeed the only one to conceive of God this way. The God that Jesus is talking about is the same God who is described in the Psalm that we read this morning. In it the Psalmist fantasizes about going somewhere to escape the presence of God and discovers, somewhat to his surprise, that there isn’t any such place: “If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”
What he is describing here are the limits of the entire universe as they were understood at that time. They saw everything that existed as a three-tiered universe – like a three layer cake with heaven on top, the earth in the middle and Sheol or the place of the dead underneath. They thought that the universe began in the place where the sun rose in the morning in the east and ended where it went down in the sea to the west. So the author is imagining an impossible journey to the extreme limits of the universe as he sees it.
If we were to map what this Psalm is saying onto our modern understanding of the limits of the universe we would have to say something like, “If I descend into the black hole that is at the centre of the Milky Way you are there; if I travel to the edge of the galaxy at the farthest end of the universe, you are there. If I travel back in time to the moment of the Big Bang or move ahead to watch the last light in the universe go out, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.” The picture is very clearly of a God who is present in every conceivable corner, and a number of inconceivable corners, of the known and unknown universe.
Think of it this way: God is not merely a being who exists somewhere. God is being itself. Even better, God is the source of all being – the very foundation of all existence.
So the notion that God, rather than merely being someplace, is actually everyplace is certainly older than the time of Jesus. But it seems to me that Jesus, displaying a unique understanding of the true nature of God, finally explained to us the true implications of such a concept of God.
Jesus is explaining in this passage that communication with the divine is simply not what we have always assumed. Most especially, it is not communication with some external being who communicates with us from a distance. The God we worship doesn’t need our religious practices and prayers in the traditional way that we have thought of them because God is not at a distance from us.
So Jesus rightly says that when you have a need or a request or a concern, you don’t need to tell God about it because God isn’t someplace else looking on while you try and explain to him what you need. If God is to be found everywhere, then God is to be found within you. In fact, Jesus is saying, God already knows what you need and what is really bothering you far better than you do.
Of course, you may ask, if God is really that present within you, then why pray at all? That is a very good question. The fact of the matter is that God doesn’t need our prayers. For that matter, God doesn’t need any of our religion. Does God need our praise? Does God need us to say, “How great thou art?” Of course not, God already knows how great God art. God doesn’t need any of it. So why do we do it? We do it because we need it – in fact, we need it desperately.
We need to pray, not to fill God in on what is going on, but because we need to verbalize the things that we struggle with. We need to come to terms with them so that healing can begin. And sometimes, when we don’t have the words for what we need and all we can do is groan in our pain or grief, we need to do that. But God is not some distant and detached observer as we do that. When we are in that prayer, God enters into the words or the griefs or the feelings with us. That’s what Paul means when he writes, “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
So more than anything, prayer, like many of the spiritual or religious practices that we engage in, is about opening ourselves up to the God who is already present with us in our longings, fears and woundedness. It is about making ourselves aware that we are not alone in what we face.
I do believe that God hears and answers our prayers. I do believe that God does heal us when healing is what we need (though, of course, healing can take many forms and we may not always get the kind of healing that we think that we need). But what I don’t believe is that God does any of this as some external being who is separated from us by time and space. God is not some being hanging around on some cloud somewhere who occasionally tunes into our prayers and, when he feels like it, decides to send some miracle in our direction. That is not the God that Jesus believed in. That is not the God that Paul worshipped. Nor is it the God that the writer of Psalm 139 discovered to his amazement.
But it is the God that most human beings throughout most of human history have imagined themselves dealing with. I think that we are increasingly finding ourselves in an age, however, where such a concept of God will no longer work for many people.
But that is okay, because we can see God in a radically different way – the way that Jesus actually spoke of his father in heaven. We have a God who doesn’t need to exist in any particular place – a God who we can just know is with us. That was all that ever really mattered.
Let this concept of God challenge the way that you pray and transform the ways that you practice your spirituality. Let it set you free. I know many people who tell me that they are afraid to pray or to try out other spiritual practices such as meditation or contemplation because they are worried that they will not do it right. Be reassured that there is no right way of doing such things because God is not watching you from some distance judging the quality of your prayers. God is within you participating in your prayers and that is what makes them worthy.
#TodaysTweetableTruth God's not out there someplace. God's with us & that should transform our prayers, faith & all our spiritual practices.
The Youth Band played for us; Jean M. sang a beautiful solo for the first time ever and we were blessed to have seven people make their Profession of Faith.
John 17:1-4, 20-24, Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, Philippians 2:1-11
I
f you are ever invited to a Greek wedding, you ought to expect that a number of great things are about to happen to you. You can be sure that you are going to have a great time. You can be sure that there’s going to be excellent food and excellent wine and probably healthy servings of Uzo. There will be people yelling “Opa!” and (warning) some dishes may be broken. But, best of all, you can also be sure that, somewhere in among the celebration, the music will start and people will stand up and form a circle and begin to dance.
The circle dance has been a part of Greek culture for a very long time. It is almost something that is programmed into the people themselves. A celebration, for them, is just not complete until at least three people (it cannot be done with two) have stood in a circle and danced around each other, in and out, in a constantly changing circle. They do the intricate steps, move in and out, under and over. The dancers begin to move faster and faster in perfect harmony until it is like the individuals fade away and it seems that all you can see is the blur of movement that makes up the whole. No one knows how old the circle dance is, but we can be pretty sure that it is at least as old as the Cappadocian Fathers.
The Cappadocian Fathers were three important church theologians who lived in the middle of the late fourth century of the common era in Cappadocia – a region in the centre of modern Turkey. Their names, just in case you want to find them in your great Christian theologian trading cards collection, are Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea; Gregory, bishop of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. And it is important to note one other thing about these three learned men: they may have lived in the territory we call Turkey, but they were ethnically and culturally Greek. This is actually quite important as you will see.
The really hot topic, in the days of the Cappadocian Fathers, was the trinity. The puzzle was basically this: Jesus and the New Testament writers had described their experience of God in a surprising and unprecedented way. Though they had experienced the unity of God – had known that God was one – they had specifically experienced God in three distinct ways: as God the Father and Creator, as God the Son and Redeemer and as God the Spirit and Sustainer. Though the Bible never actually says, not in so many words, that God is three in one and one in three, some sort of Trinitarian formulation was really the only way to make sense of what the Bible did say about God.
So, by the time the Cappadocian Fathers came along, the basic Trinitarian notion of God – one God experienced as Father, Son and Holy Spirit had been pretty well established. What the Cappadocians were trying to do was wrap their minds around how the various persons of the trinity related to each other and to us human beings. They were wise enough to realize that their poor human words could never precisely describe the functioning of the divine. What they did feel that they could do, however, was find a metaphor. They could paint some sort of picture and say, well, God is something like this.
And they did come up with a metaphor. They said that God was a perichoresis. Perichoresis is a Greek word that means rotation. And, if you listen to the way that these men described God as a rotation (and you remember that they were Greek) it becomes clear that the specific kind of rotation they were thinking of was a circle dance.
Now, let me ask you, when you hear me (or someone else) say or do something “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” what sort of picture does that draw in your imagination? I’ll bet that, for most of you, if you were forced to draw a picture of that formulation, you would come up with some sort of image of three static figures – perhaps an old man with a beard, a younger man who looks something like Jesus and some sort of a ghost or perhaps a dove to represent the Spirit.
That is what we tend to do when talking about the trinity. We imagine three distinct persons and then we try to find a way to blend them together. I’ve heard people talk about how one individual may play different roles in their life. One woman, for example, can be a mother in one part of her life, a daughter in another and a sister in another. I’ve heard people talk about the three parts of an egg – the yolk, the white and the shell. These are all attempts to wrap our human minds around a concept of the divine that cannot be understood with the human mind. They are metaphors that can be sometimes helpful to us in our understanding and imaginations and that can sometimes be very unhelpful.
Imagining God as a circle dance is, in essence, just one more metaphor among many others, but this metaphor may be more helpful than some of the others. While most of the other ways we imagine the trinity seem to be static, the image of a dance is all about movement. After all, if you put three people together in the centre of a dance floor and they just stand there – if they do not dance – they remain separate beings. But if they start to move in concert with each other, you suddenly have something new on that dance floor: you have the dance. And when you put some really good dancers together, they can produce something that is better and greater and more beautiful than anything that the individual dancers could ever do on their own. The wholeof the dance is greater than the sum of its individual parts: the dancers.
So imagine God this way. God is what is present when the individual members of the trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) start to dance together. God, as such, does not have any existence apart from the dance, nor does God need to exist apart from the dance because it has been ongoing from before the very beginning of creation and it will never end.
You can also understand just about everything that the Bible tells us about God or the persons of the trinity as movements in a great cosmic dance. We hear of God the Father who creates, chooses, blesses, judges and sometimes punishes. These are all steps in a dance towards and away from humanity and this world and its issues.
We read about God the Son who is begotten of the Father, who, in our reading from the Gospel this morning is sent into this world, who in the Letter to the Philippians, empties himself, takes on the form of slave and becomes fully human. We have his death, resurrection and ultimate exaltation at the right hand of God. These are all steps in and out and around humanity and ultimately encompassing the whole of creation.
The movements of the Holy Spirit, though not particularly featured in our readings this morning, may also be seen in terms of dance steps. From the movement of the Spirit over the face of the waters at the very beginning of creation to the descending like a dove upon Jesus at the time of his baptism to the Spirit coming like tongues of fire upon the church at Pentecost and working and moving within believers everywhere bringing us together and making us one, God’s Holy Spirit is found dancing among us, in us and through us.
Now every dancer in this great circle dance of the trinity has his own steps and her own movements. (Gender, by the way, really doesn’t matter very much when you are discussing matters of the nature of God. Gender is a human construct.) But here is why it matters that you think of the trinity as a circle dance. Each movement alone is really nothing without the coordinated movement of the others. Only when they move in concert with each other does any of it make any sense. So it is with the trinity. None of the actions of God throughout the history of the world make any sense unless you see them within the internal relationship of the dancers of the trinity.
So when, for example, Jesus talks about his own relationship with God to his disciples in the Gospel of John – when he talks about the relationship between the eternal Father and the eternal Son – we see that the dance between the Father and the Son is so intricate that you can scarcely define the one without reference to the other. “Father,” Jesus says, “the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.” It is like the glory of the one cannot exist without the glory of the other. They are in continual exchange of glory, love and grace within that unbroken dance. This, above all is what makes them who they are.
Jesus goes on to say, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” This stresses the unity, the oneness of God but, interestingly, it seems to be a oneness that we are only able to know because of a dance move where the Father sends the Son away. A movement of sending the Son away from the Father would seem, you would think, to separate, not unite, the deity, but here we are told that it actually reinforces the unity of God. That is because the sending is a move in the great dance – a move towards humanity which is the most important movement of all.
But that is not the most interesting thing about all this that I see as I read this prayer of Jesus, who is praying for the church in the Gospel of John. Jesus repeats over and over again that God is one in this passage. But he also makes it clear that this unity of God is not exclusive to God. In fact, practically every time that Jesus refers to the oneness of God, he also seems to pivot that immediately to speak of our unity as the church.
For example, Jesus says, “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one,I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. “ He is saying that the ultimate proof of the oneness of God is not to be found in theological discussion or intellectual speculation about the nature of God, but rather in our own personal experience of unity in the church. If we are one with each other, that is the only thing that can give us a glimpse of the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
In other words, if the trinity is a circle dance it is the kind of circle dance that you do not understand and you are not meant to experience as a spectator. In order to get the concept of God that is presented in this image, you have to get up on your metaphorical feet and enter the dance for yourself. It is the practical things that we do for one another to support and help each other that allows us to even get a sense of how God operates as one.
All of our attempts to intellectually understand and explain the nature and the internal relationship of the trinity will fail. We cannot describe it or explain it. Our human brains are not big enough to comprehend it. Our human language has not the words to express it. But we can experience it. We can experience it by choosing to care for one another, learn from one another and accept one another despite all of our differences and all of the things that could divide us. Do that, and you enter the dance together with Father, Son and Holy Spirit and once you are in the dance, you don’t need to explain these things because you are part of them and they are part of you.
So if you want to understand the nature of the trinity, don’t try and reduce it to words and explanations. That will always fall far short. Get on with the hard work of caring for one another and loving one another.
I think the Cappadocian Fathers may have been onto something when they chose to describe God as a circle dance. Of course, it was a radically different way of understanding God from what anyone had ever said before. Some found it so strange that they would accuse the Christians of being atheists because their concept of God was so different from what anyone had ever thought of before. Did the Cappadocian Fathers care about that? No, somehow I think that they were far too busy dancing with the divine.
#TodaysTweetableTruth 1 image that helps describe the trinity is a circle dance, an image you can grasp by entering into that dance yourself
