Sunday, May 30, 2021
In an unscripted sermon Fr. Kieswetter highlighted how sometimes it seems like the doctrine of the Trinity distances us from God (due to its seeming complexity), but paradoxically, it exists to articulate the radical Christian belief that God is actually much closer to us than we normally think. The mysterious God in heaven has come to dwell with us in Jesus, and God now resides within us and through the world as the Holy Spirit. And these ‘modes’ of God are not temporary, but actually within God’s very being. God is not static and distant, but active and relational.
Another way of putting this is that God is Lover (the Father), Beloved (the Son), and the Love that they share (the Holy Spirit). And what St. Paul communicates in his letters is that the Holy Spirit brings us into the place of the Son; we’ve been adopted, and are now children of God.
A medieval figure, Hildegard of Bingen, wrote of God’s “viriditas,” God’s lush, energizing, greening power that flowed through the world. This might be an image of the Holy Spirit for us to dwell on in our age of increasing awareness of the importance of the whole created world. And this is perhaps a much more exciting and enlivening image than the other images that point to the Trinity (the clover, triangle, etc.).
What a radical and interesting interpretation our Christian faith has on monotheism, the belief in one God! Yes, it can be complex and muddy at times… But the point is that in having experienced Jesus, our ideas about God have been changed! We can’t talk about God as distant and removed from us anymore. Instead, God — within God’s very self — is dynamic, active, relational. In short, God is Love.
© 2021 The Rev’d Matthew Kieswetter