A sermon for Trinity Sunday 2005

‘Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness...’

Last Sunday Lily Crocker was brought by her parents to Church and we joined with them and her sister Sophia in giving thanks for this new baby. It was our first occasion to see her although it can be said that she has been in church for many weeks because humans are persons in God’s eyes, even before they are born - as is eloquently testified to throughout the narrative of Scripture. Two other children will be born between now and September and all three will be baptized on All Saints Sunday.

Children can be, when there is a loving supportive marriage, the expression of that love. Parents create life to share the love that they have. It isn’t that they only start to love when they have children - rather the children come from the love that existed before they were born.

And human beings, men and women, are formed within God’s creation in which God’s mysterious and unseen activity is at work. And in that first reading we heard how we are in the image of God, that image is tarnished and obscured by sin, but never erased. It is a vocation to be who we are meant to be not by what we discover on our own within ourselves, but by what God gives us in relationship to him and others.

And because of this unique place of humans in relation to God we can carefully draw analogies between human persons and God. Carefully, because we are always in danger of creating God in our image, of projecting onto God what we like. So on this Trinity Sunday I began to develop and analogy by saying that man and woman create new life to share the love that existed before their children were born.

In a similar way God, who is love, and I will say what that means in a moment, creates to share the love that existed before world was made.

God did not create the world in order to have something to love. If God is a singular being in a mathematical sense, or like a solitary individual, then God would have to create something in order to be able to love. Creating would come before love, not arise from love.

In this case God couldn’t love until there was something or someone to love. But we are told, for example in John’s Gospel, that God is love - that God’s very nature is love, and love as nature requires more than one doesn’t it?

God’s being, as one early Church Father wrote, is a union of love, or as a modern theologian expresses it, God’s being is Communion.

God creates to share the love that God is. Even in that first reading, (and the biblical doctrine of creation is much more than Genesis) there is the mysterious saying of God who says ‘let us’ – plural – ‘make humankind’. One of the designations for God in the Old Testament is the word Elohim which like all words in Hebrew ending in a similar manner is plural – Cherubim and Seraphim are examples.

And this mystery of God is disclosed when God the Father sends his Word into the world at Christmas. The Word, through whom God created all things, became flesh and that Word and Son, Jesus, reveals the name of God as Father, who by nature always has with him his Son and Spirit. And it is through that Word, through whom all things came to be, that all things will become what God intends them to be.

God has a Son – his Word – by nature. God does not say, ‘I think I will have a son’. God by nature, not by will, is eternally Father of his Son and Word; and eternally God breathes forth his Holy Spirit. But God, like man and woman made in his image, created the world in order to share the love that God is and has – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

So God did not need to create a universe, a cosmos, a world, in order to love, for the love out of which the universe was created was forever shared between the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

This is so important that it needs to be emphasized. All human love is to various degrees a dependent love; it is love that arises out of need. We are dependent creatures in relationship to each other and God. But God’s love for the world is wholly different. God has all the love he needs within his own being, the love of the Father with the Son and the Holy Spirit. And the world will only know what it is when it loves the God who made it out of love and who sent the Son of his love, as the author of Colossians calls Christ, to live and die to save it.

This means that the world is not God but rather can be in a loving relationship with God. That is quite different that some religions that see the world as part of God so that the world really has no life of its own, it is only an extension of God. But God creates something other than himself, different, but capable of being in relationship to God. We learn in the first reading that the earth brings forth fruit – God gives space, so to speak, for the reality of creation, allowing it to grow and develop according to his design.

The bible’s picture of creation is very rich and encompasses more than just the first reading we heard today. But today we give thanks to God that the world, of which we are part, is made by a God who is love and is created to return the love of God.

We give thanks that we are made in the image of God who is a communion of love, Father, Son and Spirit, which means we are to find the meaning of our life by going out of ourselves in love for God and others. God is, we could say, a relationship, so we must find the truth about ourselves with God and in relationship with others – not by going inside ourselves as autonomous individuals.

Our life is to be lived with others, and the primary life with others is the Church. This means we will most find out who we are when we listen to others and learn God’s truth rather than seek to listen to ourselves in isolation.

We are created by love for love, not love of self but love of God and others thereby finding our true life and joy.

The Rev. Mark Ainsworth
Rector, All Hallows Church
Wyncote, PA

May 2005
 

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