June 15th Reflections by Revd Sue McCoan – Joint Celebration Service with Ga Dangme fellowship – Fathers’ Day

Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

Bible reading: Psalm 8 

Today, as well as being Trinity Sunday, is Father’s Day.

To those of you who are fathers, or who are celebrating fathers, I wish you a happy Father’s Day. And if this day is difficult for you, if it brings sadness or difficult memories, then please know you are loved and included and we will hold you in prayer later. 

For some people, it’s difficult to think of God as our Father – perhaps because fathering has unhappy associations, or because it’s all just a bit too masculine. On the other hand, if you had a good relationship with your dad, you might think of God as somebody who gives you pocket money and takes you to the football and it’s all a bit cosy. Today, I want to look at some of the richness of the idea of God as our Father. 

As it’s Trinity Sunday, I’ve divided the reflection into three parts. In this first part, I’m thinking of Father as originator. We talk of Euclid as the ‘father of geometry’, Hippocrates as the ‘father of medicine’, or Charles Babbage as the ‘father of computers’ because they were the first to think of it. God is the creator of the world – of everything. God is the origin of everything that exists. God is ‘father’ in this universal sense – the one responsible for everything and everyone that comes afterwards.

And God saw that it was good. Genesis 1 tells us there is a wholeness, an integrity, about God’s creation. It all works together as a living system, sustaining itself, bringing life and goodness. And the last thing that God created, according to Genesis 1, was the human beings – made in the image of God, and therefore, crucially, with the ability to relate to God in a different way from all other creatures.

I’ve no doubt that other living creatures relate to God in their own ways. The other morning I woke up early and thought, ‘I could get up and spend time in prayer, or I could turn over for another half hour’s sleep’, and just as I was settling for the sleep our little dog barked so I had to get up and let her out. 

But humans have a particular capacity for consciously relating to God. And it’s this that we see celebrated in Psalm 8, which we just heard. ‘O Lord, our Sovereign… you have set your glory above the heavens… I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars…’ and in all this wonder and amazement, you are mindful of the human beings, mere mortals. ‘You have crowned them with glory and honour’.

What God wants most of all is to be in relationship with us. And what human beings want, in the core of their being, is to be in relationship with God. As St Augustine said, ‘You made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you’.

Se here is God, longing to relate to us, and here are human beings, designed to relate to God, and God gives us free will and choice and so often we fail to make that connection. We’ll come back to that in our next reflection.

Bible reading: Romans 5:1-5

So God longs to relate to people, and people at heart long to relate to God, but there’s a gap. Only God can bridge that gap, and God sets out to do it. First, by calling a particular group of people – or rather by calling just one person, Abraham, who went on to become the father – the ancestor – of the whole Jewish people. With a bit of help from his wife Sarah, of course.  That’s great, but it still leaves a whole lot of people in the world who are not part of the Jewish community.

So God sends Jesus, his only-begotten son. Jesus is a human being in every physical respect, but he has God as his father. Even as a child, when Joseph his stepfather was still alive, Jesus knew this; that time he was left behind in the temple, at the age of 12, he tells his anxious parents, ‘Did you not know I would be in my Father’s house?’ 

We are used to Jesus calling God ‘father’, but at the time it was quite radical.  In the Old Testament, nobody addresses God as ‘Father’. They call God ‘Lord’, ‘Sovereign Lord’, Almighty God, ‘Lord God of Hosts’, or variations on those names. When the people of Israel speak of their Father (capital F) they mean Abraham. No wonder some people got upset with Jesus – he’s claiming a relationship with God which nobody else can have. Who does he think he is?

Jesus knows who he is. And his unique relationship with God matters to us all. Because when we talk about the gap between God and human beings, Jesus is the one who bridges that gap. One with God – and reaching out to all people – Jesus takes on himself all the sin of the world and in breaks it – through his death and rising again. He becomes the means through which all people now can become children of God. We’re adopted children of God, where Jesus was God’s son from the beginning, but we are in the family now. 

As it says in our reading from Romans, ‘we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand’.

So we can approach God, creator of the universe, with the same intimacy and trust that Jesus had. And we can bring to Jesus all our human struggles, our fears, our sadness, our anger, knowing that Jesus understands because he’s been through it too. What a friend we have in Jesus!  

And there is more, which we’ll come onto in our third reflection.

Bible reading: John 16:12-15

Jesus came to bridge the gap between God and humans, through his death on the cross. That work was accomplished there and then. But the disciples of Jesus who were with him at the time, who witnessed to his resurrection, didn’t see the whole picture. Their attention, their devotion, was still fixed on the Jesus they could see and hear and touch and eat with. The relationship needed to broaden out, and fast, so that it could spread rapidly while those witnesses were still alive. Jesus withdrew from their physical presence at the Ascension, and ten days later, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came and transformed those people. And because there were so many people present, from across the known world, and because the Spirit gave the gift of language so that they could understand each other, the gospel message was taken back to all those places. 

The Holy Spirit had been in the world all the time; right at the start of Genesis we read of the Spirit of God hovering over the waters. The Spirit moved in a particular way at Pentecost because of the particular situation. After that, the Spirit continued to move in the early church, wherever and whenever the people gathered, taking the truth of Jesus, the love of Jesus, from the specific time and place of Jesus and letting it flow through the world. The Spirit, Jesus says in this reading from John’s gospel, will guide you into all truth. Will help you understand the things that are beyond you just now; will tell you about the things that are to come. 

The Holy Spirit is our guide in the church today. The Spirit moves amongst us, binding us together in fellowship with one another, with the human Jesus of old, with God the universal creator. It binds us together, as at Pentecost, with people who don’t speak the same language; with people from other countries and backgrounds; with people whose lives and opportunities are very different from ours. So we are never to look down on another person; never to sit in judgment on them; never to exclude. That’s quite a challenge for some of us, like me, who are used to being in a majority, with considerable privilege; it might mean letting some of that privilege go. If it is the work of the Spirit, we will be given the grace to do it.

It goes beyond people. The Spirit binds us in fellowship with our creator – and if we honour and praise God our creator, then naturally we honour and care for God’s creation. Again, for those of us who have a high standard of living, that might mean thinking again about our car use, our water consumption, our throwaway culture. And again, the Spirit will give us grace if we find the changes hard to make.

The doctrine of the Trinity is all about being drawn into relationship – with one another, with God, with all people and with the whole created world. 

That is surely something to celebrate. Thanks be to God, Father, Son and Spirit.

Amen.