This morning in our All Age Worship we talked about
the things we didn’t know, the mysteries that bothered us. I asked people to
write down a question that they would like to ask God if they could, and we
stuck them on the question marks you see hanging from the chandelier.
It didn’t surprise me to find that the questions
were very varied, and some of them quite poignant. There were some questions of
course that were about purely theological or scientific things – what is
infinity? what is it like in heaven? But there were a lot of questions that
were clearly rooted in people’s personal lives - why can’t I get a job that
pays enough to live on? why do so many in my family suffer? Some of the
questions might have answers, even if we don’t happen to know them, but others
are the kind of things that will always be mysteries. We can never know, for
example, what it is like to be someone else, and we never will do.
Most people like a mystery, but only as long as the
mystery is eventually solved. That’s what detective stories play into. We know
that at the end we’ll find out whodunit, and that the clues will have been
there if we had eyes to see them. Real life isn’t like that though, and that
can make us feel profoundly disturbed. We like to feel we have life under
control.
I was once asked by a woman I knew to talk to her
daughter, who was about 6. There had been a complicated bereavement in the
family, and the child seemed to be really struggling with it. As this child
told me about it she told me about the moment when she’d watched her mum answer
the phone and receive the news of the death. “What happened then?” I asked. Mum
had started to cry, she said, so she had fetched her a glass of water. “That
was kind – why did you do that?” “Because I thought it would make Mummy
better”. “And did it?” I asked. “No” she said, sadly.
And that was what was troubling her. She had wanted
to make it better, and she couldn’t.
I took her small hands and laid them on top of mine.
“Whose hands are bigger?”, I asked. “Yours are”. “Why’s that?” “Because you are
a grown up.” I explained that some things were too big for little hands to
hold, and sometime it needed a grown up to sort things out. It was a difficult thing to make her mummy
feel better, and it wasn’t surprising that she couldn’t do it. But what about
the things, I wondered which even grown ups couldn’t sort out. I asked how big
God’s hands might be. She spread out her arms as wide as she could – “As big as
this!” she said. So maybe, we decided there were things we would just have to
put into God’s hands to sort out, the hands of the one who has “measured the
waters in the hollow of his hand, and marked off the heavens
with a span.”
That conversation seemed to do the trick. It helped
her to come to terms with the fact not only that she couldn’t sort out the woes
of the world, but that she didn’t have to, and I’ve never forgotten it, because
I know I need to remember that myself from time to time.
Today is Trinity Sunday, a day for contemplating
mysteries too big to get our heads around. Theologians have tried to explain
how God could be three and one at the same time, but to be frank their
explanations have never and will never really get it sorted out satisfactorily.
That’s because in a way we start from the wrong end with this conundrum. We
start with the doctrine and then try to explain it. The early Christians
though, started with experience. They had always believed in a Creator God – a
loving parent. Then they met Jesus, and in him they felt they were meeting God
himself. Then, when Jesus was no longer with them, they encountered this
mysterious experience called the Holy Spirit, which made them feel as if Jesus
himself, God himself, were close to them “Lo, I am with you to the end of the
age,” said Jesus, and that’s how it felt. These experiences were different, and
yet the same. But there was only one God – that was fundamental to their
understanding – so how could this be? What had happened to God when Jesus lay
dead in the tomb? Was God dead too? Was a third of him dead? Press any human
explanation too far and it breaks down. Our experiences are true and real, but
try to put them into words and we come unstuck.
The Christian belief in the Trinity then, whatever
else it is, is a reminder that God is bigger than we are. It gives us
permission to be baffled, to accept that we always will be. It gives us
permission not to feel we have to solve all the problems of the world, but to
leave them in the only hands that are big enough to hold them.
Amen
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