Isaiah 40: 12-17, 27-31; 2 Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20

Jesus said: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

I am with you always to the end of time.

One of the great struggles that human beings have is matching up the idea that God is with us always with the fact that so many things happen that seem to have in them no element of a loving God. Just this week our papers have been full of the Burmese cyclone and Chinese earthquake disasters, and of many murders, among them 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen, killed in an unprovoked attack in a bakery.
People respond in different ways. Some decide that, particularly in the case of natural disaster, that there can be no God since these disasters cause too much devastation for there to be a God who loves and cares.

Others struggle with their faith, since they cannot understand how the God they have been taught about as loving and faithful could allow such suffering.

And others still hold on to the promises of God, that Jesus uttered in those words we heard today – I am with you always to the end of time. They cannot understand necessarily why these things happen, but they can accept that God is with them in the midst of the suffering, that God has not deserted them, though disaster has overtaken them.

The Old Testament and particularly the Psalms wrestle with the question of how it is that bad things seem to happen to good people, while the wicked prosper. It’s been an age-old question.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day when we think about the nature of God, who God is, rather than what God has done.  It is significant that the episode from the ending of Matthew’s Gospel which we heard today takes place on a mountain-top. For Matthew, as for many others before him, the mountain-top is the place for a special revelation from God.

In the Old Testament, we have the rescue of Isaac from the alter at the top of a mountain, the giving of the Ten Commandments, Elijah’s encounter with God the still, small voice, and so on. And Matthew has the Sermon on the Mount – the new Ten Commandments, if you like, and of course the new revelation of God that the disciples had in the Transfiguration.

So the mountain-top setting of today’s reading shows that this is an important encounter with God. And there is another significant point too – in Matthew’s first chapter, he recalls the prophecy that the birth of Jesus will bring about Emmanuel – God with us. Now, at the end as Jesus departs, that promise of God with us remains.

So, if God is with us, how do we cope with tragedies such as the Burmese disaster and the Chinese earthquake, both of which have been made worse by human endeavour – in Burma the government’s intransigence and stubbornness which prevents aid getting through and in China the enhanced danger because of the poor quality of the buildings.

It comes down to how we see God – who is the God we worship?

A Lutheran theologian Karen Bloomquist puts it like this: “Is God primarily a monarch reigning on high, untouched by people’s suffering, or a Triune God, intimately involved with us and our world? Too often people begin with certain human ideals of power and authority and then project these onto God. At its best the doctrine of the Trinity has been a sustained criticism of the dominating concepts of God’s power and human power. Instead of a God set above on high, invulnerable and untouched by human realities of poverty, God is relational. This points to the relationships within the Trinity and with us and the rest of creation. God is love, God-with-us, suffering with creation.”

The whole point about the Trinity is that God is relational. God lives in relationship – Three in One – and with us. The doctrine of the Trinity is not just a dry theological mind-bender, but reminds us that God lives in love with God and with us.

And that means that God becomes involved in the world. There’s a wonderful hymn by W. H. Vanstone that expresses Christ’s role in the world.

Morning glory, starlit sky,
soaring music, scholar’s truth,
flight of swallows, autumn leaves,
memory’s treasure, grace of youth:
 
Open are the gifts of God,
gifts of love to mind and sense;
hidden is love’s agony,
love’s endeavor, love’s expense.
 
Love that gives, gives ever more,
gives with zeal, with eager hands,
spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
ventures all its all expends.

Drained is love in making full,
bound in setting others free,
poor in making many rich,
weak in giving power to be.
 
Therefore he who shows us God
helpless hangs upon the tree;
and the nails and crown of thorns
tell of what God’s love must be.

Here is God: no monarch he,
throned in easy state to reign;
here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain.

Those arms of love tell us about who God is, a God whose love is sacrificial, who suffers with us and on our behalf. Our God is dynamic, a moving, living God.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot live apart from one another; there is always the flow of relationship, of love, between them. Love that bore pain through the death of Jesus and the ripping apart of those relationships – my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But a love that was strong enough to conquer the separation death wrought.

At the heart of God is a relationship of love, love of the Father for the Son and the Spirit; love of the Son for the Father and the Spirit; love of the Spirit for the Father and the Son. And we are invited to become caught up in that love. The three persons of the Trinity work in different ways – we perhaps get an inkling of that from our second reading this morning which talks of the grace of Jesus, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit.

The grace of Jesus is what enables us to be set free from sin and death. The love of God is what makes that possible in the first place. And the communion of the Holy Spirit enables us to become part of the relationship within the Trinity and to be bound together in one body.

This is all important, for how we see God will affect the way we act and behave.

If we see God as the stern, strict parent always trying to catch us out doing something wrong, then the way in which lead our lives will be affected by that, and forgiveness will lose some of its power. If we see God as a far off being unconcerned with the world and humanity, then we will lack a concern for other people.

But, if we see God as a relational being, the three parts intertwined and inseparable, but calling us to be part of that too, we will act. We will not be able to sit idly by while others suffer. How we see God affects how we behave.

From time to time, people show what this means in practice. They manage to live out the kind of love that makes up God. Only this past week, we heard the words of Jimmy Mizen’s mother, a devout Roman Catholic.

She said this of her son’s murderer: “I just want to say to the parents of this other boy . . . I want to say I feel so, so sorry for them. I don’t feel anger, I feel sorry for the parents. We’ve got such lovely memories of Jimmy. and they will have such sorrow about their son. I feel for them, I really do.

“What can I really say to them? You can imagine, that’s their child. They held that boy in their arms as a baby.

“They must be in pain. It’s so painful to know that one of your children has been so cruel, so wicked.

“People keep saying ‘why are you not angry?’ There’s so much anger in this world and its anger that’s killed my son. If I am angry then I am exactly the same as this man. We have got to get rid of this anger, we have just got to.”

It was anger, among other things, that sent Christ to the cross, that caused the split in the godhead. This mother, in the midst of her grief and pain, recognised that there are other ways than retaliation and anger. There are ways that imitate the path of love set out by God.

In the same way that the Persons of God exist in relation, we exist in relation to God and with each other. Jimmy’s mother recognised that there was something that bound her to the parents of the murderer, something greater than her grief. It was the same sort of recognition that enabled Jesus to utter from the cross the words: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Love is stronger than hate and death. Love is what binds Father, Son and Holy Spirit together, and what enables us to be incorporated in those relationships.

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.

(with acknowledgements to Clare amos – Roots Worship)

Acts 1.6-14; 1 Peter 4.12-14; 5.6-11; John 17.1-11

Today’s Gospel reading comes from John’s account of the Last Supper. After the meal, Jesus first teaches his disciples and then moves into prayer to God his Father. Today’s words came from that prayer.

We need to take seriously the themes of that prayer – in some ways it is Jesus’s last testament to the world. In his conversation with the disciples he foretells his betrayal, gives the new commandment to love one another as he has loved them, he predicts Peter’s denial and talks of his forthcoming departure.

He then explains that when he goes he will not be leaving them on their own for the Holy Spirit will come, and moves on to a reflection on the vine and the disciples’ need to remain rooted in him.
After that he concentrates for a bit on the fact that they will face opposition, moves on to what the Holy Spirit will do and acknowledges that his disciples will feel pain and will suffer, but that joy will come again.

And then he moves into the prayer from which we heard this morning. At the end of today’s passage, Jesus ask for God’s protection for his disciples “So that they may be one, as we are one”. Jesus clearly recognised the threat to unity that existed for the first disciples and has exited throughout history for Christian.

Christians frequently disagree with each other. We only have to look through the pages of the New Testament to see how this has been part of Christian life from the beginning.

There were the disputes about circumcision and whether it was necessary; there were arguments in the Corinthian between those who followed different leaders; there were problems between Jewish and Gentile Christians; between rich and poor; people fell out with one another, and truly struggled with unity.

And this has not changed through the ages – churches have split and divided; Christians have left one church and gone to another; or stopped going altogether for reasons such as “we didn’t like the vicar”. I find it comforting to know that Jesus recognised that unity was going to be hard.

And today we are facing a lack of unity, not only between people of different Churches, but also within our own Church, the Anglican Communion.

As I’m sure you are all aware, the key issues splitting the church at present are the role of women – whether they may be priests and bishops; and the debate about homosexuality and whether gay people can be accepted as part of the Church or not.

I’m not going to talk this morning specifically about those issues, but I hope that we can reflect together on what causes disunity and divisions, and what behaviour contributes to unity.

First, some of the causes of division. One major source of disagreement is how one should interpret the Bible.

Some believe that it must be taken literally at every turn, particularly the New Testament.

Others believe that interpretation is much more a question of looking at the context in which words were spoken and written originally and then addressing how those words might be applicable to us today in our very different society.

Others would say that what was relevant for the first century is not relevant for us today so we shouldn’t take too much notice of biblical injunctions.

And it is hard to see how people who interpret the Bible differently from each other will ever come to agree. But agreement with someone and living in community while accepting difference are two separate things.

Splits come when people decide that they can no longer live with those who disagree with them. The differences in ethics or doctrine mean that they think Christianity is being watered down by those with whom they can’t agree, so they leave to form their own community, where they can be sheltered from those whom they see as not real Christians.

But difference in belief is only one part of the problem. There are people in churches – many of them – who live happily side by side with people who have differing views on interpretation of the Bible, on doctrine, ethics and so on. So something else must also be causing disunity.

I had a think about this as I was writing this sermon, and some of things I came up with were: a fear of those who are different or believe different things; a sense of feeling threatened by those who believe different things; being hurt by the attitudes of others; impatience; closed minds; self-righteousness; pride; an avoidance of the other.

There may well be many more. But all these things pull people apart. Fear and feeling threatened by those with whom we disagree can lead us to want to have nothing to do with them.

Being hurt by others can lead to wanting to run away and avoid those who have hurt us. Impatience leads to an unwillingness to talk and listen to those who have something to say.

Closed minds means that we have trapped ourselves by an unwillingness to learn and change and grow in faith.
Self-righteousness is a fault of those who are very quick to judge others, but unable to take, as Jesus said, the log out of their own eyes.

Pride can lead to an ability to accept that we might be wrong. Avoiding those with whom we disagree means that all dialogue is halted.

Clearly Jesus though that unity was important. So, what can enhance our unity with others. The starting-place must surely be acknowledging what we have in common. That’s not sweeping under the carpet the fact that we might disagree with someone, but we may realise that we have more in common with each other than what separates us.

For Christians our unity is in Christ.

All Christians are part of Christ’s body – think about Paul’s words to the Corinthian Church – “The body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say ‘because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it less a part of the body. And if the ear would say ‘because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.” And Paul goes on to stress that it is the weaker members of the body that should be treated with most honour. Usually when a church splits, it is those who see themselves as strong who take themselves off elsewhere.

Unity is enhanced too when we recognise that what we have in common is also the grace of God. And God shows no impartiality when it comes to grace.

As Paul reminds in the letter to Romans – “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” A counteraction to self-righteousness is the recognition that we too are in the wrong.

Something else that helps unity is when we come together with those from whom we hold different opinions. By coming together, we can learn from each other as we listen and come to a deeper understanding of the others’ point of view and why they think what they do.

When we understand more, it is usually easier to be more compassionate, and not just condemnatory. I’m always saddened that it isn’t only the conservatives who condemn the more liberal – often people at the more liberal end of the church can be just as vitriolic in their condemnation.

A humility and a willingness to learn from others is also important when we disagree with people. We may not change our views but we then again may. It is always worth holding in our minds the fact that we may be wrong.

But I think the three most important builders of unity are love, forgiveness and prayer. When we face those with whom we have difficulties with an attitude of love, the love for another becomes more important than the difference of opinion.

The New Testament contains injunction to encourage one another. Nowhere does it say knock down people not the same as you, tell them they’re useless, moan about them. Always it is about loving and encouraging others.

When we are willing to forgive those who are perhaps insensitive to us and what we think and feel, we can begin to build community again.

And prayer is the most important of all, for what sustains us in our faith is our relationship with God. What ensures that we can be held together by God’s grace and our trust in Christ is prayer. It is the starting-point of our relationship with God for it is how we sustain that relationship. And it is through sustaining that relationship and growing as a Christian that we will become more able to love those with whom we disagree, to care for those who are different from us, to encourage and not condemn.

Being at unity is about more than not falling apart. It is about creating a community where all are valued, where all are loved, where everyone is equal because they are children of God.

And as a unified community, we will be far better witnesses to the world of Christ’s love and Christ’s reconciling work than we ever will be falling out with each other.