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The Neediness of God
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 22, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Peter 1:1-9 John 16:4b-15
This is Trinity Sunday on the church’s calendar, the Sunday when the church attempts to answer the question raised at Pentecost. To wit: what does this mean? What does this mean for the life of the creature that God sent the Spirit to bear witness to the Son who has revealed the Father? And what does this mean in the life of God that the church bears witness to one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit? We will seek our meaning this morning in the midst of the theological divide that occasioned the first ecumenical council in 325 A.D. at Nicea. At issue was the relation between the Father and the Son, with the Spirit receiving honorable mention! The battle was pitched in the second clause of the Nicene Creed: “We believe…in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made.” In 325 A.D., these were fighting words, words that proclaimed a radically different God from the God many people carried and still carry around in their heads. Representing the God of human reason (which later would come into its own at the Enlightenment) was a theologian named Arius. Arius maintained that what made God God was the absoluteness of God. For Arius, divinity was wholly, utterly self-sufficient. God could not communicate any part of God’s self to another. God could not give any part of divinity away and still be God. So “Son of God” was, at most, an honorary title given to a singularly good man named Jesus. Or more to the theological point, he was a creature that was made just like the rest of us were made. Not God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, but an agent necessary only to the story of our salvation if God were to have dealings with us. Another theologian named Anthanasius believed just the opposite. What made God God was precisely the self-giving love within God. “What is the decisive mark of the Father? It is the love by which he ‘gives’ all things to the Son, including the honor and reverence due to him as God….What is the decisive mark of the Son? It is the love by which he yields all glory back to the Father. What constitutes the essential mark of God’s divinity, therefore, is [mutual self-giving] love.” Athanasius insisted that such love had been essential to God’s nature from the beginning. God never was solitary in God’s being but is eternally this communication, this community that is God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So the bishops drew a line in the sand by way of two words: the first was begotten (and not made); the second in English can only be translated by a phrase, being of one substance. The bishops were confessing, first of all, that the Son of God was not made like creation was made “out of nothing”. The Son was begotten, was generated from God and therefore was of the same substance of God. Otherwise God would not have come to us in him, and still we would be without God in the world, living at a distance from God, left in our sin. In the second place, they were saying that even though the Son was begotten from the Father, was derived from and dependent upon the Father, still the Son was no less than God, was of the same substance, hence “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.” In other words, “God was in Christ…fully!” This then, said the council, is what it means to believe in the God revealed in Jesus Christ and testified to by the Holy Spirit three decades after the resurrection. Yet there is another truth about Nicea with which we must do business on this particular Trinity Sunday and it is this: the first ecumenical council was initiated not by the church but a politician, by an Emperor who chose theological uniformity to unite his kingdom and consolidate his power. Nicea wed the church to the state, imposed a universal creed upon all local expressions of belief and shifted the language of faith from Scripture to the philosophical language of the culture. “For these three reasons,” says Luke Timothy Johnson, “many regard the Nicene Creed as an instrument of politics more than piety, of coercion more than freedom, of philosophy more than the gospel.” Yet hidden within the substance of what won and lost around the table was a truth more radically opposed to the power of a Constantine or any political leader—no matter how religious—and a purpose more eternal than any political agenda! Hidden in the creed and missed by many is what some have named the neediness of God, which is to say not God’s need of us—a heresy to this day which negates God’s freedom—but the need that is within God’s three-personed unity. “Since giving entails receiving,” wrote a little known theologian named Arthur McGill, “there must be a receptive, dependent, needy pole within the being of God….The Son who is generated and derived, who is not sufficient in himself but needy, is still perfect God: God from God, Light from Light, Very God from Very God.” Suddenly this doctrine has everything to do with who we are and what we are to be and do as followers of Jesus Christ in a time when piety and politics have bedded each other all over the world! For you and I live in a time when people are desperately in search of absolutes, live in a world that bows down before dominant power dressed in the rhetoric of democracy as well as demagoguery, live in the Western world that believes neediness to be a sin and seeks self-sufficiency at all costs. We know this from the nightly news that daily reveals our distain for the poor, the elderly, the mentally challenged, the partially-abled; that reports on our rush toward the politics of absolute certainty and so our refusal of complexity, ambiguity, and paradox in the public square. We know this as well within our own hearts as we rail against the dependence of our youth or dread the vulnerabilities of our later years, as we secure ourselves against need by our accumulation of assets (at the expense of the life we were given to live by God for others) or as we keep our distance economically, socially, spiritually from the reality of another’s neediness. This is why even our philanthropy and charity, our giving seldom bears witness to the God who is self-giving love. “There is a form of love—mere charity—in which we do not love at all,” wrote another preacher on Trinity Sunday as he explicated the meaning of the self-giving love of God, “a form of love…in which we do not see or have in mind the other to whom it is directed; in which we do not and will not notice his weal or woe; in which we merely imagine him as the object of the love which we have to exercise, and in this way master and use him. There is thus a form of love in which, however sacrificially it is practiced, the other is not seized by a human hand…but…feels that he is trampled under the feet of the one who is supposed to love him.” It makes all the difference in the world that the early church voted out of bounds the God of absolute invulnerability in favor of the God whose self-giving love was revealed completely in the Son whom God sent naked into the world. We behold in him the way God loved the world, giving us all things in him, even his life in death, that all might receive from God life abundantly and eternally. What follows for any who would follow him is a life lived in mutual dependence. “God’s divinity,” writes McGill in sum, “does not consist in God’s ability to push things around, to make and break, to impose God’s will from the security of some heavenly remoteness, and to sit in grandeur while all the world does God’s bidding. Far from staying above the world, God sends his own glory into it. Far from imposing, God invites and persuades. Far from demanding service from mortals in order to enhance himself, God gives his life in service to all for their enhancement. But God acts toward the world in this way because within God’s self, God is a life of self-giving.” Left out of the conversation within God thus far is any mention of the Holy Spirit. Here Nicea simply added five words: “and in the Holy Spirit,” and left the Spirit to later councils. We will add not many more. John’s gospel says of the Spirit, “All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that [the Spirit] will take what is mine and declare it unto you.” The Spirit acts to reveal to the church’s life the God who is in Christ, to open our minds to the living God and to bind us together in mutual love and understanding. Or to put it another way, though God does not need us to be love, God chooses in freedom to love us, to make room for us, and so by God’s Spirit invites us into the conversation, into the community that is God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Therefore Christ’s church is the community in the world that is called into being to bear witness to the community that is in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the community which confesses its faith in the Triune God by the way we love one another, by our mutual self-giving, by the vulnerability and need which binds us one to another, by our losing our lives in service only to find our true selves. Here through Christ we see another’s need as the occasion to be who we are through the love that gives itself away. So the other bears our need in the same way. And of course, because we fail to be who we are with one another day by day by day, we also constitute the community in which the depth of our need for forgiveness cannot be denied! “Perhaps dogma is what happens when you get so far inside the truth,” wrote John Carroll after a discussion of the Trinity as the inner life of God, “you forget what it looks like as a whole and then can’t get out to see it. When you focus on the meaning of the language you use, it is hard sometimes to remember what the language refers to,” which is finally to say that the doctrine of the Trinity, if it is to mean anything at all, must lead us back not to the words of assorted bishops, but to the words of Scripture that bear witness to Him who needed no council called or debate adjudicated to testify, in Spirit and in truth, to the tenacious and tender love that is God in his flesh. Reading over his own reflections on the Trinity John Carroll concludes: “I know that most of it is heresy, some of it is absurd and all of it is true.” Me too! In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! |