SUNDAY 19^th JUNE TRINITY SUNDAY

“FROM BACHMANN TO OBAMA U.S. RELIGION IS AN ISSUE FOR THE WORLD”  

Basic Christian belief can be seen in the prayer of Jesus:

“Our Father in heaven

May your name be hallowed.

May your kingdom come:

May your pleasure be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our bread for today

And free us from our debts to you

As we free others from their debts to us.

And do not put us to the test

But deliver us from the Evil One.”

This is my translation of the Lord’s Prayer. Today I suggested that we could see in it the character of God as trinity, thus:

THE FATHER

The Father is in heaven, that is, not here in this world, although the world may be in him, because he is the unseen source, the creator who is fashioning his kingdom and whose good pleasure is best for all his creatures. When we pray for his name to be hallowed we commit ourselves to keeping the holy name of God (Yahweh) silent because he is beyond our knowledge  and cannot be bound by our naming, yet we are to address him by the name Father as a declaration of our trust in him. When we pray for his kingdom we ask that we and all his creatures should know and do his good pleasure.

THE HOLY SPIRIT

The good pleasure of God is that there should be food for all his creatures, who receive food as a gift which must be shared so that none are hungry; and that we should live in his Jubilee goodness whereby all debts are cancelled. There is no selective cancellation which would let ours be cancelled while others might still be in debt to us. We are to live completely in the generosity of God so that all his gifts are shared justly, and a grace beyond justice removes burdens from our souls and our backs. Will this happen because we’re decent people? No, it will only happen when we allow the Holy Spirit, the shared life of God, into our lives. Just and equal sharing of the creator’s gifts, along with the cancellation of moral and material debt is the work of the Holy Spirit.

Living in this way won’t be easy. In faith we are prepared to struggle but because we are not arrogant we know our weaknesses and ask to be spared the hardest test of faith as Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane; and even if we are not spared the test as he was not, we hope to be delivered as he was from the Evil One, in this life and the next, by the Spirit of life. 

THE SON

So where’s the Son in this prayer? He’s the one who prays it, Jesus the Son of God who in these words expresses his relationship to the dear Father in the power of the Spirit. But he keeps neither the prayer nor the relationship to himself. Rather he offers both to his followers and through them to all people, so that they too may become children of God. He offers this in his life and death. The prayer is the declaration that the Trinity is open: through Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, human beings enter the glorious freedom of the children of God and boldly address him as their Father.

I don’t imagine either Bachman or Obama shares this theology.