THE ENERGIES OF GOD John M. Buchanan
John 14:15-21 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
May 31, 19°1 Columbus, Ohio

The tas!: of the church of Jesus Christ in every age is to communicate what we
know about God in a way which is understood. That seems simple enough. The simpli-
ity, however, is deceiving. Our particular segment of the human story is charac-
terized by uncertainty, s*epticism, secularism - none of which blend smoothly with
"God-talk". Our particular segment of the story is characterizei by a radical
revolution in communication. At our finger tips, daily, is a storehouse of informa-
tion, greater than people before us experienced in a lifetime. Television, data
processing, radio, telephone, satellite, silicon chip, computer - information flow-
jng, surging, lise the life blood of a giant organism. In an uncertain, skeptical,
secular world, comfortable with the most innovative communication methods, "God-
talk" in this mode: didactic, lecture-style, pulpit elevated ornately,robe - designed
four hundred years ago, twenty minute monolgue, is a remnant of a portion of the
story gone for decades, a real period piece.

The task is not simple. But nothing about the external problems compares with
the difficulty of the subject itself. And nothing about the broad subject is quite
as perplexing as one of its fine points, the theological idiosyncrasy called the
"Holy Spirit" - and the doctrine of the Trinity.

The difficulties begin at the outset. Christians have always known that the
idea which is contained in the term "Holy Spirit" is critical to the whole enter~
prise. But it has never been easy to express: even in the New Testament.

In the Fourth Gospel, in the middle of what are known as the farewell discourses,
Jesus is talking to His disciples about what it will be like after He is gone. The
point He is making is that they will not be without resources: that part of what He
has come to mean to them will continue. The passage is well ‘:nown, particularly
the verse, "I will pray to the Father, and He will give you another Counselor, to be
with you forever." The King James version translated the ambiguous Greek word
"Comforter". More recent scholarship, however, has concluded that "comfort" is not
the sense of it at all. Rather Jesus is talking about the experience of being
lifted up when we are down, strengthened to fight another day when we are defeated
and without hope. The Revised Standard Version translates the word "Counselor":
the New English Bible uses "Advocate". Today's English Version says simply: "I
will ask the Father and He will give you another hel p2r who will be with you forever."

Jesus was telling His friends that they could count on God. No matter what
happened to Him, God would stand with them. No matter how down they were, God
would breathe new life into them, reinvigorate them, instill new vitality in them.
They could count on it: expect it: regardless of what words they used to describe it.

They were Jews and the Jews, you see, were far more concerned with experiences
than they were with concepts. Hebrew language is active, full of good verbs, and
very short on the descriptive abstractions the Greeks loved so much. In the Old
Testament, the question "What is God like?" is answered by telling what God does.
The later Greek influence emerges in theology that focuses on God's characteristics
rather than His activity.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the way the Christian Church has been talking
about God for something like 1,700 years. There are problems with that, obviously;
not the least of which is that the language embodies a Greek philosophic system

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with wich we are no longer comfortable. Fourth century theologians argued strenuously
about the “essence of God" over against the substance of God, in raging debates

known only to the students of theology today. In his recent work, Does God Exist?
Roman Catholic Hans Kung states: "...the spirit still remains, for many, theologically,
absolutely unintelligible..,Are we not imposing on modern man a burden of faith that
many are not prepared to bear?" (P.69.).

Kung makes his own church very nervous by asking those kinds of questions, even
though he goes on to answer in a most helpful way. Our own Presbyterian Church was
thrown into an ecclesiastical trauma because a candidate for ordination recently used
less than conventional words to answer questions about the Trinity. "Is Jesus God?"
he was asked, and he had the audacity to answer "God is God". Closer to home, when
Moslem radicals turned the United States Embassy in Tehran into a hostage compound,
it became very clear that most.Americans, most Christians, <=new almost nothing,
nothing accurate at least, about the Moslem faith. It was news to us that there were
sects or denominations within Mohammadism as widely different as the Pentecostals
and Anglicans are within Christendom. Locally, and across the country, efforts were
made to establish a dialogue with Moslems. Consistently, the one point of Christian
theology utterly unintelligible to Moslems was the matter of the Trinity én general
and the Holy Spirit in particular. No amount of talking will persuade the strongly
thonothdstic Moslem that we don't believe in three Gods when we say God the Father,
God the Son, God the Holy Spirit: God in three persons.

Now the fact that adherents of other religions don't understand a particularly
fine point of Christian doctrine is not reason, by itself, to rethink the doctrine.
But it ought, it seems to me, to give us pause, particularly when the doctrine is not
entirely meaningful to the people who are supposed to believe it. My favorite story
about the matter used to be told by the late Cardinal Cushing. The Cardinal was
walking in downtown Boston one day when a man in front of him fell suddenly, apparently
the victim of a heart attack. The Cardinal knelt beside him immediately, leaned over
and said, "My son are you a Catholic?" No response; "Are you a Christian?" Again, no
regyonse; "Do you believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit?"
At'this the man opened one eye, and to the crowd that had gathered, said, "Here I am
dying and he's asking me riddles!"

Why not simply discard the doctrine? That's not a new suggestion. The church
has held onto the doctrine Trinity because it prevents theology from slipping into the

simplicity and narrowness of Unitarianism. Presbyterian theologian John Leith reminds
us that there are three kinds of Unitarianism: the very estionat nitarianism of the
Father that focuses sole as creator; the Unitarianism of the Son which thinks
only in terms of os ool and redeemer; and the Unitarianism of the Spirit which can

only tal about the intense emotional experience associated with the Charismatic
movement. The God about whom Christians wish to talk, however, is all of that.

In fact part of the inherent danger in religion is to render God too simple,
too, understandable. "Your God Is Too §mal1,"J.B.Phillips wrote, and that, in fact,
is true for many of us. We work hard to reduce the divine to the least common
denominator, to ideas and intellectual constructs that fit small minds and into the
lyrics of the latest Country and Western hit. Theologically, the trouble with most
religion is not its complexity but its simplicity, its inherent tendency to make
God in its own image, to characterize His providence in terms of American Foreign
Policy and His will in terms of the Republicar Platfarm, or Democratic Platform, to
make Him sound Anerican, if not Lutheran or Presbyterian.

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Part of what the Trinity and the term God the Holy Spirit does for me, there-
fore, is to re, ind me that what I'm trying to tal: about is something that can't be
talked about very adequately. Trinity reminds me that mystery - a sense of the
otherness of God, the unexplained and unexplainable is essential in honest religion.

I read a prayer by J. Barrie Shepherd recently that said that for me, very eloquently:

"9 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, although I have been taught

to speak and think of you as one God,

three in one, and one in three,

in fact you are a mystery

beyond all my thought and reason and understanding.

And for this I praise and glorify your name.

For I have learned that mystery is a quality

that pervades so much that is basic

to the richness of my living."

(Diary of Daily Prayer, J. Barrie Shepherd, p-39).

The doctrine of the Trinity is 4 timely reminder that there is more to God than
you and I ever will comprehend: that the most appropriate initial posture is imeel-
ing: that awe and childlike wonder in the presence of the Almighty are the founda-
tion of mature faith.

The problem is the use of the word person - as in the favorite hymn, Holy, Holy,
Holy, God in three persons, Blessed Trinity. There are often three chairs on the
Chancel of a traditional Presbyterian Church, behind the pulpit. I suppose the reason
ig aesthetic balance, but as a4 youngster I always concluded that it had something to
do with the three persons of the Trinity. "Person" - "an individual human being"
Webster's first definition reads. "God in three persons" thus becomes semantically
very complex for us, if not theologically. It's only in the dictionary footnote that
you read the Latin root of Person, “persona” which means “actor's mask, character in
a play". That's what the doctrine intends and it is what the fourth century Greeks
meant, I believe. God is God. God has acted in at least three ways which we have
experienced: as Father Creator, as Savior, and as Helper, Presence.

Twas intrigued to encounter a brief vignette ina journal I read which ob-

served this: “after the Fourth Century the Eastern Orthodox Church discussed the

energies of God rather than the attributes_of God". (Ernie Campbell's Notebook,
Spring 1931, p.4). TI liked that so much I took a sermon title from it, as so
frequently happens with our marvelous discoveries and insights, we barely begin to
enjoy our_ne nformation when we find that others have been there first

David H.C,Read}) for instance, writes that "part of my Christian belief is that
the ultimate source of all energy is God". (Unfinished Easter, p.103). That is very
helpful. S creative energy. God is the force that organizes chaos into order.
God is the power that taxes primal matter and makes universes and solar systems and
DNA and photosynthesis and lettuce. God is that incredible force which has moved
through time with ever renewing vigor, in evolutionary magnificence, from single
cell amoebas to sharks and lowland gorillas, resting for this moment in time in
Homo Sapiens. God is what makes us want and need one another, for in the wanting
and needing is not only the oodness of our humanity but the absolute assurance
that creation will continue |

William Muehl, attorney and professor at Yale Divinity School writes: "...

Christianity is embarassed by the creative energies of God and deeply uncertain
about the way in which they fit into the pattern of the moral life." (ALL the

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Damned Angels, p.41). There is a sense in which we do prefer the safe abstractions
of the Greeks, the elaborate creedal formulations, the scholarly discussions of the
relationship of the eternal Christ to the earthly Jesus. There is a sense in which
Western Christianity has always blushed at the healthy sensuality of the Old
Testament.

But the God of the Bible is creative: human sexuality is His invention. Life
is celebrated and affirmed and continued. "The energies of God" may be a far more
meaningful phrase than the "persons of the Trinity". It allows for a healthy
affirmation of the created order. It allows as well, for Christian affirmation of
the mystery of human creativity instead of the historic suspicion and occasional
hostility with which the church has viewed the arts. It suggests that alone among
the created animals human beings stopped and drew pictures on cave walls because
of a divine impulse. It suggests that the impulse to arrange colors on a canvas,
and musical sounds in meaningful relation to one another and words in rhyme and
meter is evidence of divine, creative energy. It suggests that when humanity
addresses humanity in the precise complexity of Bach or the intensity of Beethoven
or the passion of Van Gogh, or the depth and earthiness of Walt Whitman, we have
observed the evidence of God.

Holy Spirit - the energy of God - in creation, in human love, in human art, but
also, most importantly in your intimate life and mine. Holy Spirit - God close to
us. God using His energy in us and with us and for us. The early Greek word, \L
remember, came out "helper", the one who picks up what is knocked down, the one who a
breathes new life into the out-of-breath; the inspirer, the courage and strength- as
giver. To believe in God the Holy Spirit is to accept the fact that God gives ~ «WV \
intimately, personally, that which I need to live today and tomorrow. Aye

* Re g
We know, I think, what it means to be depleted. We know what it means to give \ oo
and give and give until the account is empty - to family, home, spouse, vocation, (5 \
activities, clubs, church. We know what it feels lii:e to be winded, physically and &
spiritually. We know, I have observed, the dry emptiness of spiritual exhaustion.
We know what it means to have spent it all, loved all we can love, cheered, laughed
and prayed as much as we are able. And here - where all of us are some of the time
and some of us are all the time, God the life-giver, God the creator, gently re-
stores, and fills and heals and supports and encourages. That's the promise of the
Gospel. God the Holy Spirit: God described by Professor Kung almost poetically...
‘"perceptable and yet not perceptable, invisible and yet powerful, real like-energy-
charged air, the wind, the storm, as important for life as the air we breathe..."

Amen.

God eternal, in the busyness of life, we expend without replenishing: we
give and take little time to receive. God, with life-giving energy, renew us,
recreate us. In Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.