Three in One/One in Three? Yeah, right...

The other day, I had an on-line conversation with an atheist friend.  Now don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against anyone who is atheist, so long as they really are that.  In my experience, many who claim to be atheists are simply looking for an excuse not to believe.  Such was the case with my friend who couldn’t grasp concept of all-powerful God not swooping down to intervene in all the world tragedies.

Where was God at Auschwitz?  Where was God on 9/11?  Where was God in all those earthquakes?

And he saved the best non-argument of all for last: 

Besides, religion—especially Christianity—has been the biggest single cause of wars and destruction in history.

Both of these are common arguments but both are, at best, flawed arguments.

Our discussion went on and on for twenty or so minutes.  Then, I had the chance to do a little bit of probing.  So, I had two questions for my friend: 

• How did he understand the concept of “God?”
• Where did he get that understanding?

As suspected, he had only a very basic, “pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die-by-and-by” understanding of God; a view that is, to say the least, inaccurate.  It goes something like this:

God is relentlessly stern, impossible to please and intolerant of different things (read: things that scare us!)  He  might, if we’re good, let us into heaven one day.  Meanwhile, God loves us and puts trials and calamities on us to see if we love him.  We’re to endure it all with a smile... in order to love him more.

Imagine my friend’s shock when I told him that I, a priest,  didn’t believe in that god, either.  As far as I was concerned, that wasn’t God, but a tribal idol.  This, in fact, was how ancient people understood their deities.  I invited him to consider tossing that idol into trash, as I had years before; this was not what Jesus proclaimed.

God didn’t cause natural disasters—nature did that.  God didn’t create Auschwitz either—we did.  “Well,” my friend asked, “where was God, then?”  My reply was that, as I understood things, God was there in the healing, the recovery and the rescue efforts.  In other words, God was there in the remaking and creating of wholeness which, as I understand God today, is God’s job. 

It would be unthinkable, not to say diabolically unethical to dismiss the very real horrors that have occurred, in the last 100 years.  But it would be equally scandalous to dismiss the genuine miracles that did occur in all of them; miracles brought on by compassionate God-driven human intervention.  So, it wasn’t a question of where God was, but where we were.

There are two things wrong with the line of thinking that asks “where was God”:  it doesn’t take human responsibility into account; and, the very key concept of relationship is completely missing.  Because of these weaknesses, two other possibilities are dismissed along with it:  the possibility of being in relationship with God; and, the possibility of God being relational to and with us.

So, the real question should be what is the state of our relationship with God?  Have we left God somewhere up in the heavens condescendingly looking down?  Have we too dismissed the possibility of a loving, intimate relationship with God?  If so, perhaps it’s time to get unglued from those flawed primitive ideas because they don’t work.  In the third chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus declares to Nicodemus the Father’s intention is for all humanity:  intimate and loving relationship.  

Christ makes it clear to us that God is not far off or unconcerned about us.  Neither is God an abusive parent figure.  Rather, God is relational to us and all of creation because we mean everything to him.  John 3:16, perhaps the most famous verse in the entire New Testament says it best:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him nay not perish but may have eternal life.

Does it get any more relational than that?

Trinity Sunday, day that many clergy dread having to preach, was just a couple of weeks ago.  We’ve all heard the term Trinity and most of us claim to understand it until we have to explain it.  Why?  It’s theologically sophisticated, abstract and, on the face of things, physically preposterous:  three in one/one in three, and all made of the same “stuff.”  It’s almost impossible to picture, let alone understand.  It sounds like a pot of soup, not Almighty, Loving God!

But if it's difficult to conceptualize, try thinking of it in terms of relationship.  God—in the Trinity—is all about loving relationships.  God (Father) meets us where we are by creating us.  God (Son) meets us where we are by saving us through Christ because we can’t seem to do it by ourselves.  God meets us where we are by giving the wisdom of the Holy Spirit to help stay and grow in relationship.  This is true whether we are in joy, sorrow, pain, human tragedy and even our doubts. 

At the end of our on-line discussion, my friend said that he suddenly felt different; his mind had been opened up and difference had been made.  God’s charge to all of us is that we try to make a difference; it’s how we live into the reality of the Trinity.  

Where was God at Auschwitz?  In among all the suffering and the degradation with people like Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan priest, now considered a saint who gave up his life so that someone else could go on living.  Where was God at 9/11?  God was right where God was supposed to be, in the midst of it all with my friend Fr. Mykal Judge, another Franciscan who died that day in the World Trade Center giving last rites.  God was in there with rescue workers from literally every corner of the globe who came to help.  That was where God was at Auschwitz; that was where God was at 9/11.

We speak of God as being a Trinity yet ironically, the word Trinity never appears anywhere in scripture.  Yet it’s an expression of God’s love for all of us, of one, acting in three, spilling out everywhere through the spirit and for no other reason than we are loved and that God desires relationship with us.  As Marcus Borg says

We matter to God.

So, what is our relationship with God?  Is it a stiff, formal and fraught with the terror that can come from taking scripture out of context?  Or, is it a caring, honest and deep relationship, one based in unconditional love and acceptance?   If it's the latter this is good; it's a healthy one.  But be warned: it’s the healthy relationships that will occasionally ask tough questions of us.  Healthy relationships grow and change and the same is true of our relationship with God, who creates us, saves us and sanctifies us… the Trinity.