Crowned with glory and honour (15 June)

Readings, Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31 and Psalm 8
Image, Segment from The Holy Family with Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (1618)

What does it mean to believe in a Triune God? To confess the Holy Trinity? To live as though our God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? There are, of course, conceptual answers (more often than not teaching us what not to say: the Son is not created, the Father is not above the Son, etc), and they are important. A proper understanding of who Jesus is, or why the Spirit is sent at Pentecost requires the full picture of God as Triune.
 
However, while worthy of a sermon, this is not how I want to approach the question “what does it mean to believe in a Triune God” today. Instead, the sermon is: we glorify, recognise, and confess the reality of the Triune God in treating human beings as crowned by God with glory and honour, treating each person as one who the wisdom of God delights.
 
I’ve been reading a book on the Soviet dissident movement, called To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (which would have been my toast to myself had I come out to preach on the conceptual answers to the question of the Trinity). The book centres the simple though radical choice these dissidents made: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.
 
This serves as a guide for our own lives as subjects of the Triune God, citizens of the kingdom of heaven, living amidst worldly fracture, failure, and folly. That in a world of prejudice and discrimination, of abuse and neglect, of violence and war, of tyranny and despotism, of callousness and cruelty, we live as those who believe God cares for the human person. To confess the reality of the Triune God is to live in God’s reality. And in God’s reality, God is mindful of and cares for the mortal, has crowned the human with glory and honour. To glorify the Triune God is to defy the worldly appearance of things and live as if each person has really, truly been made little lower than a God.
 
To live “as is,” is not to live in blinkered delusion, but to awaken to incongruity. It is to wake and see where in the world people are treated as if they bear no crown, no divine image, no holy delight. The most recent Peninsula Living was delivered which detailed the rising scourge of elder abuse across the Northern Beaches (and across the wider State). Stories such as this create a clash between the world as it is and the world as it should be, a clash between how the vulnerable are too often treated in the world, and how they are viewed by God. And this clash acts as a spark, it ignites us to act, advocate, organise and pray so that the as it should be gains ground in the world. 
 
On the global scale, we see the humanitarian crisis spiralling out of control in Gaza. The blocking and destruction of international aid by Israel, their strategies of starvation and deprivation added onto direct military strikes, are enabled and empowered by their own (and much of the wider world’s) decision to classify a population not as little lower than a God, but far lower than human dignity, rights, and compassion. The cataclysmic death toll is enabled and empowered by the ability to look at some people not as crowned with glory and honour, not as a site where Divine Wisdom delights, but as an inhuman problem to be extinguished or expelled. Again these heart wrenching stories spark a clash within us, they create an undeniable incongruity between the world as it is and the world as it should be, about the human as seen through a sinful, worldly vision, and as they are seen by God.     
 
More intimately, we might connect this to last week’s message about the Spirit bearing witness with our own that we are children of God. God has crowned us with glory and honour, making us little lower than a God, and this creates a clash of incongruity with our own negative self-talk, which would seek to place us several rungs lower on that ladder.
 
We believe in the Triune God by not settling for the vision of the world as it is. We believe by  rebelling against the worldly categorisation and treatment of our fellow human beings as anything lower than what God has determined us to be. Because as the reading from Proverbs stresses, it is this relationship to the human that defines the nature of our God.
 
In language reminiscent of the prologue of John, the figure of Wisdom is described as being set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth. Narrating God’s ordering of the primordial creation, Wisdom declares Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him. It is writings such as these that resourced the development of the doctrine of the Trinity in the early church. But again, the emphasis today is not on the conceptual articulation of the Trinity. Rather, we find the emphasis in the following verse when Wisdom declares, and my delights were with the sons of men. Wisdom, who was with God when there were no depths, finds delight with the sons of men. Like the opening of John, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and lived among us.
 
There is always a directionality, or focal point, for the figure of Wisdom or Word: to be among us, to be for us, to live and delight with us. While it is established that these figures are with God from the beginning, pivotal in the act of creation, the emphasis is not on their relation in an idealised pre-human eternity. Rather the emphasis is the movement toward the human, the decision to be with and for us. The emphasis is that God, who established the clouds above, the mountains below, and the limits of the seas; God for whom the moon and the stars are the works of Their fingers; should be mindful of human beings, that God should care for mortals, and make them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. Who God is, from the beginning is the one who is turned toward the human. God is only and always a God for us. A God who has elected in freedom to be our creator, redeemer, and sustainer. Who is the Triune God? The one who crowned us with honour and glory. 
 
As Julian of Norwich wrote, I saw that God never began to love mankind; for just as mankind will be in endless bliss, fulfilling God’s joy with regard to his works, just so has that same mankind been known and loved in God’s prescience from without beginning in his righteous intent… For before he made us, he loved us. (Showings)
 
What does it mean to recognise this Triune God and live faithfully in this reality? It is to recognise ourselves and our fellow human creatures as those God is mindful of, and in turn be mindful of them. To recognise ourselves and our fellow as cared for by God, and in turn care for them. To recognise ourselves and our fellow as crowned by God and in turn treat each other as crowned. It is to live as dissidents to the world of sin and death, to the world as it is, and instead to live as free citizens of the kingdom of God; world as it should be. We live as those who see and consider neighbours and strangers with the dignity, respect, and love that befits God’s own care. We live as those who are troubled by the incongruity between the all-too-common worldly denigration of the human creature and seek to rectify this out of a robust vision of God’s as it should be. In doing so we believe in the Triune God as the one who in absolute freedom, and from without beginning answered the question of divine identity simply in being mindful of us, and in being mindful, loving us.