The Community of Heaven

This is a third draft of my sermon for North Hill, July 9, 2011. The first two drafts were published here and have been erased. Also, at the requested of the person who posted them, I've erased some comments based on the earlier drafts.

John McLarty

The Heart of the Cosmos: God


Every morning I spend an hour in the pasture behind our house. The view east sweeps across the grass of the pasture then up to a line of alders, cottonwood trees and towering Doug firs. Behind them runs the ridge line of the south Cascades. On really good mornings, the ceiling over all this is a blue sky flecked with iridescent pink clouds. It's pure, wondrous beauty.

There is a dark story behind this landscape. My pasture is the surface of an ancient mud flow. Five thousand years ago it swept down from Mt. Rainier burying forests and riverbeds and villages. It left behind a desolate landscape of over 200 square miles of ragged mud, boulders and broken trunks.

The same place, two stories. Beauty and wonder versus ugliness and destruction.

In 1994, the nation of Rwanda erupted in a dumb-founding paroxysm of violence. 800,000 people were slaughtered in a gruesome genocide. The malignity of evil engulfed even ministers, some of whom betrayed their parishioners to the killers. It was an astonishing exhibition of evil.

In the capital city of Kigali, a hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, managed to shelter 700 Tutsi's from the murderous hordes. Frequently putting his own life at risk, he used connections in the Rwandan military, bribes from the hotel's stores of alcohol and fine cheese and pure, and brazen courage to resist repeated moves to annihilate the refugees in his hotel. He prevailed. No one in his hotel was killed.

Again, one place, two stories. Murderous evil versus magnificent goodness.

Is there a grand, unified story? Is there a way to bring all these complicated realities into a cohesive whole? Is there an ultimate reality that offers illumination for how we can best order our own lives?

Yes. At the core of the variegated reality of history, biology and geology is a harmonious center: God.
God is the beginning of the story. God is certainly not the only actor in this drama, not the only player in this grand, crashing, sometimes discordant symphony. He is, however, the conductor. The drumbeat of the music began when he lowered his baton. And under his direction the discord, the jarring dissonances, will ultimately resolve in an eternal harmony.

What do we know about the conductor?

God is love. This is the central conviction of Adventist theology. It is, however, not a simple statement. Love includes passion and risk-taking. It means giving freedom and allowing contradiction and hatred. Still God is love is the bedrock of all our convictions, all our beliefs.

One way we make sense of “God is love” is through the doctrine of Trinity. At the heart of the universe, at the heart of reality, is a community called God. We do not imagine God as a single deity seated by himself on a throne. Rather, in line with the Bible writers, we imagine God as a community, as a family, as a union of friends.

The unity of God, the coherence of the heavenly community is so perfect, so intense, that for most practical purposes the Bible speaks of God as a singular being. This is especially important as a corrective to the dominant conception of the divine in the ancient world in which the Bible was written. In that world, by far the most common way people tried to make sense of the jarring collisions of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, love and animosity was to imagine this was the way ultimate reality was. People imagined gods fighting with one another. The famous Greek stories of the gods were a veritable soap opera. If the gods were bickering was it any wonder that the world itself was full of conflict and contradictions?

Against this vision of divine reality as a conflict-ridden, bickering, confused collection of egotistical individuals, the Bible described God as a harmonious, perfectly united and coherent, happy community. Reality originated from and is organized around a sweet, joyous relationship of Father, Son and Spirit. The heart of the cosmos is love not war.

This vision continues to offer a relevant message today. Radical materialism imagines the origin of the universe as a single point and the subsequent course of the universe as an undirected expansion of that single point.

In contrast to polytheism's clashing wills and materialism's absence of will, Adventism celebrates the beneficent, coherent will of God. The universe is neither capricious nor random. Rather, “In the beginning God created the heavens and air… And God said let us make humanity in our image.” God created humans as the overflow of divine love. And God promises to steer history in the direction of beauty and goodness. Evil is ultimately ephemeral. It is real and deadly, but ultimately transitory. Goodness and love are eternal. God guarantees it.

(Note: the doctrine of Trinity does not just contradict polytheism and materialism. It corrects them, for sure. It also affirms elements of truth included in these ideologies. The doctrine of Trinity agrees with the polytheists that humanity originated in divine will – but insists that will is unified, harmonious). The doctrine of Trinity agrees with materialism that the cosmos is coherent across time and space – but insists that coherence is an expression of purpose and will.)

The Father, Son and Holy Spirit loved one another rapturously, richly. Creation is seen as the happy outflow of divine love. Divine creation is analogous to a husband and wife taking pleasure in expanding their world through giving birth to children. In this idyllic picture birth/creation is the fruit of happy desire, not an expression of lack or dissatisfaction. Humans are the desired, loved, treasured children of God.

In the community of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are pictured as fulfilling distinct roles, though frequently Bible writers blur these distinctions. This is hardly surprising, given both the stereotypical role distinctions in the primary human community—the family—and the ease with which these distinctions are happily or of necessity blurred.

The stereotypical role distinctions of the Trinity: The Father is the leader. The Sun takes direction from the Father. The Holy Spirit is sent by the Father or by the Father and the Son and represents the Father and the Son to humanity.

The unity of the Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit are each explicitly mentioned as being active in creation and salvation. Father and Son both judge the world. They love humanity. They are pictured as existing at the center of heaven where they are worshiped because of their work of creating and saving.

SO WHAT?

The creative center of the universe is a community with a perfectly unified purpose: the creation, maintenance, restoration and nurture of an earthly community of loving, creative people. As an earthly reflection of the heavenly community of love, the highest calling of humans is the cultivation of community. Learning and practicing affection, warmth and intimacy is the highest purpose, the most noble goal of human life. When we experience these blessings of community, we are keeping company with God.

The cultivation of affection, warmth and intimacy, especially over years and decades and across generations requires order and law and enforcement. The proper goal of order, law and enforcement is the well-being of individuals and communities. Law and order and community authority are essential for rich, enduring, happy communities but they are not ends in themselves.

Law and authority are training wheels to be discarded once we learn to ride. They are temporary scaffolding to be removed once the arch can carry its own weight. They are the crutches and splints we rely on when there has been an accident, a tragic weakness.

Law and authority become unnecessary when trust is fully established. Perfect trust is modeled in the Trinity. Each delighted to see the other honored and worshiped. In building an earthly counterpart to the community of heaven, trust is one the highest developments in human relationships. We are called to trust and to be trustworthy. We are warned against doing things that erode trust: breaking faith with one another, gossiping, slandering, coveting.

Parents' highest calling is to create a safe environment for their children where they will naturally learn trust. In marriage one of the ways spouses can be most godly is be a safe haven for the other. Keeping one's word, practicing mercy, refusing to go for “the personal win” in disagreements and instead going for the “marital win.” (The goal in addressing conflict is to enhance the marriage, not to score points or to vanquish the other.) The sweetness of friendship comes from the deep knowledge that this person I can trust. Building trust. Practicing trust. Being trustworthy. These are some of the highest forms of human interaction.

Killing people – wounding, punishing, deriding, berating, scorning – brings us closer to the essence of the Devil than the heart of God. The three people most highly honored in the Bible – Abraham, Moses and Jesus – are all pictured as “correcting” God when he expresses his intention to severely punish. When God announces damnation or destruction, even when the intended targets richly deserve it, the proper response of holy people is to contradict God. Part of our proper role as friends of God is to insist that he elevates mercy over justice, creation over destruction, love over vengeance. This has implications for how we interpret Bible passages that call for the enslavement of people, the subjugation of women, the criminalization of homosexual love, the execution of criminals, rebellious sons, and Sabbath breakers.

The Bible describes people as members of the clan of heaven, members of the cosmic royalty. Because of our membership in the royal family, environmental stewardship is an inescapable element of our noblesse oblige. We are responsible not only for the well-being of humans but of the entire estate—the woods and marshes, oceans and deserts, the entire realm.

We believe that at the heart of the cosmos is the harmonious community of God.
We believe that we are related by family ties to this community.
We believe God will succeed in bringing the entire orchestra into a unimaginably grand harmony.

So we confidently commit ourselves to pursuing harmonious relationships among people and with the natural world, knowing this harmony is the ultimate shape of the cosmos. It is the supreme dream and purpose of God.