Message from Tim

 

God is a Single-Parent Family

I will put my hand up and say it is my fault. I was the one who pushed for referring to Brighton Road as ‘an extended family’ in the vision we have been considering over recent weeks. Not everyone was happy with this description of us. Our own experience of family inevitably colours our perception of how families operate, for better or for worse. If we talk about ‘family’ will some people assume that we are talking primarily about families with children? Despite some people’s reservations, I resisted suggestions that we opt for a word like ‘community’ instead, because I feel that ‘family’ is a much more personal term.

A question for Trinity Sunday: is God a family, made up of Father, Son and Holy Spirit? If you have a father and a son, it is hard to argue that God does not comprise a family in some sense – but what kind of family? How the Holy Spirit relates to the Father and the Son as part of this family has been a matter of controversy for centuries.

Those who look for a feminine side to a rather male-dominated picture of God may find a shred of comfort in the idea that the Hebrew word for spirit (ruach) is feminine in gender, but that actually means nothing in terms of whether we should conceive of the Spirit in male or female terms. And anyway, God is beyond gender, and ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ are all terms which afford us a limited degree of understanding about what God is really like.

Nevertheless, if we dare to think of God as a ‘family’, then the presence of the Holy Spirit, who maybe proceeds from the Father, or perhaps from the Father and the Son, guarantees that this family is unlike any other family we may have known or experienced. God transcends all our inadequate metaphors. Yet we can say with absolute confidence that this family has love at its core.

And we are warmly invited to join God’s highly unusual (unorthodox?!) family. Those who receive Jesus become children of God. Jesus calls us his brothers and sisters – and sometimes his children. After his resurrection, he talks about going back to his Father and our Father, including us in his own relationship with God, just as we are included in this relationship whenever we pray, Our Father…’ The Holy Spirit enables us to relate to God as Father, and invites us to call him, ‘Dad’. While systematic theologians might wish for greater consistency in how the terminology is used, it seems pretty clear that God wants us to belong, to him and to each other. Jesus and the Holy Spirit include us in God’s extended family, which includes all generations and all ethnicities.

If that is the case, it is probably far better to think of Brighton Road as being ‘part of God’s extended family’. To describe ourselves in this way prevents us from thinking in insular terms, because as part of God’s extended family we are in relationship with other churches – in our Baptist cluster, association and union, as well as with churches of any denomination in Horsham and beyond.

And how do we relate to each other within this extended family? We are called to honour one another, just as the Father honours the Son and the Son honours the Father, as the Spirit honours the Son, as we honour God in worship and as God honours us by sharing his glory with us. We honour each other as we big each other up, as we seek what is best for each other, as we praise and affirm each other. When that happens as it should, then God’s extended family is not only the biggest family in the whole world – it is also the best.