Thought For The Week 4 June 2023

Last Sunday evening our family had a great time at the Illuminate Light & Sound Experience in the Botanical Garden. One of my favourite displays was the giant Astronaut and planets from our solar system. We often end up talking about space, our galaxy and the universe in our family. I think this is because there is something so big and                  incomprehensible about the bigness of the universe. I often find myself pondering Astronomer Carl Sagan’s words, about the preciousness of life on the “pale blue dot” of our earth, seemingly alone in the vastness of space.

The writer of Psalm 8, several thousands of years before Sagan didn’t need a photo taken from the edge of our solar system to reflect on the same mystery.

When I consider your heavens …. what are human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3-4). We are left in wonder at the mystery of a God who would fashion the cosmos and yet still is concerned for us, want to live with us and know us.

Today is Trinity Sunday, an opportunity to consider the magnificence of this great and mysterious Triune God. A prayer I engaged with this week was written in the ‘apophatic’ tradition. Acknowledging that God is Father, Shepherd, and King. But, also that these, our best metaphors for God, are at best inadequate descriptors of him. God is these things, but he is also more than these things.

But this God, who we struggle to describe, came in his fullness in the person of Jesus Christ. Because of Jesus, we can know and speak of this God. May the Spirit enable us as image bearers of the divine to reflect the unity of the Trinity and of Christ in us, through our community as we gather today and go into the coming week.

Luke Blackbeard