We have just celebrated Pentecost, which marks the end of our commemorations of the main events of the Lord’s earthly life and the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter. Only a week later we come to Trinity Sunday, when we are face to face with the complete God, the summation of all the seasons that have gone before. Trinity Sunday is woefully neglected these days, which may be partially explained by the fact that different sections of the Church seem to have become hung up on one particular aspect of the Trinity – the Evangelicals on the Son, the Catholics on the Father and the Charismatics on the Holy Spirit. God is indeed three distinct Persons, but He is also One, with each Person having a particular role to play within a totally complete and cohesive One, the Holy and Undivided Trinity.
Just as the Trinity is the expression of complete balance and unity within the Divine nature, so the human family ought to be the tiniest mirror image of the Divine, another trinity, a man, his woman and their children. This is the family that God, in His infinite wisdom, created at the beginning of time and it contains within it, that same Divine intention that there should be total balance, cohesion and mutual love between its three elements. The principal reason why the Western countries are in such a woeful mess today, with murder and stabbings, juvenile crime, civil disorder and massive fraud the order of the day is because this delicate balance of love, mutuality and responsibility displayed within the family as created by God has been almost destroyed.
Men do the sexual deed and promptly disappear, while the mothers are left to struggle with children they probably never wanted and are then expected to take on menial, poorly paid employment, leaving the all-powerful State to do the parenting, which it performs with all its usual incompetence, insensitivity and arrogance – and of course, godlessness.
It is noticeable that this abandonment of the nuclear family has taken deepest hold upon the so-called Protestant countries of Northern Europe and the USA, the very places where feminism and sexual confusion have also been so successfully reared. The Catholic countries have at least had the visual image of a mother and child – the Blessed Virgin Mary and her Divine baby – to remind them constantly of what the family is all about. Evangelicals have been so anxious to avoid giving Mary any sort of due recognition for her unique role that we have ended up with no visual model to remind us how God actually wants things to be.
Within the Christian community it is now absolutely vital that we should be commending the nuclear family at every opportunity to the lost and confused world outside. It is not only the way that God Himself ordered human existence for people’s optimum happiness and fulfilment, but it also reflects – even if in only the dimmest way – the mutual love, trust and concord within the Triune Godhead and the way that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit deal with us individually, both as sinners and as saints, in our conversion and in our sanctification
The Archbishop of Canterbury and his episcopal bench have a lot to say in the House of Lords and elsewhere about contentious political issues such as immigration and housing, but their silence in promoting heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family is deafening. One of the most encouraging developments in recent years has been the emergence of a genuinely Biblical and evangelistic Anglicanism birthed in GAFCON and the Global South. This movement is a shining example of joyful Christian faith and obedience in the face of horrendous levels of murder, persecution, famine, homelessness and abject poverty. We UK and Western Anglicans who want to stay loyal to Jesus and His Gospel of repentance, faith, forgiveness and holy living at last have a strong episcopal voice to guide and encourage us. If the leadership of the Anglican Communion passes to the believing Global South, which represents 85% of Anglicans worldwide, we should be shouting hurrah to that!
However, allied to a courageous witness to marriage and the family must be our vocation to be Good Samaritans to pick up the huge number of casualties this rebellious and godless society has so enthusiastically created. Our congregations and our activities must be urgently geared up to help these people, not merely by setting up or supporting parochial food banks, but also by taking care to include proper provision for the needs of single mothers and their inevitably damaged children – and by visibly including them within the Church family and its liturgical worship. That will probably mean simplifying and shortening our sermons and searching to discover modern equivalents for Jesus’s homely parables of the Kingdom, which He used to such great effect in His teaching. This will need some serious and imaginative thinking, but it has now become priority stuff.
Finally, two great books for Summer reading:,
WILLIAM GRIMSHAW OF HAWORTH. Faith Cook, Banner of Truth, 1997.
The story of one of the greatest parish priests of the C18 and probably of all time. His relentless round of visiting and preaching around his vast patch of the Yorkshire Moors and his straightforward manner converted hundreds. His communion services attracted anything between 1200 and 2000 people!
THE BOOK OF REVELATION DECODED. K.A. Schneider, Charisma House, 2007.
A Jewish Messianic rabbi takes a careful journey through the end times predicted in Revelation, but through the lens of the prophecies of the Old Testament, which naturally mean so much to him. Israel plays a large part in this and there is much useful Bible study material here as he undertakes a thoroughly Scriptural analysis of the sequence of disasters and calamities we are witnessing today.
