God is a Womble

Today is Trinity Sunday, when the church takes a deep breath and engages with one of its most exciting ideas, that of the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This falls at a really good time for me, coming as it does at following the week when I have been studying the way in which the idea of the Trinity has developed over the years and centuries.

There is no hiding from the fact that this idea is one that is difficult to get our heads round, but I think that it's really exciting because it gives us language for talking about God that allows us to say things in ways that cannot be said otherwise.

My plan for the next quarter of an hour or so is for us to explore this idea together, and by together, I mean that I am going to ask some questions, and you guys are going to chip in with some answers. I want to start with a contribution that one of my fellow students made in class when we were discussing the Trinity.

God is Womble.

Can anybody think of any attributes of Wombles that might tell us something about God?

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Pentecost Water

What is it about kids and water? My four year old, Nathaniel, came home from nursery this week one day and told me that they'd had something really special that day. They'd had the water guns out. But there was one rule. No squirting people. They'd cleaned the garden furniture, sprayed the walls of the shed and watered the plants. As summer comes the plea for the paddling pool is heard once again, on every possible occasion. Kids seem to instinctively know something, that water is one of the most exciting things in the whole of the world.

Water is essential to life as we know it. It has a starring role in the first chapter of the Bible, central to the Creation of all that is, and it is also important in the last chapter, part of the description of the way in which the new creation will be. In between we find it again and again and again. It is one of the most potent images that we have for life and the life giving nature of God.

When God had called the people of God out of captivity and oppression in Egypt, they were led by Moses out in to the desert. As they travelled the horrors of the slavery, the murder of their sons, the forced labour began to fade in their memories and they began to focus on the difficulties of the journey and their fears overtook them. They missed the pomegranates and figs. They were thirsty and saw no source of water. In their lack of faith they rebelled against Moses.

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