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If God is love, um What did God love before God created us? Uh And, and as you know, there are some, some of those uh people who taught in the early church that uh uh creation was equally uh eternal. Uh And, and you have to say,

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well, isn't it wonderful that we have this doctrine of the Trinity, which speaks of God as a fellowship, a community. And, and so you have this wonderful image of the community that is God, the Trinity. So that from all eternity, the one who is called Father

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pours out all of God's love and being on what would be and utterly competent object, pouring all of God's love. God's being into the son who is coequal co eternal gushed the adequate object for this divine love and, and, and, and, and the Son returning from

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all eternity, uh this love and, and you have this movement between the two that is so tremendous that it is, it is, it is called the Holy Spirit. And, and why that is important is, is that it has an incredible amount about us that God actually

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did not need us. Uh God, God was his love. And uh this movement within uh the divinity is this dynamic thing. And this cord then says, I want you, I want you II I create you because I want you not because I need you. And, and,

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and, and it, it speaks volumes for who we are. I mean, he speaks about the freedom of God. And we created in the image of this God have the same freedom that God makes us, made us as those who fundamentally would be uh moral, ethical beings

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who can choose. Uh and you know, it is that we can choose to love or not to love God, we can choose to obey or not to obey God. And the fantastic thing is that God says, I have such a profound reverence for your freedom that

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I'd much rather you went freely to hell than compel you to go to heaven. Um It, it's, it's a staggering thing. Uh what it says about about us. Um When speaking of us, as those created in the image of God, I think it's much better for

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us to be reminded that we, we are tabernacles, we are sanctuaries. Uh We are temples. I mean, if we, if we believed it, we would not, we would not just shake hands, we would genuinely in front of each other much as the Buddhist would the God

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in me greets the God in you imagine. I mean, if we really um believe this and, and and acted out the implications of it. One of the things that I um I, I've kept saying in, in our struggle. Uh you know, you, you use that old

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story of uh um how, when the missionaries came to Africa, they uh they had the Bible and we had the, we had the land and, and then they said, let us pray and we dutifully shut our eyes. Uh And when we finished, we said amen. And

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when uh that had happened, lo and behold, they had the land and we had the Bible. If you want to, uh keep, keep people uh down and oppressed, the last thing you should have given them is, is, is the Bible because it is, it is, uh

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it's really dynamite. If this were not a moral universe, that is a one in which it was a matter of indifference. Uh You lie or you don't lie, it ultimately doesn't matter. Uh uh you, you oppress, you don't oppress, it doesn't matter really. Um You, you

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can think of anything. Uh And, and, and if we, if we had a AAA universe that was more or less a neutral, uh then the kind of things that seem to happen in our world, um uh would be very difficult to, to explain. I mean, you

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look at any piece of history and you find that there is an oppressor who is uh uh trudging the stage of the world as if they were really running the show, you can list them from the year taught. And if ours was not a moral universe,

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then, um, basically we, the, the, the powerful, the immoral, uh, would, uh, be the ones who, who ruled the roost forever. But the fact of the matter is that at the end of the day with almost all of these people who were strutting, uh, the, the

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stage of the world as if it really belonged to them have bitten the dust, you know, uh and, and the those who thought who seem to have had the thin end of the stick are vindicated. That's one, I mean, you, we, that is what we, we

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used to say at home uh to our people when uh it seemed as if the apartheid uh oppressors were, were we were really going to rule the roost forever and ever. And we would say, you know what they have already lost. I mean, if you think

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uh what it was like, yeah, I mean, and the Nelson Mandela's were in prison. Uh Most of our leaders were either in exile or under some form of restriction or other. We've been vindicated or God has been vindicated. Uh Right in the end, we uh can,

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can point to, to the scriptures and say, you know, this God is a, is a God who is, which is notoriously biased. This God is not even handed this God is a God who is biased in favor of the downtrodden. The, this God is in, in,

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in, in on the side of the have nots the, the ones who are regarded as non, non entity. And uh uh what turns out to be the paradigm act or paradigmatic act. The Exodus. And you know, you say to people, did you notice something? Have you

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noticed the sequence where I think people think, I mean that it is, it is, it is because of worth that God will then uh favor. No, the Exodus, the liberation happens first when those who are liberated were some of the most obstreperous bunch of people you

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could have ever imagined. I mean, they couldn't, they couldn't have claimed that they were a nice bunch of people. They were so worrisome. Uh but that's the punch that God set free and then having set them free, having acted and with grace as a free gift,

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then God gives them the law and we, we keep forgetting this sequence. We think the law is meant for us to keep so that we can then say to God, we deserve as a reward for keeping the law. No, God says I liberate you. I tell

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you, I love you. I tell you you are of great one. And now in order for you to be able to express your gratitude for what I have done freely, I give you the law and, and so whatever you anyone can tell me having lived to

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my age, I have seen enough evidence that ultimately, God will have the last word, the profound truth is you cannot be human on your own. Uh You are human through relationship. Uh You, you become human, you know. Um And, and we've seen it, um teachers of

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psychology tell us that you, we wouldn't be able to speak as human beings. We, we speak by imitating other human beings. We, we walk uh as human beings by imitating other human beings. We think. And so ultimately, yes, we are human only through relationship. Um And

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that is, that is fantastic because it says we are really made for uh this delicate network of interdependence, interdependence show that this the completely self sufficient person is in fact subhuman. Um I need you in order for me to be me, I need you to be

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you to the fullest. Um We are made for complementarity. Adam had certain gifts. Eve had certain gifts, but it was only when the two made up what was lacking in the other that they became fully human. And, and that is the fundamental law of our being

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says, not you are human because you think you are human because you participate in relationship. Uh It says a person is a person through other persons. That is what we say, but that is what the Bible is saying. And that is what our human experience teaches

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us. I would have thought, I mean that almost all of us uh would say there was something wrong about a morality that said, um you didn't, in fact have at least a modicum of, of freedom between two opposite ways of acting. Um None of us can

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get to the point where we say, say for instance, that, I mean, we are all were, were driven by our instincts completely uh because it would, it would evacuate any meaning to. This is wrong, this is right. But I think almost all of us do make

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a distinction. I mean that uh we, we make a distinction between what we would say is instinctive. It is something that you cannot help doing it is that someone who is addicted to drugs, we would say, um has a, a reduced responsibility. That is how we

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operate in, in say our court systems that um we don't say every criminal act is the same, it has the same uh value. Uh I mean, we don't say this killing. It's because it is a killing is the same as this killing because it is a

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killing. We, we make, we make distinctions and, and most of us reckon that those distinctions are um uh justified. You know, uh one of the things that happened when we, we had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was you had people were applying for

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amnesty uh having to uh reveal the facts relating to the acts for which they were asking uh amnesty. We inhabit AAA, an A universe were right and wrong. Don't matter. They are, they are just a matter of indifference. Uh I'm glad it is in that kind

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of universe. Uh That it is, it is one where kindness matters, compassion matters, caring matters, sharing. Uh And certainly I, I would uh uh lay my bet on that one and uh tough luck if it isn't. Uh But iii, I believe it firmly that uh this

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is a moral universe, uh, and it matters right and wrong matter and mercifully gloriously, uh, right, will prevail.