08/27/12 Why Do We Doubt? Grace UMC
As a pastor, I have met many people who, because they are not pastors, think that they are unable to understand or explain the Bible. They are quick to point out that they have not gone to seminary and so they are aware that there is much about the Bible that they simply have never been exposed to. While many people have to endure their seminary experience, I loved seminary. I learned a lot and got challenged in every kind of way you can imagine. However, even though I think that seminary can be a wonderful experience, I am all too aware of the fact that there are times when seminary training does no more than teach people to read the same passages in the same ways over and over again, never learning anything new, never growing, never imagining that there might be something simple that speaks volumes that they might have missed. Often times, these kinds of things are completely unrelated to the things you learn in seminary; that is to say, they are things that laypeople are every bit as equipped to discover as clergy. In fact, it may be that lay people are even more prepared to notice them since they don't have their heads filled with all kinds of issues that may or may not be related.
I say all of this because I am amazed at how often a little detail, that I have never noticed but has been in the passage the whole time, something that seems so simple, will hit me like a ton of bricks. This is the case with this passage we have just heard. It is so simple that it doesn't seem like much at first. It is so obvious and basic that the story simply couldn't have continued if it wasn't the way it is, and yet it is routinely ignored. Let us consider the story.
Jesus has just fed the five thousand. He had his disciples start across the Sea of Galilee while he stayed behind to dismiss the crowds and then he went off by himself to pray. Several hours later, he was still on shore while the boats had gone on ahead. A storm rose up and the disciples, experienced boatmen, were unable to make any progress, but here comes Jesus walking on the water. At this point, Peter does something interesting; he decides that he is going to get out of the boat. But first, he wants to make sure that he isn't dreaming or that all the hard work hasn't made him start seeing things. He asks Jesus to invite him out of the boat, which he does. At first, Peter does pretty well, taking a few steps as if he were on land. However, his fear and doubt begin to get the better of him and he begins to sink, so he cries out, "Lord, save me!" Jesus grabs him and chastises him a little, saying to him "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"
Now, we could go on all day about the virtues of faith and obedience, about how important it is to trust that, when God tells us to do something, we shouldn't doubt but do it with all our might, that Jesus has given us no reason to doubt him, and all those are good things to remember. However, there is just one detail that seems to me to be absolutely crucial to this passage that I feel that we keep forgetting. Peter loses faith and the consequences are significant. After all, he starts to sink and it is serious enough to provoke a critique from Jesus. However, we must never forget that, even when all this happens, Peter doesn't drown. Now that seems a little bit silly, doesn't it? Isn't it obvious that Peter doesn't drown? After all, he is in the rest of the story of Jesus' life and he continued to be in ministry long afterward. It is so clear that Peter does not drown that it doesn't seem worth mentioning.
And yet, I think it makes all the difference in the world. Look at it from this point of view. The disciples are being overwhelmed by the storms. They simply cannot make any progress, even with all their strength. Then along comes Jesus, just taking a stroll across the stormy sea; not concerned, not even working up a sweat. It is as if the dangers of the storm and the sea simply do not exist for him. They certainly aren't impacting him the same way they impact the disciples. Peter looks out and, because a disciple in ancient Israel was accustomed to doing everything that his Rabbi did, and seeing that it is better to walk on the water than to be defeated by the storm, asks to be invited out of the boat. Eventually, he starts to doubt and begins to sink. So now we have three different kinds of people. We have Jesus, who has absolute faith in his ability to walk on the water, we have Peter who has a bit of faith, but it isn't as strong as he might like, who has some success but then his faith begins to fail, and we have the other disciples who were so terrified of the storm that they didn't dare to get out of the boat at all! The point is that not one of them died that day. Not one of them was defeated by the storm. In fact, the storm was defeated by Jesus when he stepped into the boat and they all made it safely to the other side.
Why didn't Jesus sink? He didn't sink because his faith was so strong that he simply could not be defeated by the storm. Why didn't Peter sink? He didn't sink because when he went down, he was secured by Christ's hand grabbing him. Why didn't the disciples sink? Because Jesus calmed the storm and made a way when there had not been a way. Not one of the disciples made it to the other side on their own strength; Jesus made it possible, even for those whose faith wasn't even strong enough for them to get out of the boat.
It is very easy to get caught up with the quality of our faith. We look at ourselves and we see how often our faith has failed. We look at others and we see how much stronger their faith seems to be than our own. The single most significant issue that marked the Reformation was a revolt against the kind of attitude that said that you had to do all kinds of things right before God would accept you. If you sinned, you needed to do penance, and if you didn't do it, it didn't matter what else you did, you still fell short of salvation. There was always this sense that the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ wasn't quite enough, that God did most of it, but we still had to finish the job. That kind of attitude only leads to pride, if we think, wrongly, that we have it all together, or despair when we realize that we don't. If that is our position, than we can only say that Peter wasn't good enough because his faith wavered and the other disciples were really not good enough since their faith didn't even go as far as Peter's. We would have to say that the story of Jesus walking on water is a story of the radical failure of humanity to be good enough for God.
Maybe it does teach us that, but is that all that it teaches us? I don't think so. It seems to me that there is something profound that is here that goes above and beyond what it says about our ability, or at least our track record, to do what we should. Peter's faith wavers, but Jesus catches him. The disciples can't move their boat forward, but Jesus calms the sea. The success that saved all of them was not in any way, shape or form based on their abilities, as we see with the other disciples, or even in the strength of their faith in Christ, as we see in Peter. The success of the whole trip depended on the strength and faithfulness, not of the disciples, but of Christ.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul takes an entire chapter and points out that the Jewish people, and remember that Paul was Jewish, shouldn't boast in the fact that God gave them the law if they don't even follow it. He pointed out that if the Gentiles follow God, even if they have never heard the law, they are more fully God's people than the Jews were who had the law but didn't follow it. What is amazing is that he immediately follows this up with a question that might be put to him. "Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision?" The question is basically this, "The Jewish people, by and large, were not accepting Jesus and being transformed. Is there really anything special about the Jews?" Paul's response is passionate. "Absolutely! For in the first place, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God." God had singled the Jewish people out for special interaction through the years and spoke to them in a special way. But the question could come back. "Paul, but what if some of them, or even most of them, were unfaithful?" Paul's response is amazing. "Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Although everyone is a liar, let God be proved true." Every pastor, every Christian, could be a liar, but that does not make God any less truthful. Every human being could be absolutely faithless, but that does not mean that God has become unfaithful.
That is why everyone made it safely across the sea. Peter's faith didn't get them across and the other disciples' lack of faith did not prevent Jesus from delivering them. It was the faithfulness of Christ that does not give up when we make mistakes or when we aren't as good as know we should be that made it happen. When we talk about having faith, the point isn't, or at least shouldn't be, to get all excited talking about how strong my faith is or how strong your faith is. When we say we are saved by faith, we don't mean that faith is something that we do and, because we reach a high enough level of faith, we are considered good enough for heaven. In many ways, that is just taking the Medieval notion of salvation by works and substituting faith in as the new work that we have to do. Now, instead of having to reach a certain level of moral perfection, we have to reach a certain level of perfection in our faith, in order to be saved. That is what the Reformers fought so hard to get rid of.
When we say that faith is important, what we mean is that it is the one in whom we have faith, that is important. It is not a question of how much we believe but in whom we believe. We are saved by grace through faith, but the reason that we are saved is not because we are so good at being faithful, but because Christ is so good at being faithful. The good news of Jesus Christ for the one who has never done a good deed in their lives and has never even given a thought to God before is that, when they stand before God they can say, "I have nothing to bring. No deeds that made people think that I was a good person, no wise words that built up my brothers and sisters, nothing of any value at all. If what Jesus did on my behalf and in my place isn't good enough, then I have no other hope. All of my trust, all of my hope is in Christ and if it fails, I have nothing left. I would be as lost as Peter if Jesus had not grabbed him when he began to sink." What makes that good is because that is all that is asked. In fact, it is the only thing that any of us can say before God.
So why do we doubt? That is the question that Jesus asked Peter. What if the question about why Peter doubted is not a question of criticism, that is, what if it wasn't a way for Jesus to say, "Peter, you know you are supposed to believe, so why did you doubt?" What if the question was a real one, one that Jesus asked because he simply could not understand why Peter could have any reason to doubt? I can imagine that Peter might answer like many of us would. "But Lord, I got out into the middle of the sea and I began to realize that I can't do it. I can't walk on water, so I began to doubt because I found myself doing something that I am not able to do and I didn't think that I could keep it up."
What would Jesus' response be? If the real point of faith is for us to have strong faith just for the sake of having faith, as if faith in an of itself is a good thing, or if we take the modern attitude of self-help and the power of positive thinking as our guide, the question, "Why did you doubt," would be, "Peter, why did you doubt? Do you not trust in the power of believing in yourself? Keep trying and you'll make it someday." But if that is not the case at all, if the point of faith is not that we believe but that we believe in Jesus, not that we trust our own abilities to do anything but trust in Jesus, who lives his life in us and through us, then the question is not, "Peter, why did you doubt yourself," but "Peter, why did you doubt me?" Jesus was the reason why Peter could walk on the water in the first place. His own abilities had absolutely nothing to do with it. There was no reason to doubt because the ultimate responsibility to stay on top of the water didn't lie with him but with Jesus.
So that is the question for us this morning. Why do we doubt? And by that I don't mean to say that there is not room for a healthy curiosity about what we believe about God. Anyone who has had a substantial conversation with me knows that I am all about probing beyond popular opinion about God. What I mean is, if God has loved us so much that he stepped into our world of space and time in order to become one of us and one with us; if he was willing to not just come but to take our brokenness upon himself and take it all the way to the cross in order to deal with it once and for all; and if he did all of this, not when we had our act together but while we were yet sinners, before we even gave a first thought to God, why should we doubt whether God really loves us, whether God actually cares about us, whether God actually wants to redeem us and be reconciled?
Listen to Paul's reflections on this topic. "What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?" If God loves us so much that he did that, why would we doubt that he wants to finish what he has started? Paul continues. "Who will bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is it to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us." Paul is saying that the only one in all of the universe who is in a position to bring a charge against you or to condemn you is God, but this is a God who not only loves you with a love that will not let you go, but one who has gone through tremendous lengths to make that love real for you and prays for you, even to this day.
Our God is not a God who sits up in heaven with a chart to keep track of whether you are good enough or whether you have believed hard enough or not. Rather, he is a God who calls you to do things above and beyond what you were ever capable of on your own, to do things that are amazing from a human point of view. And in the midst of that calling and empowering, you might make a mistake, but you can trust that, when that time comes, Christ will grab you so that you will not drown and remind you that you do not need to doubt, because your trust and faith are not in yourself, but in him, and he has strength to support all of creation. Let us pray.
AMEN
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Not the Same Weapons (1 Samuel 17:31-51)
07/22/12 "Not the Same Weapons" Spencer GUMC
If we were to try to make a list of the Bible stories that are most well known by the church and even the larger culture, the story of David and Goliath would almost certainly be close to the top of the list, along with stories like Noah's ark and Jonah and the whale. In fact, this story is known and talked about more often, both in the church and out of it, than many of the stories that directly involve Jesus. It is because it is so fantastically well known that I have felt free to limit the time that I spend this morning retelling it in order to free up time to explore a particular aspect that has been impressing itself on me recently.
At the time when David shows up to the battlefield where he will ultimately slay Goliath, he was not yet a warrior. In fact, he was nothing more than a kid, likely no more than fifteen years old. He was so far from being known as a great warrior that even his brothers were amazed that he would volunteer to go head to head with a giant like Goliath. And yet, though he was young, though he had no credentials, though to all outward appearances, he was nothing more than the youngest of a large family, his appearance at this time and place is inherently political.
Remember that David has been introduced to the reader in the previous chapter, and that introduction took the form of the prophet Samuel, on orders from God, going to Bethlehem and anointing him as king over all of Israel. This is, from a purely political point of view, high treason, since Israel already had a king, Saul. It is fascinating to me that in the slaying of Goliath, David is able to defeat the Philistines, the very thing that Saul was not able to do with an army.
All that aside, it seems to me that the most common aspect of this story that gets emphasized in Sunday school, Bible studies and sermons, is the need to stand in faith, knowing that God is far greater than the giants that we see in our lives, no matter how big they seem or how many of them there are. All of this is entirely true. I do not mean to minimize that conclusion in any way, shape, or form. However, I want to place my stress on a different detail, because I think that it is both something that I forget, though it is so obviously included in our normal way of discussing this passage, and because I feel it is something that is very much appropriate in this place and time.
I want to draw your attention to the interchange that David has with Saul, where Saul tries to equip David for battle. This is what we read. "Then Saul clothed David with his armor; he put a helmet of bronze on his head, and clothed him with a coat of mail. And David girded his sword over his armor, and he tried in vain to go, for he was not used to them. Then David said to Saul, 'I cannot go with these; for I am not used to them.' And David put them off. Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in his shepherd's bag or wallet; his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine."
I feel that it is important to stress that, when David went after Goliath, he did not use the same weapons as Goliath did. Now, this seems like a silly and trivial observation, doesn't it? After all, we know that, while Goliath had a sword and a shield so big he needed someone to carry it for him, David simply had an ordinary sling with five stones. However, I think that we often get so caught up in the glory of the victory, that David actually is able to defeat Goliath, that we forget how significant this fact really is.
Think about the sheer absurdity of David's decision. He is only about fifteen years old, going up against a man who has been a warrior, likely for longer than David has been alive. Goliath is trained in all the best military strategies, he knows how to use his sword, he knows how to fight, both in battle and in single combat. David has none of these things. He has spent his youth far from the battlefield, caring for sheep and playing his harp. Saul is giving the best advice he knows. The only way that makes sense to Saul to approach this incredibly significant battle is armed to the teeth, covered in armor and with the best weapon you can find, at least one that was created for battle. Remember, Saul is no weakling, but is an accomplished warrior himself. The maidens of Israel used to sing, "Saul has slain his thousands."
David walks out, completely naked from a military point of view, and does not just face his enemy, but defeats him. What would the people's response have been? I can imagine it would be something like this. "How amazing is it that Goliath has been defeated at all, let alone by this young man, let alone with a sling and a rock." The great glory is that God brought about victory in spite of David's weakness of weapon.
But what if that reaction misses the entire point? What if God's victory wasn't in spite of David's inexperience, in spite of his unimpressive weaponry? What if God brought victory precisely because of those things? What if David didn't just find a way that worked as well in that moment as that of the great warriors, but found the only way that would work? The fact of the matter is that if we wanted to say that the reason that David was victorious, even with a stone and sling, was because he was such a natural warrior, we would have to say that he could have defeated Goliath with Saul's sword and armor, he just didn't feel as comfortable doing it. On the contrary, I think that the story forces us to conclude that, if David had gone to the battlefield doing things the way Saul told him to, meeting Goliath with his own versions of his armor and sword, the event would have ended very differently. David would have been killed, Israel would have been defeated, and the whole history of the world would have changed forever.
But you know what? Once I noticed that David not only did not fight Goliath using the same weapons, but deliberately avoided anything resembling conventional combat equipment, I started to notice that this is not the only time in the Bible that this kind of thing happens. It turns out that almost everywhere you turn, there is someone doing something that makes absolutely no sense if we think about if as an outsider but we hardly notice it either because we have been trained for so long to see it as normal or because we are so quick to read the end of the story into its beginning that we never notice how odd it really is.
Perhaps the single best example of this happening is Jesus. Here is a man who was being called the Messiah, the anointed one, the Son of David. He was a man who was associated with the restoring of Israel and the hopes and dreams of the people. He spoke of a kingdom that was coming but yet was already there in his person. He gathered followers, he spoke against those in authority, and he sharply critiqued the ways that Israel had become just like the pagan nations. And finally, when the time comes to complete his work, to release the people from bondage, to cast the powers of this world to the ground and shatter them, what does he do? He dies! He doesn't march on Jerusalem with a rag-tag army like the Maccabees did over a hundred years before. He doesn't take up his rightful place on the throne of Israel and restore the Davidic line of kings. In fact, Israel was still ruled by Rome and the people's lives were not noticeably different after he died compared to before. When you think of it, it is a pretty funny way of establishing a kingdom.
And yet, we don't say that God established his kingdom here on earth in spite of the death of Christ, do we? No, we say that God established it through his death, that there really wasn't any other way it could come about, that to try to establish the kingdom of God using the same "weapons" as human kings use would make absolutely no sense at all. If Jesus' kingdom depended on how well he was able to marshal troops, to combat and defeat trained Roman soldiers, we would have no choice but to say that he was an absolute failure. And yet, we don't say that, do we? We don't say that because Christ's death wasn't a sign of his failure, it redefined what it means to succeed. Success is not an avoidance of death, but an emerging on the other side of death in resurrection. From the outside, we would have to say that the Jesus movement was kept alive in spite of Christ's death. From the inside, we know that there was no other way, and to do it in another way, a more conventional way, a way that made more sense to the outside world, would never actually work.
Look at just about any hero of the faith. Abraham was over ninety years old when God called him and told him that he would be the father of a great nation, something that is very hard to do if you have no children and are not likely to have any. Moses was an eighty year old shepherd with a speech impediment who had burned all his bridges with the Egyptian royalty. Gideon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into leadership in order to overthrow the nations that were ruling over Israel. Jonah was a bigot who hated the Ninevites, the ones he was called to preach to, with every ounce of his being. The list could be made as long as we like. The point is that if we ever imagined that the standards of the world were the best way to move forward in God's eyes, not a single leader in Israel's history, including David and Jesus, would have been taken seriously.
What can we learn from this? I am sure we can learn many things, but what I am increasingly convinced of is that it means that we should not pay even the smallest bit of attention to how other people do things, at least if they are people that we could consider, on one level or another, to be our enemies. If David attempted to meet Goliath using the same kinds of weapons and armor that he used, he would have been killed; if Jesus tried to establish his kingdom like earthly kings, not only would it not have worked, we would have missed out on the real kingdom of God, which is far greater than the kingdoms of this world.
This means that we need to stop looking over our shoulders and seeing if we are keeping up with the Joneses, to see if we are doing the same things as everyone else, because what they are doing has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on what we need to be about. Trying to measure yourself by other people can only lead to pride, if you think you are doing well compared to them, or despair, if you think you aren't doing as well. The same is true if you think that the only way that God could be calling you to behave is the way others behave.
Allow me to give some concrete examples. Any of you who have children who are still in school, especially if they are in middle school, are doubtlessly aware of a phenomenon called "drama." Drama, in this sense, is not to be confused with theatrics. Drama is an age-old issue with a new name. It is when one person, or group of people, starts spreading rumors about others, or begins to talk about someone else behind their back. Drama is the number one complaint I have ever heard from people who are in school. Seeing that it is such a big problem, and one that everyone seems to notice and understand, what do you think is the number one way to deal with school drama? More drama! As amazing as it might sound, the way that people in school most commonly deal with the drama in their lives is to instigate more drama, as if somehow, if we can just get the last word in, everything will be fine. What is this but a modern example of using Goliath's weapons against him? The result is never that Goliath is slain, but only that we get beaten, because he is a giant and we are small and he has more experience with them than we could ever have. The only way to win at the drama game by using more drama is to somehow become the kind of person who is better at creating turmoil than anyone else, and then you may have won, but you have become a person whose self-worth is determined by how bad you can make other people feel. You can only defeat Goliath using his own weapons by becoming a bigger, nastier, more cruel giant than him, which is no real victory.
When I was serving a different church, there were several churches, within convenient driving distance, who specialized in reaching out to college students. To that end, they had developed fantastic praise bands, they integrated contemporary culture into their services, and they had an amazing network where new people in the school could be reached by word of mouth. The people at the church I was serving were noticing that people they knew were traveling to attend these other churches and they wanted to find a way to get them back home. In order to do that, it was suggested to reinstate our own praise band that had been discontinued by a previous pastor and to try to copy these other churches and do what they do to get those people back.
Now, there are many reasons why this is a problem. First, there is a big problem with looking at other churches as being our enemies. They aren't our enemies. People may have left our church at one point to go there, but at least they are going somewhere, they are still putting themselves in a position of hearing the word of the Lord, of joining the larger body in worship, and learning how to live as Christians together. There are far too many people in any given town who are simply unreached to worry about those who are still Christians, just a different brand than us.
But beyond that, it is an idea that is doomed. There is nothing wrong with reinstating a praise band, there is nothing wrong with a church becoming more contemporary. The problem is when those things are pursued in the belief and with the conviction that they are the way to reach others. If that church had gotten a band together and said to the people of their community, "You should come to this church because we have a band," they could respond, "So does this other church, and their band is better." The fact of the matter is that we could never win if that was our strategy. The churches we would have hoped to compete against had been doing those things for a good twenty years. They had experience and money invested in it that we could never even come close to duplicating. It would have amounted to nothing more than looking at other churches and calling them Goliath (a problem in itself), and then saying that the best way to "slay" that Goliath is to do what they are doing. It would have been as disastrous as if David had fought Goliath with a sword and shield instead of with a sling and some stones.
So I urge you, in every aspect of your lives; in your personal faith journeys, in your relation to the church, in the way you treat people in your workplace, and in every other way, listen to God and do what God tells you to do and do it the way God tells you to do it, regardless of how silly or counter-intuitive it might seem. If David had said, "No way, God. There is no way I can go against a giant with just a sling and some stones," he would have never won the battle and would have never become the great king that he was called to be.
On top of that, do not allow other people to discourage you from doing it. What if Saul had said to David, "You will either fight Goliath my way or you will not fight him at all?" He would have never defeated him, or even may never have gone out to battle in the first place. Someone else would have had to fight the giant, maybe without listening to God at all, and that would also have been disastrous. If God has called you, and he has, he will make it clear what you should do. Do you wish that your church would develop a particular kind of ministry because it is something you care about and you know that others probably care about it, too? Go do it! If someone tells you that it is doomed to failure because you aren't doing it the way they would do it, even if you know that God isn't calling you to do it their way, keep faithful. Sometimes the greatest victories, as we see in the Bible, come when they are the most unlikely of all.
When God calls his people, he equips them, not in the way that seems best to the rest of the world, but in the way that is actually best for that time and place. We do not need to worry about what has happened before, or even what is happening right now. We need to be about participating in what God is doing in the days ahead and we need to join him in that. I am not sure that I know exactly where that is, and I am not sure that any other single person knows, but I trust that God will reveal it to us as an entire congregation and will do so by motivating individuals and small groups to step forward and make a difference. God is likely even calling you right now, in this season of your life. Be in prayer and be encouraged to step out boldly, for it not just a human being who believes in you and supports you, but the very almighty God of the universe. As silly as it might seem, cast aside your sword and shield and take up your sling and stones, for the weapons that are chosen and anointed by God are better than the best that we could find on our own. Let us pray.
AMEN
If we were to try to make a list of the Bible stories that are most well known by the church and even the larger culture, the story of David and Goliath would almost certainly be close to the top of the list, along with stories like Noah's ark and Jonah and the whale. In fact, this story is known and talked about more often, both in the church and out of it, than many of the stories that directly involve Jesus. It is because it is so fantastically well known that I have felt free to limit the time that I spend this morning retelling it in order to free up time to explore a particular aspect that has been impressing itself on me recently.
At the time when David shows up to the battlefield where he will ultimately slay Goliath, he was not yet a warrior. In fact, he was nothing more than a kid, likely no more than fifteen years old. He was so far from being known as a great warrior that even his brothers were amazed that he would volunteer to go head to head with a giant like Goliath. And yet, though he was young, though he had no credentials, though to all outward appearances, he was nothing more than the youngest of a large family, his appearance at this time and place is inherently political.
Remember that David has been introduced to the reader in the previous chapter, and that introduction took the form of the prophet Samuel, on orders from God, going to Bethlehem and anointing him as king over all of Israel. This is, from a purely political point of view, high treason, since Israel already had a king, Saul. It is fascinating to me that in the slaying of Goliath, David is able to defeat the Philistines, the very thing that Saul was not able to do with an army.
All that aside, it seems to me that the most common aspect of this story that gets emphasized in Sunday school, Bible studies and sermons, is the need to stand in faith, knowing that God is far greater than the giants that we see in our lives, no matter how big they seem or how many of them there are. All of this is entirely true. I do not mean to minimize that conclusion in any way, shape, or form. However, I want to place my stress on a different detail, because I think that it is both something that I forget, though it is so obviously included in our normal way of discussing this passage, and because I feel it is something that is very much appropriate in this place and time.
I want to draw your attention to the interchange that David has with Saul, where Saul tries to equip David for battle. This is what we read. "Then Saul clothed David with his armor; he put a helmet of bronze on his head, and clothed him with a coat of mail. And David girded his sword over his armor, and he tried in vain to go, for he was not used to them. Then David said to Saul, 'I cannot go with these; for I am not used to them.' And David put them off. Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in his shepherd's bag or wallet; his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine."
I feel that it is important to stress that, when David went after Goliath, he did not use the same weapons as Goliath did. Now, this seems like a silly and trivial observation, doesn't it? After all, we know that, while Goliath had a sword and a shield so big he needed someone to carry it for him, David simply had an ordinary sling with five stones. However, I think that we often get so caught up in the glory of the victory, that David actually is able to defeat Goliath, that we forget how significant this fact really is.
Think about the sheer absurdity of David's decision. He is only about fifteen years old, going up against a man who has been a warrior, likely for longer than David has been alive. Goliath is trained in all the best military strategies, he knows how to use his sword, he knows how to fight, both in battle and in single combat. David has none of these things. He has spent his youth far from the battlefield, caring for sheep and playing his harp. Saul is giving the best advice he knows. The only way that makes sense to Saul to approach this incredibly significant battle is armed to the teeth, covered in armor and with the best weapon you can find, at least one that was created for battle. Remember, Saul is no weakling, but is an accomplished warrior himself. The maidens of Israel used to sing, "Saul has slain his thousands."
David walks out, completely naked from a military point of view, and does not just face his enemy, but defeats him. What would the people's response have been? I can imagine it would be something like this. "How amazing is it that Goliath has been defeated at all, let alone by this young man, let alone with a sling and a rock." The great glory is that God brought about victory in spite of David's weakness of weapon.
But what if that reaction misses the entire point? What if God's victory wasn't in spite of David's inexperience, in spite of his unimpressive weaponry? What if God brought victory precisely because of those things? What if David didn't just find a way that worked as well in that moment as that of the great warriors, but found the only way that would work? The fact of the matter is that if we wanted to say that the reason that David was victorious, even with a stone and sling, was because he was such a natural warrior, we would have to say that he could have defeated Goliath with Saul's sword and armor, he just didn't feel as comfortable doing it. On the contrary, I think that the story forces us to conclude that, if David had gone to the battlefield doing things the way Saul told him to, meeting Goliath with his own versions of his armor and sword, the event would have ended very differently. David would have been killed, Israel would have been defeated, and the whole history of the world would have changed forever.
But you know what? Once I noticed that David not only did not fight Goliath using the same weapons, but deliberately avoided anything resembling conventional combat equipment, I started to notice that this is not the only time in the Bible that this kind of thing happens. It turns out that almost everywhere you turn, there is someone doing something that makes absolutely no sense if we think about if as an outsider but we hardly notice it either because we have been trained for so long to see it as normal or because we are so quick to read the end of the story into its beginning that we never notice how odd it really is.
Perhaps the single best example of this happening is Jesus. Here is a man who was being called the Messiah, the anointed one, the Son of David. He was a man who was associated with the restoring of Israel and the hopes and dreams of the people. He spoke of a kingdom that was coming but yet was already there in his person. He gathered followers, he spoke against those in authority, and he sharply critiqued the ways that Israel had become just like the pagan nations. And finally, when the time comes to complete his work, to release the people from bondage, to cast the powers of this world to the ground and shatter them, what does he do? He dies! He doesn't march on Jerusalem with a rag-tag army like the Maccabees did over a hundred years before. He doesn't take up his rightful place on the throne of Israel and restore the Davidic line of kings. In fact, Israel was still ruled by Rome and the people's lives were not noticeably different after he died compared to before. When you think of it, it is a pretty funny way of establishing a kingdom.
And yet, we don't say that God established his kingdom here on earth in spite of the death of Christ, do we? No, we say that God established it through his death, that there really wasn't any other way it could come about, that to try to establish the kingdom of God using the same "weapons" as human kings use would make absolutely no sense at all. If Jesus' kingdom depended on how well he was able to marshal troops, to combat and defeat trained Roman soldiers, we would have no choice but to say that he was an absolute failure. And yet, we don't say that, do we? We don't say that because Christ's death wasn't a sign of his failure, it redefined what it means to succeed. Success is not an avoidance of death, but an emerging on the other side of death in resurrection. From the outside, we would have to say that the Jesus movement was kept alive in spite of Christ's death. From the inside, we know that there was no other way, and to do it in another way, a more conventional way, a way that made more sense to the outside world, would never actually work.
Look at just about any hero of the faith. Abraham was over ninety years old when God called him and told him that he would be the father of a great nation, something that is very hard to do if you have no children and are not likely to have any. Moses was an eighty year old shepherd with a speech impediment who had burned all his bridges with the Egyptian royalty. Gideon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into leadership in order to overthrow the nations that were ruling over Israel. Jonah was a bigot who hated the Ninevites, the ones he was called to preach to, with every ounce of his being. The list could be made as long as we like. The point is that if we ever imagined that the standards of the world were the best way to move forward in God's eyes, not a single leader in Israel's history, including David and Jesus, would have been taken seriously.
What can we learn from this? I am sure we can learn many things, but what I am increasingly convinced of is that it means that we should not pay even the smallest bit of attention to how other people do things, at least if they are people that we could consider, on one level or another, to be our enemies. If David attempted to meet Goliath using the same kinds of weapons and armor that he used, he would have been killed; if Jesus tried to establish his kingdom like earthly kings, not only would it not have worked, we would have missed out on the real kingdom of God, which is far greater than the kingdoms of this world.
This means that we need to stop looking over our shoulders and seeing if we are keeping up with the Joneses, to see if we are doing the same things as everyone else, because what they are doing has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on what we need to be about. Trying to measure yourself by other people can only lead to pride, if you think you are doing well compared to them, or despair, if you think you aren't doing as well. The same is true if you think that the only way that God could be calling you to behave is the way others behave.
Allow me to give some concrete examples. Any of you who have children who are still in school, especially if they are in middle school, are doubtlessly aware of a phenomenon called "drama." Drama, in this sense, is not to be confused with theatrics. Drama is an age-old issue with a new name. It is when one person, or group of people, starts spreading rumors about others, or begins to talk about someone else behind their back. Drama is the number one complaint I have ever heard from people who are in school. Seeing that it is such a big problem, and one that everyone seems to notice and understand, what do you think is the number one way to deal with school drama? More drama! As amazing as it might sound, the way that people in school most commonly deal with the drama in their lives is to instigate more drama, as if somehow, if we can just get the last word in, everything will be fine. What is this but a modern example of using Goliath's weapons against him? The result is never that Goliath is slain, but only that we get beaten, because he is a giant and we are small and he has more experience with them than we could ever have. The only way to win at the drama game by using more drama is to somehow become the kind of person who is better at creating turmoil than anyone else, and then you may have won, but you have become a person whose self-worth is determined by how bad you can make other people feel. You can only defeat Goliath using his own weapons by becoming a bigger, nastier, more cruel giant than him, which is no real victory.
When I was serving a different church, there were several churches, within convenient driving distance, who specialized in reaching out to college students. To that end, they had developed fantastic praise bands, they integrated contemporary culture into their services, and they had an amazing network where new people in the school could be reached by word of mouth. The people at the church I was serving were noticing that people they knew were traveling to attend these other churches and they wanted to find a way to get them back home. In order to do that, it was suggested to reinstate our own praise band that had been discontinued by a previous pastor and to try to copy these other churches and do what they do to get those people back.
Now, there are many reasons why this is a problem. First, there is a big problem with looking at other churches as being our enemies. They aren't our enemies. People may have left our church at one point to go there, but at least they are going somewhere, they are still putting themselves in a position of hearing the word of the Lord, of joining the larger body in worship, and learning how to live as Christians together. There are far too many people in any given town who are simply unreached to worry about those who are still Christians, just a different brand than us.
But beyond that, it is an idea that is doomed. There is nothing wrong with reinstating a praise band, there is nothing wrong with a church becoming more contemporary. The problem is when those things are pursued in the belief and with the conviction that they are the way to reach others. If that church had gotten a band together and said to the people of their community, "You should come to this church because we have a band," they could respond, "So does this other church, and their band is better." The fact of the matter is that we could never win if that was our strategy. The churches we would have hoped to compete against had been doing those things for a good twenty years. They had experience and money invested in it that we could never even come close to duplicating. It would have amounted to nothing more than looking at other churches and calling them Goliath (a problem in itself), and then saying that the best way to "slay" that Goliath is to do what they are doing. It would have been as disastrous as if David had fought Goliath with a sword and shield instead of with a sling and some stones.
So I urge you, in every aspect of your lives; in your personal faith journeys, in your relation to the church, in the way you treat people in your workplace, and in every other way, listen to God and do what God tells you to do and do it the way God tells you to do it, regardless of how silly or counter-intuitive it might seem. If David had said, "No way, God. There is no way I can go against a giant with just a sling and some stones," he would have never won the battle and would have never become the great king that he was called to be.
On top of that, do not allow other people to discourage you from doing it. What if Saul had said to David, "You will either fight Goliath my way or you will not fight him at all?" He would have never defeated him, or even may never have gone out to battle in the first place. Someone else would have had to fight the giant, maybe without listening to God at all, and that would also have been disastrous. If God has called you, and he has, he will make it clear what you should do. Do you wish that your church would develop a particular kind of ministry because it is something you care about and you know that others probably care about it, too? Go do it! If someone tells you that it is doomed to failure because you aren't doing it the way they would do it, even if you know that God isn't calling you to do it their way, keep faithful. Sometimes the greatest victories, as we see in the Bible, come when they are the most unlikely of all.
When God calls his people, he equips them, not in the way that seems best to the rest of the world, but in the way that is actually best for that time and place. We do not need to worry about what has happened before, or even what is happening right now. We need to be about participating in what God is doing in the days ahead and we need to join him in that. I am not sure that I know exactly where that is, and I am not sure that any other single person knows, but I trust that God will reveal it to us as an entire congregation and will do so by motivating individuals and small groups to step forward and make a difference. God is likely even calling you right now, in this season of your life. Be in prayer and be encouraged to step out boldly, for it not just a human being who believes in you and supports you, but the very almighty God of the universe. As silly as it might seem, cast aside your sword and shield and take up your sling and stones, for the weapons that are chosen and anointed by God are better than the best that we could find on our own. Let us pray.
AMEN
"Trinity Sunday" 2012
06/10/12 "Trinity Sunday" 2012 Grace UMC
Over the years, the worldwide church has suggested that local churches take certain times of the year and set them aside to talk about certain things. For example, in December, we talk about Jesus being born and in the early Spring, we talk about the Resurrection of Christ from the dead. There is nothing magical about these times; they could have just as well been different. But the thing that is wonderful about this is that it gives us a pattern, a way to live our lives together as Christians that allows us to weave the key parts of the story of God's interaction with humanity into the very fabric of our lives so that it more deeply makes up part of who we are.
It is about this time of year that this pattern suggests that we should talk about the fact that the God we worship is not just a single isolated individual, marked simply by unchangingness and perfection. After all, even the pagan Greek philosophers thought that God was like that. Rather, the God we worship is a community of three Persons that are all bound together in the same Being. That is to say, we worship a God who is Triune.
I would imagine that many of you have either not heard any sermons on the Trinity or, at least, not too many of them. Why is that? After all, we declare that we believe in the Trinity every time someone is baptized and we imply it every time we take communion. In fact, the creeds that have historically bound the church together are deeply Trinitarian, both in form and content. One could say that the Trinity forms the basic grammar of our Christian faith. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was profoundly Trinitarian, though not everyone has noticed it. In his sermon on the Trinity, after he had made a point of stressing that Christians can disagree on a wide variety of issues, says this. "But there are some truths more important than others. It seems there are some which are of deep importance...surely there are some which it nearly concerns us to know, as having a close connexion with vital religion. And doubtless we may rank among these that contained in [the words] 'There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: And these three are one.'" Wesley, who was so willing to be flexible on a number of significant issues, wouldn't budge on the Trinity.
Why is that we as Christians are so reluctant to talk about the Trinity in which, we say, we believe? I don't think it is really all that much of a mystery. After all, most people have never really heard the Trinity related to and connected up with their basic Christian faith and experience. Now why not? Why shouldn't a belief that lies so close to the heart of Christian faith be strongly related the very core of that faith in practical terms? I think it is because we have had a tendency to start by saying, "Yep, I believe in the Trinity. I'm not entirely sure why I believe in it, but they tell me that I should, so I'll go with it." Once we do that, however, and it happens among scholars just as often as among laypeople, we have a doctrine that we hold because we were told to, not because it resonates with the depths of our Christian experience, and now we have to make sense of it.
But how do we make sense of it? We sometimes use images like an egg, which is one egg but is made up of yolk, white, and shell, or water, which can be solid, liquid, or gas. Now, whatever else those images might do, they certainly don't make us say, "Now I understand why the angels of heaven hide their faces before the glory of God and cry 'Holy, Holy, Holy!" Even if we use more sophisticated images or ideas, we often set out to explain how three can be one and how one can be three in a way that doesn't really relate to what God has actually done in Christ. I am not in any way blaming people for doing this, so don't feel bad if you have used those kinds of explanations. After all, what better examples do we have? In many ways, the history of the church has let us down because for the last 1,500 years, it is as if we have said, "We talked about the Trinity once upon a time but now we all agree, so let's stop thinking about it." Then, it is only when someone comes along and says that the Trinity is nothing more than confused mathematical thinking, that we realize that we don't have a good answer.
Why is it that we should care about the Trinity? The short answer is that it is bound up with the depths of our Christian faith. Not a single other religion or philosophy has developed a doctrine of the Trinity like the church has. In spite of all the times that it has been pointed out that the word "Trinity" does not appear in the New Testament, Christians have never yet been convinced, in general, to give it up. There is something about the nature of Christian faith, that is unique, which drives us to consistently say that we have to think of God as one Being but three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That something is the living reality of Jesus Christ.
Belief in the Trinity formed the major center of debate within the church for about a hundred years. People wrote book after book on all sides of the issue, there were councils where the leaders of the church had heated discussion about it, bishops were exiled when they did not agree with the dominant opinion in their area at the time. To us about 1,600 years later, it might seem hard to understand what the big deal was. We might be tempted to think that the debates over the Trinity were like how our contemporary debates often are, either two sides who just like fighting and will fight over anything they can, or else a debate that has gotten out of control because both sides basically agree, but can't realize it. However, neither of those things is the case.
The reason why the Trinity matters and why there were Christians who quite literally laid their lives down for it is because it goes to the very root of our Christian lives, whether we always realize it or not. The very basic fabric of your faith is Trinitarian in nature and the fact that we worship a Triune God bears its mark on your most fundamental Christian experience. John Wesley concluded his sermon on the Trinity with these remarks. "But the thing, which I here particularly mean is this: The knowledge of the Three-One God is interwoven with all true Christian faith; with all vital religion...I know not how any one can be a Christian believer till he '[has],' as St. John speaks, 'the witness in himself;' till 'the Spirit of God witnesses with his spirit, that he is a child of God;' that is, in effect, till God the holy Ghost witnesses that God the Father has accepted him through the merits of God the Son: And, having this witness, he honours the Son, and the blessed Spirit, 'even as he honours the Father.' Not that every Christian believer adverts to this [that is, not every Christian talks about their faith in distinctly Trinitarian terms]; perhaps, at first, not one in twenty: But if you ask any of them a few questions, you will easily find it is implied in what he believes."
The fact of the matter is that, if you are a Christian, if God has cleansed you with the blood of Christ and transformed you through the power of the Holy Spirit, you are already Trinitarian. Wesley said that we could easily find that this is true if we just ask a few questions. If I were to ask you, “Are you accepted in the eyes of God?” You would say to me, “Yes!” Then I would ask you, “How were you accepted by God?” Your answer would be something like, “Because God became a man in Jesus Christ and died for my sins.” Finally, I would ask you, “How did you come to know that you were accepted?” Your answer might not be quite like this, but it would be similar. “Because the Spirit of God bore witness in my heart that I am a child of God.” Our very most basic Christian experience is rooted in the fact that God is triune.
I think it is one of the most profound tragedies of our contemporary Christian culture that we have neglected the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which is truly the Christian understanding of God. And why do we do it? We do it because we can't see how it actually applies. We are told, perhaps in confirmation, that as Christians, we are Trinitarian, and so we believe it. It has been seen for so long as so crucial to what it means to be a Christian that we are afraid to deny it, but we could never defend it if someone were to press us on it. For many Christians, we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place with the Trinity and we are afraid to ask for clarification and often times we don't have any examples of people who think that it matters enough to talk about or think through.
So, what are we really saying when we say that God is Triune? What we are really saying, what lies at the root of our fundamental, Trinitarian conviction is that, in Jesus Christ, we have to do with God. When we say that we believe in the Trinity, we are saying that, when we look at Jesus and all the things that he said and did, we are looking at God doing them. His words are the very words of God, his actions are the very deeds of God. In Christ, we are face-to-face with God and not just a messenger of God. Jesus is not merely a prophet, not just one upon whom the Spirit of God rests, but one who is God in his very self, at the core of his being. We believe that everything that Jesus says and everything Jesus does is truth, that he is the very definition of truth, that he is the truth, and that this truth applies no less when we see him praying to and communicating with his Father in heaven.
When we say that we believe in the Trinity, we are saying that this same God that we come to know in and through Jesus Christ has also taken up residence in the hearts and lives of the people who belong to the Father through the shedding of the blood of Christ. We are saying that, not only did God so love the world that he sent his only son so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life, but that this salvation does not come like a kind of "get out of hell free" card, but by God coming and redeeming us from the inside out. In Christ, we see that God loves us so much to limit himself, meet us on our own level, and ultimately take our broken and diseased condition upon himself and condemn our sin to death on the cross. In the Holy Spirit, we see that God loves us so much as to enter into each of our fallen lives, to meet each of us where we are and to take our hearts and connect them to the heart of Christ, so that our words begin to sound like the words of Christ and our actions begin to look like the deeds of Christ.
This is why we heard that passage from John as our text for this morning. Jesus says, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you." This is one of the most amazingly Trinitarian passages in the entire Bible. Everything that belongs to the Father in heaven also belongs to Jesus, his Son. There is nothing of God that is missing in Christ. Everything we say about the Father, we say about the Son, except "Father." But that is not all. The Holy Spirit, to whom Jesus refers as the Spirit of truth, is the one who takes the things of Christ and declares them to us. The Spirit is the means through which we have come to faith in Jesus Christ, the one who took the blood of Christ and made it real in our lives, who continues to take the things of Christ and make them known to us. In a very real sense, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the very life of Christ, God in flesh, is made real in our lives so that the blood of Christ begins to pump through our veins and shapes us into people who begin to follow more closely in the footsteps of Christ in his life of love, devotion and obedience to the Father.
So, aside from the fact that the very fabric of our Christian life is Triune, what impact does the Trinity have on our daily lives? It shapes the way we live because we have not just been made in the image of God, but in the image of the Triune God, the God in whom the relationships between the Persons is every bit as important as the Persons themselves. This means that we are people for whom our relationships are just as important as who we think we are on our own. It means that we cannot be the people we were made to be if we insist on doing things by ourselves and always doing things our own way.
So, if we are made in the image of this Triune God, we would expect that we are made for relationship and that we cannot be who we were made to be if we do not allow those relationships to touch the core of who we are. The fact of the matter is that, whether we like it or not, we already are affected by our relationships. More and more, both in theology and in natural science, it is becoming clear that our relationships make up part of who we are. If our relationships with other people are not centered in Christ, there is a part of us that is not centered in Christ. If we surround ourselves with people who do not love the Lord, who live in ways that are not compatible with the Gospel, it is only a matter of time before those relationships begin to drag us away from our God. However, there are other people whose lives are so characterized by faith that it is the easiest and most natural thing in the world to be a Christian when we are around them. When we surround ourselves with people like that, it is only a matter of time before we begin to become more faithful, joyful people. Both of these things happen because our relationships really do affect us.
We are the church. We are the people whom Paul describes as being the ones who live lives worthy of the calling with which we have been called, who live with all humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another in love. We are the people who are to make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. We are one body with one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. If you notice, Paul even speaks of the church in Trinitarian terms. We are the people who have been made right with God in Christ and through the Holy Spirit; we are the people who give our prayer and praise back in the Holy Spirit, through Christ to the Father. And because of all that, we are bound to each other, to build one another up, to contribute in our own unique way to the work of God in our midst.
We are Trinitarians because we believe that when we look into the face of Christ lit up by the Holy Spirit, we see the very face of God. We are Trinitarians because we believe that what God has done shows us who God truly is. We are Trinitarians because we believe that God does not just sit up, far away from his people, telling us what to do and what not to do, but loves us so much as to meet us where we are, to transform us, and to lift our lives, even here and now, into his presence. We are Trinitarians because we believe that we is just as basic as me and we live our lives for each other because we know that what happens to you impacts me and what happens to me impacts you. And finally, we are Trinitarians because God has loved us so much to reveal himself to us as he actually is and not how we would like to imagine him. And that is good news. Let us pray.
AMEN
Over the years, the worldwide church has suggested that local churches take certain times of the year and set them aside to talk about certain things. For example, in December, we talk about Jesus being born and in the early Spring, we talk about the Resurrection of Christ from the dead. There is nothing magical about these times; they could have just as well been different. But the thing that is wonderful about this is that it gives us a pattern, a way to live our lives together as Christians that allows us to weave the key parts of the story of God's interaction with humanity into the very fabric of our lives so that it more deeply makes up part of who we are.
It is about this time of year that this pattern suggests that we should talk about the fact that the God we worship is not just a single isolated individual, marked simply by unchangingness and perfection. After all, even the pagan Greek philosophers thought that God was like that. Rather, the God we worship is a community of three Persons that are all bound together in the same Being. That is to say, we worship a God who is Triune.
I would imagine that many of you have either not heard any sermons on the Trinity or, at least, not too many of them. Why is that? After all, we declare that we believe in the Trinity every time someone is baptized and we imply it every time we take communion. In fact, the creeds that have historically bound the church together are deeply Trinitarian, both in form and content. One could say that the Trinity forms the basic grammar of our Christian faith. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was profoundly Trinitarian, though not everyone has noticed it. In his sermon on the Trinity, after he had made a point of stressing that Christians can disagree on a wide variety of issues, says this. "But there are some truths more important than others. It seems there are some which are of deep importance...surely there are some which it nearly concerns us to know, as having a close connexion with vital religion. And doubtless we may rank among these that contained in [the words] 'There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: And these three are one.'" Wesley, who was so willing to be flexible on a number of significant issues, wouldn't budge on the Trinity.
Why is that we as Christians are so reluctant to talk about the Trinity in which, we say, we believe? I don't think it is really all that much of a mystery. After all, most people have never really heard the Trinity related to and connected up with their basic Christian faith and experience. Now why not? Why shouldn't a belief that lies so close to the heart of Christian faith be strongly related the very core of that faith in practical terms? I think it is because we have had a tendency to start by saying, "Yep, I believe in the Trinity. I'm not entirely sure why I believe in it, but they tell me that I should, so I'll go with it." Once we do that, however, and it happens among scholars just as often as among laypeople, we have a doctrine that we hold because we were told to, not because it resonates with the depths of our Christian experience, and now we have to make sense of it.
But how do we make sense of it? We sometimes use images like an egg, which is one egg but is made up of yolk, white, and shell, or water, which can be solid, liquid, or gas. Now, whatever else those images might do, they certainly don't make us say, "Now I understand why the angels of heaven hide their faces before the glory of God and cry 'Holy, Holy, Holy!" Even if we use more sophisticated images or ideas, we often set out to explain how three can be one and how one can be three in a way that doesn't really relate to what God has actually done in Christ. I am not in any way blaming people for doing this, so don't feel bad if you have used those kinds of explanations. After all, what better examples do we have? In many ways, the history of the church has let us down because for the last 1,500 years, it is as if we have said, "We talked about the Trinity once upon a time but now we all agree, so let's stop thinking about it." Then, it is only when someone comes along and says that the Trinity is nothing more than confused mathematical thinking, that we realize that we don't have a good answer.
Why is it that we should care about the Trinity? The short answer is that it is bound up with the depths of our Christian faith. Not a single other religion or philosophy has developed a doctrine of the Trinity like the church has. In spite of all the times that it has been pointed out that the word "Trinity" does not appear in the New Testament, Christians have never yet been convinced, in general, to give it up. There is something about the nature of Christian faith, that is unique, which drives us to consistently say that we have to think of God as one Being but three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That something is the living reality of Jesus Christ.
Belief in the Trinity formed the major center of debate within the church for about a hundred years. People wrote book after book on all sides of the issue, there were councils where the leaders of the church had heated discussion about it, bishops were exiled when they did not agree with the dominant opinion in their area at the time. To us about 1,600 years later, it might seem hard to understand what the big deal was. We might be tempted to think that the debates over the Trinity were like how our contemporary debates often are, either two sides who just like fighting and will fight over anything they can, or else a debate that has gotten out of control because both sides basically agree, but can't realize it. However, neither of those things is the case.
The reason why the Trinity matters and why there were Christians who quite literally laid their lives down for it is because it goes to the very root of our Christian lives, whether we always realize it or not. The very basic fabric of your faith is Trinitarian in nature and the fact that we worship a Triune God bears its mark on your most fundamental Christian experience. John Wesley concluded his sermon on the Trinity with these remarks. "But the thing, which I here particularly mean is this: The knowledge of the Three-One God is interwoven with all true Christian faith; with all vital religion...I know not how any one can be a Christian believer till he '[has],' as St. John speaks, 'the witness in himself;' till 'the Spirit of God witnesses with his spirit, that he is a child of God;' that is, in effect, till God the holy Ghost witnesses that God the Father has accepted him through the merits of God the Son: And, having this witness, he honours the Son, and the blessed Spirit, 'even as he honours the Father.' Not that every Christian believer adverts to this [that is, not every Christian talks about their faith in distinctly Trinitarian terms]; perhaps, at first, not one in twenty: But if you ask any of them a few questions, you will easily find it is implied in what he believes."
The fact of the matter is that, if you are a Christian, if God has cleansed you with the blood of Christ and transformed you through the power of the Holy Spirit, you are already Trinitarian. Wesley said that we could easily find that this is true if we just ask a few questions. If I were to ask you, “Are you accepted in the eyes of God?” You would say to me, “Yes!” Then I would ask you, “How were you accepted by God?” Your answer would be something like, “Because God became a man in Jesus Christ and died for my sins.” Finally, I would ask you, “How did you come to know that you were accepted?” Your answer might not be quite like this, but it would be similar. “Because the Spirit of God bore witness in my heart that I am a child of God.” Our very most basic Christian experience is rooted in the fact that God is triune.
I think it is one of the most profound tragedies of our contemporary Christian culture that we have neglected the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which is truly the Christian understanding of God. And why do we do it? We do it because we can't see how it actually applies. We are told, perhaps in confirmation, that as Christians, we are Trinitarian, and so we believe it. It has been seen for so long as so crucial to what it means to be a Christian that we are afraid to deny it, but we could never defend it if someone were to press us on it. For many Christians, we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place with the Trinity and we are afraid to ask for clarification and often times we don't have any examples of people who think that it matters enough to talk about or think through.
So, what are we really saying when we say that God is Triune? What we are really saying, what lies at the root of our fundamental, Trinitarian conviction is that, in Jesus Christ, we have to do with God. When we say that we believe in the Trinity, we are saying that, when we look at Jesus and all the things that he said and did, we are looking at God doing them. His words are the very words of God, his actions are the very deeds of God. In Christ, we are face-to-face with God and not just a messenger of God. Jesus is not merely a prophet, not just one upon whom the Spirit of God rests, but one who is God in his very self, at the core of his being. We believe that everything that Jesus says and everything Jesus does is truth, that he is the very definition of truth, that he is the truth, and that this truth applies no less when we see him praying to and communicating with his Father in heaven.
When we say that we believe in the Trinity, we are saying that this same God that we come to know in and through Jesus Christ has also taken up residence in the hearts and lives of the people who belong to the Father through the shedding of the blood of Christ. We are saying that, not only did God so love the world that he sent his only son so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life, but that this salvation does not come like a kind of "get out of hell free" card, but by God coming and redeeming us from the inside out. In Christ, we see that God loves us so much to limit himself, meet us on our own level, and ultimately take our broken and diseased condition upon himself and condemn our sin to death on the cross. In the Holy Spirit, we see that God loves us so much as to enter into each of our fallen lives, to meet each of us where we are and to take our hearts and connect them to the heart of Christ, so that our words begin to sound like the words of Christ and our actions begin to look like the deeds of Christ.
This is why we heard that passage from John as our text for this morning. Jesus says, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you." This is one of the most amazingly Trinitarian passages in the entire Bible. Everything that belongs to the Father in heaven also belongs to Jesus, his Son. There is nothing of God that is missing in Christ. Everything we say about the Father, we say about the Son, except "Father." But that is not all. The Holy Spirit, to whom Jesus refers as the Spirit of truth, is the one who takes the things of Christ and declares them to us. The Spirit is the means through which we have come to faith in Jesus Christ, the one who took the blood of Christ and made it real in our lives, who continues to take the things of Christ and make them known to us. In a very real sense, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the very life of Christ, God in flesh, is made real in our lives so that the blood of Christ begins to pump through our veins and shapes us into people who begin to follow more closely in the footsteps of Christ in his life of love, devotion and obedience to the Father.
So, aside from the fact that the very fabric of our Christian life is Triune, what impact does the Trinity have on our daily lives? It shapes the way we live because we have not just been made in the image of God, but in the image of the Triune God, the God in whom the relationships between the Persons is every bit as important as the Persons themselves. This means that we are people for whom our relationships are just as important as who we think we are on our own. It means that we cannot be the people we were made to be if we insist on doing things by ourselves and always doing things our own way.
So, if we are made in the image of this Triune God, we would expect that we are made for relationship and that we cannot be who we were made to be if we do not allow those relationships to touch the core of who we are. The fact of the matter is that, whether we like it or not, we already are affected by our relationships. More and more, both in theology and in natural science, it is becoming clear that our relationships make up part of who we are. If our relationships with other people are not centered in Christ, there is a part of us that is not centered in Christ. If we surround ourselves with people who do not love the Lord, who live in ways that are not compatible with the Gospel, it is only a matter of time before those relationships begin to drag us away from our God. However, there are other people whose lives are so characterized by faith that it is the easiest and most natural thing in the world to be a Christian when we are around them. When we surround ourselves with people like that, it is only a matter of time before we begin to become more faithful, joyful people. Both of these things happen because our relationships really do affect us.
We are the church. We are the people whom Paul describes as being the ones who live lives worthy of the calling with which we have been called, who live with all humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another in love. We are the people who are to make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. We are one body with one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. If you notice, Paul even speaks of the church in Trinitarian terms. We are the people who have been made right with God in Christ and through the Holy Spirit; we are the people who give our prayer and praise back in the Holy Spirit, through Christ to the Father. And because of all that, we are bound to each other, to build one another up, to contribute in our own unique way to the work of God in our midst.
We are Trinitarians because we believe that when we look into the face of Christ lit up by the Holy Spirit, we see the very face of God. We are Trinitarians because we believe that what God has done shows us who God truly is. We are Trinitarians because we believe that God does not just sit up, far away from his people, telling us what to do and what not to do, but loves us so much as to meet us where we are, to transform us, and to lift our lives, even here and now, into his presence. We are Trinitarians because we believe that we is just as basic as me and we live our lives for each other because we know that what happens to you impacts me and what happens to me impacts you. And finally, we are Trinitarians because God has loved us so much to reveal himself to us as he actually is and not how we would like to imagine him. And that is good news. Let us pray.
AMEN
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