Sunday, May 30, 2021

Invited in

A Sermon preached on Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021 at St. Augustine’s

Isaiah 6:1-8, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17

Today is Trinity Sunday, sometimes also referred to as the only Sunday dedicated to a doctrine, rather than an event or a person. But of course, I could also make a case for Christmas being dedicated to the Incarnation, God becoming human, or Easter to the resurrection, and both of those are doctrines. And Trinity Sunday may not be about a person, but it is about God, one God in three persons.

Today is also a Family Service, so I thought I would look at ideas for explaining the concept of the Trinity to children. One suggestion was to use a hardboiled egg – one egg in three parts: shell, egg white and yolk. I did not find that very convincing. There is not a lot of life or love or movement in a hardboiled egg. And we cannot imagine the Trinity without any of those!

Another idea was to talk about the Trinity as describing God as a team, in which each person plays a particular role: a soccer team we have the goalkeeper, a defender and a forward (and yes I know that a football team has more than three people!). That’s not too bad an idea actually as in the course of a football game a forward player will also defend, defenders stop goals, and goalkeepers have even been known to score goals. And in the Trinity, it is not the case that each person only has one role. Take our creation for example. According to the Nicene Creed, the Father is “the maker of heaven and earth,” but through the Son “all things were made,” and the Holy Spirit is “the giver of life.” But still, team still sounds like three separate people and therefore overemphasises the three at the expense of the one.

The problem is that most analogies, however well intended, are always oversimplifications and end up diminishing one of the truths about the Trinity – whether it’s the distinction – that God is three persons – or the unity – that God is one. Even St. Patrick, one of whose prayers to the Trinity, to the Three in One and One in Three we will hear sung later as our final hymn, was guilty of an oversimplification when, at least according to legend, he used the shamrock as a metaphor for the Holy Trinity when he was first introducing Christianity to Ireland.

So, if analogies won’t help, what about our readings, what do they have to say about the Trinity? One of the challenges to preaching on Trinity Sunday is that there are no Biblical passages that fully describe our Christian understanding of God as three persons. But it is still a concept that emerges from our reflection upon scripture, upon how God was experienced.

The first passage we heard this morning was from the Prophet Isaiah. Seemingly out of nowhere, he finds himself in the presence of God and it is terrifying. This is God the creator, mighty, lofty, transcendent, utterly other. Isaiah believes that no one can see the Lord and live. After all, God told Mosesyou cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live." (Exodus 33:20) But Isaiah doesn’t die, instead God reaches out to him, makes him worthy and invites him to go as God’s messenger: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” God asks. Isaiah replies - emboldened and empowered - “Here am I; send me!” We hear nothing about Father, Son or Holy Spirit here, but we do learn one important thing. God desires relationship and God makes us worthy of that relationship, God values us.

The extract from Paul’s Letter to the Romans is a little more explicit. We have the Spirit of God, we have Christ – not called the Son in this section but still referred to as a child of God, and we have the Father. Even more importantly we have another invitation: if we allow ourselves to be led by the Spirit of God, we are children of God and we are empowered by the Spirit to call God “Abba (Dad)! Father!” Just as Jesus did. The Spirit brings new life and draws us into that relationship with God that we need and that God desires.

And then we have Jesus’ nocturnal encounter with Nicodemus. Here we have the Spirit, and we have God the Father sending the Son and again we have an invitation, to be born again or born from above or born of the Spirit. This is John’s equivalent of us being invited to become children of God, to enter into a new relationship with God, and to be given the gift of relating to a loving and forgiving God exactly as Jesus did.

In the end we cannot really explain the Trinity, not with an egg, not with a shamrock, not even with Scripture. God is not a thing or a being and so the categories we use to describe them just do not work. But what scripture and experience tell us is that God revealed godself in several distinct ways, that we call the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Together they form a communion of persons in perfect relationship with one another. But this relationship is not exclusive, it is not turned inward as if the persons of the Trinity were turning their backs on us. It is open and inclusive and invitational. God invites us into relationship, all of God. We heard how God the mighty Father and Creator invited Isaiah. We heard that God sent the Son – lifted up – to draw us closer to God. And we heard that God sent God’s Holy Spirit, that person of the three who stands most for connection, to makes us worthy and able to enter that relationship. And like Isaiah we are also sent – not sent away but sent into the world on God's behalf to extend that invitation to all we meet. There are no limits, no boundaries, no end to God and to God's love and desire for relationship.   

Amen.

 

Sunday, May 9, 2021

A compelling faith

 

A Sermon preached on Easter VI, May 9, 2021 at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden and St. Christoph, Mainz

Acts 10:44-48, 1 John 5:1-6, John 15:9-17

Some years ago, there was a UK TV comedy series called “men behaving badly.” And Church history has sometimes also been described as the story of Christians behaving badly. That is a comedic oversimplification of course. Church history is full of good people and behaviour, of self-sacrifice, of acts of love, of people inspired by their faith to fight for peace and justice: abolishing slavery and child labour to name two examples. But bad things have happened too. The crusades, Christians persecuting other Christians, or forced conversions by the sword and mass baptisms such as those that followed some of Charlemagne's early campaigns are just some examples. They are the reason one of the Solemn Collects on Good Friday is a prayer for “all who have not received the Gospel of Christ” that includes “those who in the name of Christ have persecuted others.” Because if they received the Gospel, they sure did not show it!

But what we heard in this and in last week’s readings from Acts is a very different kind of forced baptism. No one forced the Ethiopian Eunuch we heard about in last week’s Acts’ episode to be baptised, no one forced Cornelius and his household to be baptised in today’s extract. If anything, they almost had to force or at least persuade the church leaders to baptise them. Our friend from Ethiopia is recorded as saying: “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” And this week Peter says, "Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people - who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" Why would anyone want to prevent or withhold? Well, “these people” were gentiles, Cornelius was even a Roman centurion, and the very early church was still strictly focused on the people of Israel, which is why “the circumcised (i.e., Jewish) believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.” (Acts 10:45) They might even have been a bit upset or annoyed. But as Jesus said to Nicodemus (John 3:8) “The wind or spirit blows where it chooses,” which is not always where the established leadership thinks the spirit should go. And the Holy Spirit was active in both cases. It “fell upon all who heard the word” (Acts 10:44) and it worked through Philip inspiring him, when he explained and expounded scripture to the Ethiopian Eunuch.  What compelled them all to be baptised was not human force but the Holy Spirit and a compelling faith story.

The original sin of the Church has always been force and power, whether we used them to try and exclude people on the basis of their ethnicity, nationality, gender or sexual orientation, or whether we used them to forcibly include people or to make them believe the “right thing.” Both are wrong. We may pray to God that “the whole earth also worship you, all nations obey you, all tongues confess and bless you, and men and women everywhere love you and serve you in peace,”[1] but we do not achieve that by any form of compulsion, only by spreading God’s word and by the example we set and show.

If that is the case, why is Jesus commanding love? In George Orwell’s book 1984, Big Brother orders his subjects to love him, and it is the “Ministry of Love” that identifies, monitors, arrests and converts real and imagined dissidents until love for Big Brother and the Party replaces dissension. Sadly, in far too many countries around the world this model is still being practiced today. But it is not our model.

In our Gospel extract Jesus tells his disciples, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12) Yes, Jesus commands them to love, but you will note, not him. His commandment is that they, the disciples, should love one another following Jesus’ example. And his example is that “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (15:13) He will do the greatest thing that love can do and allow himself to be executed for his friends, and for us all. This is what the John of the today’s Epistle means when he says that Jesus came by water – when the Spirit descended on him at his Baptism – and blood – the crucifixion. As Paul writes to the Corinthians: “We proclaim Christ crucified.” (1 Cor. 1:23)

Jesus creates a context in which loving him, loving God is unavoidable, because it is a compelling vision. Jesus’ “command to love is given by one who has himself done everything that love can do.”[2] “I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father,” (John 15:15) Jesus says. And all of his teaching about God, about how God loves him, about how God “so loved the world that he gave his only son,” (John 3:16) is backed up by his behaviour, by his actions. He heals, he feeds, he serves, he gives life, he gives up his own life for us. No one has greater love than this. In the words of our Collect today, he pours love into our hearts. Jesus does not command us to love him, you cannot command an emotion, but to abide in his love. “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” (John 15:10) To abide means to dwell in, to rest in, by sharing in his love and in his life. By doing so, we conform our lives to the very pattern of God's own life, just as Jesus did. It will feel compelling, because it is what we were created for.  

We have been chosen and appointed to bear fruit – remember at the very beginning of this chapter Jesus had described himself as the true vine and us as the branches. Jesus is saying we have been chosen and appointed to go and manifest the life of God. God is love and so the main expression of this fruit is the love we show, within the Christian community and to the world into which the disciples were sent and we are being sent. God’s love came into the world in Jesus, it remained in the world in the community of his friends when they abided in his love. If we really want the whole earth to worship and obey God, and all tongues to confess and bless the Lord, and all people to love God and one another, then we need to present a compelling vision of love and an authentic life lived in love as a witness to God’s love.

Amen.



[1] Prayer for Mission, BCP p. 124

[2] John for Everyone, N. T. Wright, p. 74