Genesis 1:1-2, 26-28; 2 Corinthians 13:11-14 "Encircle Me"

Each night, as I put Bronte down to sleep, I take Bronte and cradle her in my arms and pray a blessing over her. It started out somewhat generic, but has become a blessing that rhymes and asks for the Holy Trinity to watch over her. It goes as follows:

May the Holy Trinity encircle you through the night. May your Heavenly Father enfold you in his arms. May Christ Jesus save you from all harms. May the Holy Spirit guide you through the night. That you may wake up fresh in the morning light.

This is an encircling prayer. It is a prayer or blessing designed to remind us of the Trinity and the fact that each part of the Trinity has a role in our lives. We often focus on just the Father or just the Son. Some churches focus on just the Spirit, but that is not a problem we often find in ourselves. And this prayer, this blessing is designed to remind us that we have a relationship with the whole Trinity.

God the Father is our father. Jesus reminds us that we are to call him our father and treat him as our father. And as I stand there, enfolding Bronte in my arms I imagine our heavenly Father doing the same for us.

Jesus, the Son of God, sometimes referred to as the Son of Man, was sent to save us. Usually we think in terms of Jesus saving us from our sins, and Jesus does this; but there are other things in this world and in our lives that we need to be saved from, and Jesus is able to save us from those as well.

The Holy Spirit is sometimes hard to grasp on to and to understand, but the Spirit is our comforter and our guide. The Spirit shows us the way and speaks to us when we need direction.

The Holy Trinity is active and real in our lives. God is not a distant god, God is a god of relationship, within the Godhead and with God’s people. And we are called to be a part of that relationship ourselves.

I. A Confusing Trinity

The church I grew up in until Junior High was Trinity Lutheran Church. I don’t remember many sermons preached there as I grew up, but I do remember the pastor commenting in one of his sermons that it was Trinity Sunday and he felt that because the church was Trinity Lutheran he should probably speak about the Trinity. I also remember him saying that this wasn’t always the easiest thing to do, as talking about the Trinity usually meant you were getting a little to theological in your sermon and not practical enough, and further that the concept of the Trinity is a hard one to wrap our minds around.

As I prepared for this morning’s sermon I realized that much of what my pastor growing up said was true. And yet, here I am preaching about the Trinity today. Hopefully I won’t get too theological at the expense of the practical, and hopefully what I have to share will make sense.

Today is Trinity Sunday. It is the day in the church year where we acknowledge that God is a god of relationship. God is so much a god of relationship that it is not enough that God have relationship with humans, God actually has relationship within the Godhead. The Father, the Son and the Spirit are interconnected, they are one, but at the same time they are three. This is a central part of our belief as Christians, and yet when you look at the Bible, it sometimes can be hard to see the Trinity laid out so very clearly. Don’t get me wrong, it’s in there, but it isn’t laid out as clearly as a textbook or a systematic theology would put it. We see monotheism pushed throughout the Old and New Testament, but there are hints that we see that the monotheism isn’t as clear cut as we’d like to believe. When we look at Genesis we see God hovering above the waters, above the chaos, and we know that this God is one. And yet when God creates humans he decides to create humans in “our own image”. Not “my own image” but “our own image”. And then in the Gospel of John we are told that God was not alone at the creation of the world after all. Rather, the Word was with him and the Word was the way that God went about creating the world. And we are let in on a little secret, that Word that was with God at the beginning of creation, that Word that the Old Testament referred to as Wisdom, comes down to us as Jesus, the Messiah. And we realize that though God is one, there is a complexity there that we just cannot understand.

And the Trinity is most explicitly shown in the Bible in the last line of 2 Corinthians, which we read this morning: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

II. Different Roles

This, like the blessing that I say to Bronte each and every night, is a Trinitarian blessing that acknowledges the fact that in the Trinity, God fulfills different roles. The Father loves us, the Son offers us grace and the Spirit brings us fellowship. Now we need to remember that God isn’t totally divided up. We don’t only receive love from the Father, and Jesus isn’t the only one offering grace, but at the same time, there are roles that each part of the Trinity fulfill.

When we usually think of the Father we think of him as the creator, the sustainer of this world. This is fair. This is how God the Father is originally introduced to us. And it is a part of his role that we ought to celebrate and rejoice in. But I fear that we often tend to think of the Father as distant, as set apart, as removed from our day to day lives. I believe we’ve had this conditioned into us in a number of ways. First, when we think of the creator of the universe, we think that God is probably a bit busy running the universe to deal with individual people and their individual problems. Or, perhaps it is that we have the watch-maker vision of the Father, a God who built the clock, set everything in motion, and then wound it up and let it run. But just because God created the world doesn’t mean that God is distant. Jesus shows this to us when he teaches us to pray, when he encourages us to call God “dad.” And Paul, in his Trinitarian blessing does not focus on the creative part of God the Father’s role, rather he focuses on his love. May the Love of God be with you, he says.

Jesus is our Savior. He is the one who offers us grace. He is the one who sacrificed himself for our sake. He lived out the love of the Father in the most powerful way. He died for our sins and offers us salvation. But it isn’t only salvation or grace that Jesus offers. We have other things mentioned throughout the Bible which he brings to us, like peace. That’s right, Jesus is the Prince of Peace and often Paul particularly offers the blessing asking for people to take the peace of Christ with them.

The Holy Spirit is the most confusing part of the Trinity. Not much is explicitly said about him, but we are told that he is our counselor, that he will stand up for us when we need someone to do so. We are told that he is our guide and our teacher, greater at leading us on the right path than our conscience could ever be. And we are told that the Spirit offers fruits and gifts to God’s people, so that we can live in union, in community, with each other and with God. The Spirit of God offers us fellowship with God and with each other, as we are made into the beings that God designed us to be.

III. Relationships

When we look at the Holy Trinity, when we look at what God is about being three and yet one, we realize that God is at his center a God of relationships. There is a reason that God decides that humans shouldn’t be alone, because, though God is one God, God is not alone either. God is a God of relationship and we see this in the way that the different parts of the Trinity work together. We see this in Jesus and his life on this earth as he talked about the Spirit of God being upon him and as he talked about God being his father.

In Genesis, God says that humans are going to be made in the image of God. Some people have taken this to mean that God has two eyes, two arms and a mouth. Many have realized that this is not what God meant when he said that humans would be in his image. Others have argued that being in God’s image means that we have a spiritual life, that we have a soul. And they would argue that this is what separates us from the rest of the world around us. And this has often been the Christian answer as to what it means to be in God’s image. But there is another possibility, as well. What if being in God’s image means that just like God we are beings of relationship as well. What if just like God we have a desire to create, to sustain, to offer grace to those around us, to live in fellowship. This is an amazing and powerful idea, because it means that we even have more reason to work out our relationships in Christ. It means that we have a divine imperative to work with each other, to come together, to find unity and strength in each other.

God has a special relationship going on within the Trinity, within the godhead. The Father and the Son and the Spirit are working together and loving together and sharing together. And then they invite us to be a part of that. They say that they want relationship with us, that they want to welcome us in, that we are allowed and able to join in with them in their work in this world. And so, how are we caring for the creation? How are we sharing God’s love with those around us? How are we offering the grace of Christ and the peace of Christ to those who have not experienced it? And how are we offering fellowship to each other? When we begin to do these things, then we find that we too are acting as we were made, in the image of God. And this is a wonderful place to be. Amen.

John 8:31-36 "Set You Free"

As I have mentioned many times before, I grew up Lutheran. Leaving the Lutheran church to go to a Covenant Seminary and join the ministerium of the Covenant Church was not an easy decision, nor was it one I took lightly. People have asked me why I left the Lutheran church and I have had to explain that it was not a repudiation of Lutheran theology. I believe much the same as I did when I was Lutheran. It was not a repudiation of Lutheran worship, either, at least mostly.

My deep dark secret is that I love Lutheran liturgy. When you listen to what is being said through the worship, the praise of God, the confession of sins, the statement of belief; there is power there. I love the fact that on a weekly basis, in the Lutheran liturgy, we are asked to confess our sins in a group and we are reminded of God’s love and forgiveness, and we are encouraged to turn from those sins. This is something that I feel is lacking in much contemporary worship, and in many non-liturgical settings.

And yet I always felt that people were rattling off the words of the liturgy and saying what it said without allowing the words to truly mean anything to them and inhabit them. This is not a problem that is only found in liturgical settings, though. It is just as possible and just as much a problem in contemporary worship; that we have great worship songs with powerful meaning and powerful words, and the people never allow themselves to connect with what they are saying.

No, the real reason I left the Lutheran church and joined the Covenant was that in Covenant theology and in Covenant practice I found a more real connection to the Lutheran theology and practice that I loved, and I found a separation from some of the dangers that I saw inherent in Lutheran theology and practice.

One of the dangers that I saw in Lutheran practice is a danger that is found in many faiths. It is the danger of believing that you can inherit your Christian faith; that it can be handed down from father to son, from mother to daughter. But we believe that faith is something that you need to have for yourself. It is a personal, not private but personal, relationship with God through his Son, Jesus. Lutheran theology says the same thing, and yet growing up I found people believing that their faith was something they inherited from their parents, something that was more a part of their culture than a part of them. And I found this sad and difficult.

I. Preaching to the Jews

A couple weeks ago I talked about how the gospel message had to be spoken in the language of the people hearing it. I shared the story of Paul preaching in Athens and using the very idols that he despised to bring the people of Athens to a place where they could hear about the God who created the whole world. Paul spoke in the language of the people to bring them to an understanding of the gospel. When Paul shared the gospel with the Greeks he needed to use things that mattered to them and talk a language that made sense to them. He couldn’t start with where he wanted them to be, he needed to start with where they were and allow them to be moved to where they needed to go.

Preaching to the Greeks can be difficult, and yet it can sometimes even be more difficult to preach to the Jews. You see, sometimes we need to preach to the religious. Sometimes we need to tell the people that are going through the motions that they need something more. Sometimes we need to remind each other that going to church is not enough, that faith isn’t something that you’ve inherited but rather something that needs to grab you and hold you and change you. Sometimes we need to reach out to the church-goers and tell them that there is something more.

This is the message that Jesus found himself having to share again and again. You see, Paul reached out to the heathens to tell them of the gospel, but Jesus was reaching out to the faithful, and Jesus often found that this was even more difficult. Jesus discovered that the sinners and the outcast found it easier to repent because they were better able to see their own sins. But the religious people, the ones who did their best to follow the commandments thought they were going the right way. And in today’s scripture we see Jesus bluntly challenge them on this. He goes farther after where we quit reading. He actually refers to them as children of the devil, though they believe that they are children of Abraham.

II. Children of Abraham

The religious people that Jesus is talking to believe that their ancestry gives them what they need. They believe that the faith of their fathers and mothers and great grandfathers and great great grandmothers will earn them salvation. They believe that because they are descended from Abraham, because of what their forefathers, the patriarchs, did, they are freed from sins. This is not a Biblical understanding of the world that they have. It does not fit with reality. Throughout the Old Testament God is always, again and again, calling his people back to him and hoping that they will learn to follow him on their own instead of relying on the faith that has gone before. And yet the people seemed to never truly get this message.

And here, in today’s scripture, Jesus tells us that we are called not just to be descendants of the faithful or children of Abraham, but his disciples. And Jesus tells us how to be his disciples as well, and it isn’t necessarily what we’d expect. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

If we hold to Jesus’ teachings, if we follow what it is that he calls us to do, how it is that he calls us to live, then we will know the truth and be his disciples. And if we know the truth we will be set free.

It is interesting what the response to this is by the faithful. Their response was that they were children of Abraham. They were already free. They hadn’t ever been slaves and they didn’t need to be set free. This, to me, epitomizes the false security held by many who are religious, who are comfortable, who have accepted their faith without question from their parents and grandparents. I am a Christian; I am the child of a Christian; I grew up going to church; I don’t need to be saved from anything.

Don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not putting this on Lutherans. I know people of every stripe and every faith who allow their faith to be cultural, allow it to seep down to them from their parents, who never make their faith their own. One thing that shocked me was when I discovered that this wasn’t only true of Christians, but of other religions as well.

We have heard so much about militant Muslims in the last years that we don’t always realize that there are also cultural Muslims. When I lived in Chicago and worked with developmentally disabled adults, we had a large group of men and women from Nigeria who worked for us. Many of them were Muslim. And yet they did not follow their faith terribly well. I heard about their parties, and I know they ignored the command to avoid alcohol that the Muslim faith requires. And I remember talking with one lady who had just completed Hajj, her trip to Mecca that is required of every Muslim at least once in their life, if at all possible. I was asking her what the experience was like and it didn’t seem to be much of a religious experience for her, rather a social and cultural one. I asked her how serious about her faith she was and she said she was pretty committed to it, “but if I found a good Christian man, I’d convert to Christianity so that I could marry him.” She was just one example of a whole group who were Muslim because that was what they were raised to be and not because that was what they necessarily believed. And I realized that there are many of all faiths and religions that go to church and go through the motions not because they believe, but because it is what is culturally expected of them, because it is what is easiest. They believe that because of what their parents and grandparents believed, they need to believe the same thing in the same way and thus they are saved.

III. Set Free

But Jesus has a different message: a message that tells us that being the children of Christians is not enough; a message that tells us that we cannot inherit salvation. Jesus tells us that we are all slaves. Unfortunately, this is what we have inherited from Adam and Eve. And we cannot blame this only on inheritance, either, for we each have sinned and therefore are slaves to sin. But we don’t need to live as slaves. If we follow Jesus’ teachings we will be his disciples and we will know the truth and the truth will set us free.

I find it kind of ironic that I am preaching about this today on Mothers’ Day. Mothers’ Day is the day we remember the mothers who have gone before us, and for many of us it is our mothers who so aptly and strongly encouraged us in the faith. And here I am, saying that this is not enough. Here I am saying that relying on our mother’s faith is not going to get us anywhere, that we need our own faith.

But I think that what I am saying this morning, what Jesus says in today’s scripture, actually does honor our mothers and the faith that they have brought us. You see, those who have gone before us don’t want us to just follow their faith blindly. They don’t want us to inherit a faith that is not our own. Rather they want us to make the faith that they brought us up in our own. They want to give us the chance to own it for ourselves, to accept it and believe it and live it in our lives. When we do this, when we allow the faith to inhabit our lives completely, then we discover that we too are Jesus’ disciples and we are living the life he called us to. And as the truth has set our mothers free it can set us free as well. Amen.

Acts 17:16-34 "Destroying/Using Idols"

I. Christendom Ends

How do we interact with a world around us that doesn’t believe the same things we do? Unfortunately, this is a question that we are going to have to ask ourselves more and more often in the coming years. The world is becoming less and less Christian and moving into a post-Christian time. Don’t get me wrong. Jesus and his message still matter, our faith still has something powerful to say to the world around it, but Christians may not be the ones in charge in the world as much anymore.

This isn’t all bad. Christianity is at its best when it is persecuted. Christians who have to fight for their very lives, Christians who have to daily pick up their cross to follow Christ and face the possibility of prison or death, often have a much deeper faith than Christians who are born into a faith that doesn’t mean terribly much to them. And when you look through the New Testament, through the teachings of Jesus particularly and even the teachings of Paul and the apostles, you will discover that there is very little about how to rule and much more about how to survive in a world that is turned against you.

And unfortunately, this is the direction that we are facing as a society. This is where Europe is already and if things don’t change, it is where America is headed as well. And yet there is hope for us as well. First, we will see that people who are involved in church, who are alive in their faith, are there because of what Jesus has done for them and not because it is expected of them. And second, now, as Christians, we have something that is different to offer those around us. We can stand up and show how living as a Christian is different than not living as a Christian. We can show how there is something special about following Christ. We stand out in our faith and our actions, and we can make a difference in the world around us. And, in truth, we can interact with the world around us in much the same way that the first Christians interacted with the world around them.

II. Preaching to the Greeks

When you look at the book of Acts, you see that Paul and the early apostles used different techniques to reach different groups of people with the good news of the Gospel. Paul tells us that he tried to be all things to all people. This means that he would reach out to people where they were instead of expecting them to become more like him before he talked with them. The first Christians shared their message with the Jews. They were preaching the good news of new life in Christ to people who had grown up believing in God, who were religious. They were preaching to the churchgoers who didn’t yet have a personal relationship with Christ. This in some ways is easy, and in some ways it is difficult. It is easy in that you are speaking the same language as the person you are sharing the Gospel with. The terminology makes sense to them, the message is there.

But then we see other instances where the Gospel needs to be explained from scratch. This is the situation that Paul finds himself in in Athens in today’s scripture. He is sharing the Gospel with people who do not have the same starting point as he does. They don’t believe in Yahweh. Instead, they surround themselves with idols and false gods. And Paul finds himself uncomfortable with this.

The story of Paul in Athens begins by sharing some of Paul’s frustrations. He has come to Athens and he looks around and he sees the idols around him. He is frustrated because he realizes that these idols will pull people away from Christ. He is frustrated because he knows that idol worship is wrong, a sin, and it cannot be tolerated. He is frustrated because he realizes that as he speaks the Word of God, he is going to be drowned out by all the voices speaking up for other religions and other gods.

So, Paul is frustrated, but he doesn’t let this stop him. He sees the idols around him, but he doesn’t allow them to silence him. Instead he begins to reason with Jews and God fearing gentiles in Athens. And he catches the ears of the Greek philosophers. I love the way they are described in this passage, I hope you catch the disdain here, “All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.”

These are academics of the worst kind. They are people who like to hear new ideas for the sake of hearing them. These are people who are more interested in hearing that something is new than hearing that it is true. When I was in college, more so than when I was in seminary, when we had to write papers for Bible classes, we were told that we had to use journal articles in our research that were less than two years old. The idea was that we had to see what the most recent thoughts were on the topic we were studying. And the underlying conceit was that the more recent scholarship, being more fresh, being newer, somehow had something more to offer than writings that were older.

I remember complaining about this to a couple professors, and being told that despite my complaints, I still had to use new research for my papers. Oh well.

I have often admired N.T. Wright, a Bishop in England and a very wise Bible scholar, whose new books usually find themselves on my to-read list. He spoke at a convention at North Park Seminary while I was there, and I found much wisdom in what he said. But I also discovered something else about him. He could talk the language of the Biblical skeptics. He could use the lingo that the Jesus Seminar people, who try to disprove Jesus’ divinity, would use. And he would use it to support a Biblical understanding of Jesus and his work in this world. I remember watching a special on TV around Easter one year and there were people speaking up against the resurrection and then N.T. Wright spoke up, and happened to receive the last word. He argued that when you look at the disciples, the way their lives were changed, the way they went from timid fishermen to evangelists, you have to realize that something miraculous happened in their lives, and in his mind, the only explanation for this is the resurrection. It is an argument that has stayed with me ever since, because it talked in the language of the skeptics, but it brought Biblical truth.

III. Speaking their Own Language

Paul finds himself in a similar situation in today’s scripture. Paul cannot share the Gospel in his own words, in his own language, because the people would not hear it. He couldn’t just come out and tell them that idol worship was evil and they should stop it because they had no reason to listen to what he had to say. Instead, Paul found a creative and unusual way to speak the truth to the people of Athens while at the same time honoring them and their quest for knowledge, their quest for truth.

Paul knew that he had to lead the people of Athens from their idol worship and their relativity in what they believed to a Biblical understanding of Jesus and his Gospel. Paul knew that he had to begin where they were and move them towards the truth. He ends up with a call for them to repent of their idol worship. But this isn’t where he began. He began by acknowledging their idols and even using one of them as an illustration point to point them towards God. Basically, he began by speaking their own language and speaking to them where they were.

I think we can learn much from Paul’s approach here. I think we can learn to be observant like Paul was, and even when we see sins around us, we don’t need to come out first and foremost in speaking against those sins, but rather use them as a place of contact with the lost. Of course, just as Paul does, we do need to point people towards God and his love as well as his commands for our lives, but this isn’t necessarily the place to start. Instead we can reach out and figure out where people think their needs are.

We know that those around us need Jesus. But they don’t often realize this themselves. But instead of shouting at them and telling them how much they need Jesus, we can reach out with the things they think they need, and use that as an opportunity to share Jesus with them.

A few weeks ago our church board had a retreat where we talked about how to reach out to our community. And we talked about needs in the community around us and how we can reach them. And we realized that there are many needs of those around us that just aren’t getting met. And we decided that we want to start meeting some of those needs. So we decided to find ways to be a resource to those around us. Sharing with them areas where they need help, offering resources to people who don’t have them. We decided that we want to meet people where they are instead of where we want them to be. And we believe that God can use us through this to bring them to where he wants them to be. You see, if we speak their language, the language of their needs, then soon they will begin to speak our language and the Holy Spirit will begin to work in them and through them and they will become new creations. This is what we are about as God’s church. Let us enter into this with excitement and joy as we reach out to those around us who need Jesus. Amen.