Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever. Amen.
The words have changed. Only a week ago we said, “Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!” But now something else passes our lips. It’s a familiar phrase, one we say somewhere around 60% of the year; and yet to speak the Triune Name, to bless Him: what a mystery that is, and what a miracle. We may not think in those terms — because who does think about the Trinity? Even priests avoid it. We quip that Trinitarian doctrine is a matter for theologians, and then make the curate preach on this particular Sunday every year. To do so, though, to equivocate when it comes to the One in Three and Three in One, is to miss a gift. For this encounter and any encounter with the Triune God is a blessing. We say it. We bless him; and in doing so he blesses us. Which is actually incredible and maybe even a little unbelievable. God blesses us — us, who get him so wrong so much of the time. Such is the human predicament. Since time immemorial, when people began to look from their hands to the sky and wonder if anyone was up there, humankind has been calling on almost any god but the LORD. Thor, Zeus, you name it — pagan antiquity came up with some pretty sophisticated substitutions. But now, after two World Wars and the Atom Bomb and the Internet, most modern people have settled on worshiping the god of their imaginations, the deity that deals in thumbs-ups and bright smiles, a deity in which our world believes and proclaims. “God,” in this age, is the affirmative voice that resides somewhere in our subconscious, a voice that wants us to be happy and that is eager to show us the path of self-fulfillment, where the individual is the beginning and end of everything. But then life happens, as it always does. The toddler cries all day or the relationship falls apart or the beloved parent or friend or spouse forgets our name. What can we do, what can anything or anyone do when that happens? What could we buy that might alleviate the emptiness that rushes up to meet us? What could we watch that might loosen the grip of pain and fear that threatens to consume us? What could we say when there are simply no words left? Very little. Maybe nothing. When tribulation comes, there is no mortal power within us that can surmount our suffering. And there is no mortal power outside of us that can transform our suffering. On our own we are frail and fragile and helpless — but with God we are not. Which is not just something nice to say. It is the truth. We’ve all searched, desperately at times, for the cure to our sorrows or the balm for our anxieties. And, like most people, we have looked at the sky and screamed at the clouds even if we weren’t sure that anyone was listening. That is part of our nature. Each of us knows, whether by the beating of our hearts or in the movement of our souls, that Someone is listening. Someone does care. And we know his Name. Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is no figment of our imagination. He is not someone we can control or even fully comprehend. He is God of gods and Lord of lords. The saints and doctors of the Church have taught us that God is of one substance. He alone is divine, all-holy, all-powerful, unchanging. Or, to put it another way, He Is Who He Is; and no one and nothing else is like him. And yet he doesn’t exist in isolation. God speaks. He breaths. He loves. God is unity in community: Three Persons in One Being, a being that is perfectly at rest. Perfectly content. Perfectly whole. We could spend years meditating on the ways the Church has conceived to speak about the Trinity; but, perhaps this morning, all we need to remember is that the God who made everything that is is the God who redeemed everything that is is the God who sanctifies everything that is. We live and move and breathe in his reality, a kingdom marked not by selfish self-fulfillment but by selfless self-giving love. Such is the nature of the One we worship, a God who will draw us out of ourselves and into his Life, that we might be united with Him. That we might come into the presence of God Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth, not as a caricature of what humankind can be but made into the very image of his Son through the working of his Spirit. Which doesn’t happen in one day. This is a journey, a pilgrimage that happens at walking-speed and according to the tempo of our own heartbeat. God will lead us away from the cramped and cracked altars we build in our hearts toward his heavenly throne. Abiding with the One who is near us, all around us, and in us, we will find God. We will encounter Him. And he will stop us in our tracks, bring us to our knees, and lift our hearts to the place where the Holy One sits and from which the Holy One came down and to which the Holy One always returns. And that’s the key: Worshiping the Holy Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is really not about understanding a doctrine. It’s not about the ability to speak with confidence of a mystery we can’t actually comprehend. Worshiping the Trinity is about surrendering ourselves to a God who is above all and through all and in all, and who nevertheless humbles himself to meet us where we are. And, mystery of mysteries, we know when he does. Every time our spirit longs for hope and healing, every time our hearts cry, “Abba, Father!” the Spirit bears witness to our spirit that we are God’s children, the beloved of the Trinity. As we take hold of that faith, as we grow in him, as we grow in love, we will begin to live with the kind of peace and joy that binds the Father and the Son and the Spirit together, until we become the kind of children who are always looking for, always running toward, always begging to be held by the Beloved. Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever. AMEN.
0 Comments
In the Name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
They didn’t believe him at first. He was leaving them, that much they grasped; but Jesus talked about it as though his departure would be a good thing. And how could it be? When you love a person, you want them to be near, to never go far. And yet he had — and more than once. Jesus was betrayed, arrested, led to his death. He died a criminal. Almost every one of his disciples abandoned him. Until the news of his resurrection brought them back, three days later, shaking to the upper room. “Peace be with you,” Jesus said. He talked with them. Walked among them. Ate with them. But not for long. Forty days after his resurrection, Jesus met with his disciples on a mountain outside of Jerusalem and told them that he was going back to the Father. “I will send you the Advocate, the Holy Spirit,” he said. And then he was gone. Looking at the sky, the disciples marveled and wept and surely remembered the words Jesus spoke in our Gospel text today: “I tell you the truth; it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you, but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.” What could those words have meant to the disciples when they first heard them? And what did those words mean to them as they peered into the clouds? “It is to your advantage that I leave. I will go and send you someone else.” The mystery of God’s will was still a mystery, even as the day of Pentecost dawned. The disciples had waited. And wondered. And prayed. They knew that something was coming; but nothing else was clear. All they could do was abide in that place of expectation, painful as it was, and believe that the promise Jesus gave them would be fulfilled. And it was. In the space of a moment — in the space of a breath — the early morning clamor of the City of Peace was swallowed up in the roar of gale-force winds. Fire appeared and burned over the disciples’ heads; and the Holy Spirit himself filled the room. And not just that. For the breath of God filled the disciples, too. It was almost like breathing for the first time. The fear was gone. The sorrow was gone. The confusion was gone. Divine life had been poured out without hesitation or limitation on the men and women gathered there that day, and the experience was nothing less than re-creation. We see it happen. We hear it happen. Think of Peter, the disciple who got so much right when he wasn’t getting it so utterly wrong. Peter stood up and, filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, told the crowds gathered before him that these were the days of which the prophets had spoken and that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, sent by God himself to save the world. And the crowd believed him. They heard the Truth in his voice. And that was transformative. Thousands of people began to worship Jesus that day. Thousands of people were baptized. Thousands of people received the Holy Spirit. The presence of God was palpable. The lame walked and the mute spoke; but more wondrously and more miraculously, the rich became poor, and the poor became rich. Everyone had everything in common. And Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female sat down together to eat. That is Pentecost. This is Pentecost: the rebirth of the world as it was meant to be. We know from Holy Scripture that the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters at the very beginning of creation, holding everything that is in the knowledge and love of God. On the Day of Pentecost, that same story was retold. For in his descent, the Spirit takes what Christ has done and makes it our own. He takes the love and the faithfulness and the obedience Jesus showed to the Father and places the power to do the same in our own hearts. He fills us with the grace that makes us what we were always meant to be: We are no longer strangers but God’s friends, no longer enemies but beloved brothers and sisters to each other and to all of creation. That miracle isn’t just something that happened on a single day so long ago. We live in Pentecost. We move in Pentecost. The Spirit of God has come, and he fills all things and sanctifies all things. He is God, invisible almighty and eternal; and yet we can see him, know him, feel his presence in the lifting of our hearts and the glow of our countenance and the impulse to reach out in love to someone, to anyone purely because they are a fellow creation of the Lord our God. We know that the Holy Spirit is among us because no one else could cause that love to blossom and grow. No one but God himself could beget such holiness and wholeness that is the same sign and the same miracle that took place so long ago. We may not speak in the tongues of every nation, but moved by the Spirit and transformed by the Spirit and filled by the Spirit, we can and do speak in the language every human heart knows and longs to hear: which is love. One look at the news, one honest glimpse at ourselves, and we know without a doubt that the entirety of creation groans as if in labor pains, awaiting the coming of a God who makes right what is wrong and heals what is broken. We long for the day when wars will cease and suffering will end. We long for that day; and it is coming, not only in the future, when Christ returns in glory to judge the living and the dead, but now and every day in our hearts. We have the Spirit, the power of God himself to change and to grow into the likeness of his Son; and we have the honor to do so with him, to hope, to actively passionately hope that God might take us as we are and make us into who he wants us to be. And he will. He does. He starts with that desire. He starts with frightened disciples and makes them into saints. He starts with hostile crowds and makes them into his Church. For the Spirit helps us in our weakness. He prays for us with sighs too deep for words that when the time comes we will act as one with the Lord of Love, whom he brings near, never to depart. This is our life, our life in the Triune God. What will come of that will surprise and amaze us, for we breathe with the very Breath of God. Let us go forth rejoicing in the power of the Spirit. Alleluia, alleluia! AMEN. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
We are given the same story twice tonight. Does that ever happen? In our first lesson, from the Acts of the Apostles, and our second, from the Gospel according to Luke, we see Jesus ascend into heaven, leaving his disciples behind. But at the beginning of Acts, the disciples don’t look quite as good as they do at the end of Luke. And though both were written by St. Paul’s companion, it is in Acts that we find the disciples as we might expect them to be. Nervous and prone to missing the point. Jesus has just spent 40 days with them, convincing them that he’s alive and still the same person, teaching them about the kingdom of God, and now telling them to stay in Jerusalem and await the coming of the Holy Spirit. We can almost see the disciples nodding their heads as Jesus speaks. They were listening intently; but they weren’t hearing what they wanted to hear. “Is it now, Lord,” they asked, “that you are going to restore Israel?” Jesus’ disciples were still hung up on an old problem, still unable to let go of their old hopes, still thinking in old terms. Surely, Jesus was Messiah — for Israel alone. Which misses the point entirely. And Jesus wouldn’t allow his disciples to remain in that mindset. He doesn’t even answer their question. “You won’t know what the Father is planning,” he says. “It’s not for you to know. But know this: you will receive power from the Holy Spirit to be my witnesses not only to Jerusalem but to Judea and Samaria and even to the ends of the earth.” And then he was gone, lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. How long the disciples would have stood staring at the sky we don’t know because two angels appeared and knocked them out of their revery. “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? He will come in the same way you saw him go.” Caught in the tension between their hopes for a renewed Israel and a chastised Rome and the sudden and final departure of their beloved teacher, Jesus’ disciples didn’t know where to look. Everything they thought they knew, everything they had expected, had changed — too quickly for comfort. And now they were losing the one, the only one it seemed, who knew what was going on. The transition wasn’t easy. Or flattering. Which is why this account is so important — because it shows us us. We are just like the disciples, asking the wrong questions and then looking in the wrong places for the answers. And understandably so. It has been nearly 75 years since the world has seen such political, economic, and social upheaval. Practically everything is unsure and unstable. Like the disciples did so long ago, we want to know what will happen. We want to know what God is up to. We don’t want to wait for the future to unfold of its own accord. To do so is to experience the kind of existential discomfort modern Americans cannot stand; which is why we get stuck staring at the sky or, more likely, at our phones, slowly calcifying while the present slips past us. “Men of Galilee, why do you stand staring at the sky?” Why do you stand staring at the sky when the Lord of Life has made you free to live not just any life, but eternal life. Now. When his disciples asked Jesus about the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel, he firmly, gently corrected them, and then he left. Before the disciples were ready. Before the disciples could wrap their heads around the mission they had just been given. Before they could even say goodbye. God would not wait and does not wait for when his creatures are ready to receive the gifts he longs to give us. He doesn’t wait for us to finally learn the right lesson or to find the right words. God pours out his love for us now, for everything that we are — and for everything that we can be. God knew his disciples. He knows us. He knows each and every person in the light of eternity, and he will bring us there, not by picking us up and carrying us like some impatient parent, but by walking with us and working on us until the day comes when we are transformed, and the human being and God desire the same thing. God has given us a speaking part in the story of our salvation. He wants us to grow into our own. He wants us to get up and walk. Which is why the story of the Ascension is so important. It shows us we can because it’s been done before. By living a human life, by dying a human death, Jesus redeemed everything that is, renewed everything that is — and carried it all with him to Heaven. For the first time, humankind entered those heavenly courts; and not for the last because our Great High Priest dwells there and would have us dwell with him. He has prepared a place for us, a home for which he prepares us in every moment of our every day. Because the Christian life is not one of stasis, not one of even staring at the heavens, holy as that may sound. The Christian life is one of learning to act together with God and move toward Him and with Him and in Him, while also moving forward, loving God and our neighbor with all of our heart and mind and soul and strength; which is a posture that takes some practice but always bears good fruit. As we learn to turn away from the things of this world — from the need to know the signs and portents, from the desire to control those events, from the longing for safety and security that keeps us from stepping out in faith — as we learn to turn away from those things and turn toward God, we will learn to love the world aright. We will learn to see with heavenly eyes. We will learn that God fills all things and knows all things and loves all things. And that is something worth looking for. Just like Jesus’ disciples, we can’t know what is coming this year or next year or in 10 years. What we can know and be certain of is that Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God and Son of Man, is seated at the right hand of the Father and there is nowhere he is not. He will come again, just as he went so long ago; and when he does return to judge the living and the dead, he will find a sanctified people, filled with joy, blessing God and worshiping him in his temple. AMEN. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
About 2,024 years ago — give or take a few — when Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to his disciples, there were no bells. There were no champagne receptions. There were no glad shouts of “Alleluia!” Instead, there was a lot of confusion and fear and running around because no one believed what the myrrh-bearing women said they saw at the tomb in the garden. The news that Mary and Salome and Mary Magdalene brought — “He is not there!” — was simply too incomprehensible to be true. Only three days had passed since Jesus’ friends and followers had seen him gasp his last excruciating breath, nailed to a cross. It’s not surprising that they would not or could not wake up to what this news meant. And yet Jesus was there regardless — standing among them, alive and seemingly well, save for the nail-marks in his hands and feet and the wound in his side. His voice, the same. His smile, too. Jesus opened wide his arms with words of welcome; and then he ate breakfast. Nothing was the same after Jesus rose again. As each day passed, the disciples — Mary Magdalene, Thomas, Peter — had to come to grips with how much they hadn’t known or understood about this man they loved. They had to reckon with the earth-breaking, grave-shattering, veil-rending revelation that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus was who he said he was. He is who he says he is; and that will never cease to surprise and amaze us — and turn our lives upside down. Because it’s easy, all too easy, for us to have the same experience as the disciples. We hear the Word Christ speaks and promptly forget it or immediately misunderstand it. No matter that we’re educated denizens of the 21st-century — humankind doesn’t change; and just like Thomas, we need Jesus to remind us that he is still flesh and blood and God — divine and human, our Lord and our God. And just like Peter, we need Jesus to remind us that he can forgive even the deepest of betrayals and then send the sinner out to become a saint. And just like the Jewish leaders and the Roman consuls as well as thousands of Christians throughout the years, we need Jesus to remind us that his reign is one not of coercion or rigidity or violence but one of love and mercy. That is what Eastertide is about. Jesus is among us, teaching us to live in light of who God revealed him to be by raising him from the dead. And what do we learn today but the oldest lesson of them all? God is love; and he commands us to love one another. “As the Father has loved me,” Jesus said, “so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” Even just on the surface, these words sound very nice. God is love. We can get behind that; we can print it on a t-shirt or stick it on our car. But to stop there is to surrender our understanding of Love to the 21st-century’s two dimensions, where love is more often the product of algorithms or the domain of advertisers or the half-guilty sense of familial obligation that descends upon us at Christmastime than it is anything to do with God. Given a moment to reflect, though, we can usually recognize that; and given another moment to reflect, we can actually recognize God’s love when we see it. Because it’s distinctive. It’s striking. It’s not normal to pour oneself out as an offering of love for someone else — including one’s enemies. But that is what God does, has done, and will do. For God so loved that world that he sent his only Son to save it. And that love truly, truly I say to you, changes everything. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, lived and died as a human being; in his life, the Word rewrote what was possible for humans to accomplish; in his death, the Lamb broke the bonds of fear and pain that so often underly the sins committed against us and the sins committed by us; and in his resurrection, God opened up the way of eternal life to us now. This is Easter. Christ is in our midst, teaching us and reminding us and revealing to us who he is, that we might ready to follow him when he comes our way. And he does — and you are already following him. You may not realize it because we haven’t been taught to look for the Lord of Love in every moment of every day; but every time, every time you choose to control even justified anger and turn the other cheek, you are abiding in God’s love. Every time you give up an hour or a weekend to listen to a friend cry or to help a grieving family at their son’s funeral, you are abiding in God’s love. Every time you pause to behold the beauty of creation, you are abiding in God’s love. Every time you strive to see someone as a person rather than a caricature, you are abiding in God’s love. Every time you do your work with your whole heart and mind and soul and strength, you are abiding in God’s love. Every instance of this love that pulls us outside of ourselves is a moment we step into the reality of our existence: God’s love holds us, holds everything in life simply because he loves us and wants us to exist not just now but for all of eternity. Did you know that? Did you know how much God loves you? The creator and redeemer and sustainer of the world; the all-holy life-giving Trinity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit loves you, not as a child would, not as a lover, but as a God who knows you, who sees you — not as you might appear to your boss or your coworkers, not even as you might appear to your closest friends or family; but as you are. Your beauty and your ugliness, your light and your darkness, your fears and secrets and sins and hopes and dreams. All of it. He sees you for who you are and says, “My love.” Nothing is impossible after that because nothing is impossible for God. We live in the light of his love. We walk in the morning of his resurrection. This is his Word. This is his command: Abide in his love. He has said these things to you so that his joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. AMEN. |
Archives
October 2024
Categories |