7-1-18 “God’s Word Embodied”

7-1-18  “God’s Word Embodied”   

   We talked in week 1 of this series that one of the things the author of 1 John is trying to address in this letter is the growing heresy of docetism. 

And you’ll remember that docetism grew out of the dualistic idea that spiritual things were good, material things were evil, and that therefore Jesus could not have had a material or physical body because that would have been evil, therefore Jesus only seemed or appeared to have a human body. And this idea goes against a central tenet of the Christian faith, that in Jesus Christ, God took on a human form, that God is most fully revealed to us in the person and body of Jesus. We call this incarnation. And we identify this idea with Jesus when we use the name Emmanuel for Jesus, which means literally, God with us. Jesus is the embodiment of all that God is - he gives God form.

   And that’s good, because nobody has ever seen God. Our words are certainly inadequate to even begin to describe God, so knowing that we can understand who and how God is by looking at Jesus helps us to better grasp the nature of God. In fact, the definition of the word embodiment means both to personify, exemplify, to make concrete, or to provide with a body, to incarnate. So when we say that Jesus is the embodiment of God, we can understand that both in the physical sense as well as in the exemplary sense. 

   In John’s gospel, the writer begins his writing by naming Jesus as the Word of God. Word of God, in this sense, isn’t about a collection of alphabetic letters that form words; the Greek translated as Word is logos, which means the wisdom, the plan, the embodiment of God. And it follows then, that if Jesus is the embodiment of God, then Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love. If, as the author of our epistle claims, God is love, then the same can and must be said about Jesus - Jesus is love. And to take that one step further - Jesus is love in the flesh, love incarnate - Jesus is love embodied. He shows us what love looks like and what faith in the God who is love looks like, as a human being. 

   In the gospel passage we read today, Jesus tells the disciples that God will send a companion after he is gone, referring to the Holy Spirit. In our passage from 1 John for today, the author warns however,  “don’t believe every spirit. Test the spirits to see if they are from God because many false prophets have gone into the world. This is how you know if a spirit comes from God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come as a human is from God, and every spirit that doesn’t confess Jesus [as a human is inferred here] is not from God.”

   It’s the battle against docetism. If someone says Jesus was not human, then they are a false prophet, or as the elder puts it, they are the antichrist. 

And as New Testament scholar Rolf Jacobsen puts it,

   “The writer [of 1 John] uses the word “antichrist” for the view he opposes. In the popular imagination, the antichrist is a political figure who is coming to dominate the world at the end of the age. But in 1 John, that is not the case. 

The Greek prefix “anti” means both “against” and “substitute for.” The writer uses the term “antichrist” for a form of the gospel that circulated in his own time. It is “against” Christ because it offers a thoroughly spiritualized “substitute for” Christ. And the writer notes that the world finds the disembodied message more appealing than the incarnate one.”

   Jacobsen says, “The basic issue, according to chapter 4, is whether spiritual claims are centered in the Word that Jesus embodied. For the writer, the incarnate Word cannot be reduced to some spiritual abstraction. Divine love is not simply an idea. It takes tangible form in the life Jesus lived and the death that he died.”  In other words, God’s love was embodied so our faith, too, must be embodied.

   Have you heard of the term “spiritual but not religious?” It’s a term usually used to describe people who hold some kind of faith or spirituality but who are not part of a church or any organized religion. I always say I’m not part of an organized religion either, I’m Methodist, but SBNRs, as they’re often referred to, don’t profess a religion so much as a belief that there is something more than just our day-to-day existence, there is a greater force in the universe with which they desire to connect. And while some wouldn’t necessarily use this term, we call that force God. And there are some people, both SBNRs and so-called “religious” folk, who prefer their faith to be more “spiritual” in nature than physical. That is, they prefer to pray, to meditate, or perhaps to read spiritually. Maybe their primary faith or spiritual forms of expression are to journal, use prayer beads, walk prayer labyrinths or something similar,  but for many their faith or spirituality is a head and heart thing. We might say for some their faith is “inspired,” that is it has life breathed into it, but it is not so much “embodied,” it may not necessarily have hands and feet attached to it.

   Now, we see that in some very traditionally religious people too. Do you know anyone whose faith is all about the next life - forget about this one? People who claim that the word BIBLE is an acronym for Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth? Or, as some refer to them, people who are so heavenly-minded that they’re no earthly good? For some, the whole point of faith, religion, whatever you want to call it, is to punch a ticket to heaven in the next life and say so long to this one. It’s almost an escapist approach to religion. That’s not what Jesus was about though.

   Jesus was all about inviting people into the Kingdom of Heaven here and now, the Reign of God that was present in their midst. His was a very touchy feely, hands-on embodiment of what the love of God and the Kingdom of Heaven were all about. Jesus’ faith was grounded in prayer, but it wasn’t limited to prayer. Prayer was how he got himself in tune with God, and then he went out and embodied that “in-tune-ment” with and for others. His was not a faith that was limited to head and heart, but was expressed through his hands and feet as well - by walking with others, touching and healing, breaking bread with others. He told his disciples that he came as a servant and that love of him and love of God looks like serving others. It was a physical, incarnate, embodied faith. It was about a love that was sacrificial.

   The book, “Chicken Soup for the Soul” recounts a now familiar story on courage of a young girl who is dying of leukemia and needs a blood transfusion. Her 5 year old brother is the ideal donor so the parents ask him if he would be willing to donate blood so that his sister will live. He thinks about it and agrees. The two children are hooked up to IVs in side-by-side beds and a pint of blood is drawn from the little boy and transfused into the little girl. As her color begins to return he becomes quiet and ashen, and turning to the doctors asks, “Will I begin to die soon?”

   The little boy, misunderstanding what was being ask of him, was willing to give his own life for the sake of his sister. Now this story, this parable has circulated in one form or another, in different countries and cultures for decades, and was even portrayed in a Mary Pickford film over 80 years ago - so whether it really happened is not the point. The point of the story - in spite of the fact that in misunderstanding what was being asked of him the little boy could only have concluded that his parents loved his sister more than him - is that he was willing to act sacrificially on his love for his sister. It wasn’t just kind words or platitudes, he didn’t just offer his “thoughts and prayers” - he was willing to die that she might live. 

   An “embodied” faith doesn’t necessarily ask us to die so that someone else might live - although it might - it asks us to be the body of Christ in the world. 

It asks us, as the tome goes, “to live more simply so that others might simply live.” It asks us to love the stranger, the immigrant, the sojourner, the alien among us, because, as Deuteronomy puts it, “we were once strangers in a strange land.” It asks us to not judge others because we haven’t walked a step in their shoes. It asks us to trust in God’s goodness, and to love God more than we love money. It asks us to make sure that those who are on the margins at least have enough: enough food, enough clothing, enough healthcare, enough shelter.  It asks us to embody for others the love that Christ embodied for us. Christ modeled divine love in that he knew that his teachings about God, about the law, about religion, about empire, about inclusivity could very well result in his own death, but he went ahead anyway. That’s what sacrificial love looks like.

   Today is Communion Sunday. In Holy Communion we remember, we memorialize the sacrificial love that Jesus both shared and modeled. In fact, we use the word remembrance because it has a deeper meaning than just remembering. Remembering invites us to call to mind, to search our memory for the “Jesus’ Last Supper” file that is stored in there somewhere. 

Remembrance, on the other hand, means to reconnect, to re-embrace, to re-immerse ourselves in the experience to the point that we are there, that it is real to us in the moment and not just a story that we’ve heard. 

This bread and this juice embodies the love of God that was incarnate in Jesus Christ. When we receive this Holy Meal, it is intended to feed us, but not just so we can feel good, not just so the growling in our stomach can be sated until we get to our favorite lunch spot. It is intended to feed us in the Spirit of the God who in the body of Jesus Christ told his followers to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, visit the imprisoned. Not just the ones who we think “deserve” it, but all of them. “You give them something to eat,” he told the disciples when they were overwhelmed by the numbers of people in need and saw only what they lacked in resources. This meal from Christ’s table invites us not only to take Christ’s body into our body, but also to allow it to embody us to be Christ’s body in the world. 

   And how can we be Christ’s body in the world? How can we serve as Christ desires for us to serve?

How about helping at Vacation Bible School

Or the Food Pantry

the WSFS   

Community Meal

Mustard Seed Homeless outreach

Mow someone’s grass

Help clean a room or windows, or pull weeds at the church

Visit a shut-in or a nursing home

Write cards to shut-ins or to those not here today

Write or call your representatives on behalf of the poor or the marginalized

You can give blood

You can give money

You can embrace a stranger and be the face of Christ to them

   What if when the next time you go to a restaurant or go through a drive-thru, you pick up the cost of a meal for another person in the restaurant or the person in line behind you? Not a person who you think “deserves” it, but someone who needs it, or would appreciate it. 

   That would be a real life, hands-on way to embody the love of Christ. That would be a great model of what it means to be in communion with God. 

Why not embody your faith by paying forward the love og God in remembrance of Jesus Christ? Amen.

6-24-18 Sermon “God is Light”

6-24-18 Sermon   “God is Light”

   I’ve shared with you before that I like to sleep in as total darkness as is possible. So in order to do that, sometimes I use this sleep mask. If Lynn wants to read and I’m ready to sleep, I just slip this on and it’s as though I were in a deep, dark cave. Zero light gets in. In fact, just this week when we were going to bed and I turned the bedside light out, I commented to Lynn that I liked this moment best because that was as dark as our room gets. As our eyes adjust, as our pupils dilate, it appears to be lighter in the room. As we grow accustomed to the darkness, as we acclimate to it, we become more comfortable with it. So when we get up in the middle of the night - as many of us do - often we don’t need to turn on a light, we’re so used to trudging that well-worn path from bedside to bathroom in the dark. 

We know how many steps it is, we know where to walk in order to avoid kicking our bare toes against the bed post or the corner of the dresser. In fact, you may not even need to really open your eyes. It’s a trip we’ve made many, many times and have become so used to, so accustomed to, that we can literally navigate the path in our sleep. 

   Rather than a choice, though, sometimes darkness is seemingly forced upon us. We find ourselves immersed in it, not by choice, but because situations or events act as blinders, as masks, blocking our ability to see the light. Tragedy or loss can plunge us into a darkness as black as a starless, moonless night. Drowning in this soupy murkiness, we lose our bearings, we step off the familiar paths - forgetting that the light is still there; the light is always there. And as a result, we move, we act, we respond from a perspective of a perceived total darkness.

   Our writer, the elder you’ll remember is how he refers to himself, says that “God is light, and in God there is no darkness at all.” But what does he mean by that - that God is light? Certainly it’s a metaphor, but what does it mean to say that God is light? And even more basic, what really is light?

   Well, second things first. Light is electromagnetic radiation made up of waves of varying lengths. All the light that we see falls in the range of what is called “visible light,” and is made up of what we perceive as the colors of the rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Beyond the visible range, though, there are longer and shorter waves of light, of electromagnetic radiation, that human eyes are unable to see but that other animals can see. So think about that for a moment - there are colors in the world, outside of the possibilities given to us in the biggest box of Crayola crayons, that we cannot even imagine because our eyes cannot see them. Our vision as humans is limited to the colors of the spectrum that are in the visible light range. But these are just a segment, a fragment of all the light and colors that exist in the infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray, microwave, and gamma ray spectrums. 

   The colors we see are created by the stimulation of the cones in our eyes by that electromagnetic radiation. The color we perceive is based on the wavelength of the light that is reflected off the object we see - with all other wavelengths being absorbed by the object. 

This carpet reflects back the red wavelengths of light but absorbs the others, so we see red. So, thinking about it another way, without light there is no color. 

That dresser you seek to avoid, that bedpost you maneuver around when making that midnight trek to the toilet in total darkness, have no color at all. 

The presence  of color depends totally on the existence, the presence, the reflection of light. No light means no color.

   So now, let’s return to the first question, what does it mean to say that God is light? Well, understanding that all of our words about God are inadequate and can only be metaphor, if we take the properties we know about light and apply them to God we can understand that God is bigger, greater, more expansive than the limited amount that we can perceive, right? Like the colors outside our visible range, God extends beyond what we know, or think we know, even beyond what we can imagine. We can also understand that as light is broadly diverse across a spectrum of colors both visible and invisible, that diversity is also reflected in God’s nature as well as God’s creation. God has created things, life forms, even places that we have never seen and cannot even imagine in our limited human capacity..

   I have shared with you before that darkness in and of itself is not a thing - it represents absence, and exists only as the absence of light. You cannot create darkness independent of simply removing light. This is true in science and nature, just as it is true in faith. The writer says that if we claim to have fellowship with God, who is light, but live in the darkness, then we are lying - to ourselves and to God. So, let’s take a moment to consider how do we live in darkness? What do you think it means, what does it look like, to live in darkness?

 (ASK THE CONGREGATION THIS QUESTION?)

to live with anger

to live in fear or mistrust

to live in guilt

to judge others

to fail to forgive others

to live with hatred

to live with racism/sexism/homophobia

to live with xenophobia - fear of the other, those not like you

to live with misogyny

to live with bigotry

to live with a sense of entitlement

to live with a sense of moral superiority

to live in hopelessness

   So what the author is saying is that if we say we have a relationship with God, when we claim that Jesus is our Lord and Savior, but we hold these things in our lives, choose to live with these things, these feelings, any of them, then we are not in fellowship with God, that we fool ourselves or are just flat lying to ourselves and to the world. We may be talking the talk, but we’re not walking the walk. As Naomi shared in her message a couple of weeks ago, “we’re quick to claim Jesus as our Savior, but we pick and choose when and where we allow Jesus to be Lord.”

   The elder doesn’t leave us hanging on that precipice though, writing “But if we live in the light in the same way as God is in the light, we have fellowship with each other, and Jesus…cleanses us from every sin.” If we live in the light, we are cleansed from our sin. If we reject the darkness, our sin is washed away. If we take off our blinders, our masks, to see and embrace the love of God, the presence of God in all of those people, places, and things that we’ve never seen or have denied before from within our limited field of vision, then we will be cleansed from our sin. When we embrace the light and reject the darkness, only then are we in fellowship with God, in fellowship with Jesus Christ, only then can we truly live in the light.

   And that sounds great - that sounds wonderful! Hallelujah! But in the warm afterglow of our newly realized salvation, God’s light has revealed another question that we have to wrestle with - what is sin? You might remember a song from the late 60s, early 70s era called “Spirit in the Sky.” It was a popular song by a singer named Norman Greenbaum. I don’t know if he ever had another big song after this one, but he had some interesting lyrics in the refrain of that song as it pertains to sin that, as theologian Debra Freeman put it, “is perhaps present in the church, but is certainly common in the world.” Greenbaum sang:

Never been a sinner, I’ve never sinned

I’ve got a friend in Jesus

   And I guess I would offer that if he thinks he’s never sinned, then Jesus must have been more than just a friend to him. I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t count all the ways I’ve probably sinned today! 

In 1 John, the elder writes that if we say we don’t have any sin, that if we claim we have never sinned, we make God out to be a liar, and God’s truth is not in us.That is, we are living in darkness. 

   Sin is, at its core, the absence of God’s light. Sin is sometimes defined as that which separates us from God. But in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome he tells us that nothing can separate us from God’s love, so I have difficulty with using that definition of Sin. Others have defined sin as putting ourselves above God, or placing our will ahead of God’s will. In the book, “What is the Bible,” by Rob Bell that we’re reading for Summer Book Clumb, he shares a definition that suggests that sin is that which disrupts the peace and harmony God desires for the world. Those are both better understandings, I think. There is systemic Sin in the world that is often equated with the idea of original sin - the “isms” that we often talk about of racism, sexism, etc., along with greed and all those other things we listed when we talked earlier about what it looks like to live in darkness. Those things are Sin, with a capital S, and represent a state of sinfulness found in the world.

    Often, though, when we think about Sin we aren’t thinking of these bigger systemic things, we’re focused on the actions of a person or a group that we consider sinful or as breaking God’s law. In fact, it’s easier to point our fingers at this person’s actions, that person’s words, another person’s misjudgments and call that sin than it is to confess our role in keeping alive, supporting, or promoting the larger systemic sin that hurts so many people - sometimes because while that sin hurts someone else it benefits us. 

   For example, racism and other isms tells us that if we can instill enough fear of black people, if we can convince enough white people that Latino immigrants are all murderers, rapists, or are here to take their jobs, if we can convince enough straight people that gay marriage is going to somehow hurt their marriage, then “WE” will be okay, regardless of what happens to “THEM.” 

That’s what systemic or institutional sin looks like. My male privilege, our white privilege is sin when it results in someone who doesn’t look like us being treated as a criminal or somehow “less than” us. Assuming that you have the right to comment on another person’s appearance or their body, grab or touch their body, or try to control their body is sin. What has been going on with immigrant families and children on our southern border for the past several months is sin. It is darkness. More than murder, or adultery, or anything else we like to point to that is carried out by individuals - nations and peoples are complicit in systemic sin. They represent the absence, the darkening of the light of God. 

   Now, some will argue that some of these are matters of law and order, misquoting scripture to make their point. But lest we forget, Jesus broke the law and supported the breaking of the law when necessary; about adultery and those penalties; about the Sabbath; cleanliness laws, just to name a few. Jesus never denied that he broke the laws of Israel and the Roman Empire; he claimed that these were unjust laws, and not of God. And as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so eloquently pointed out, not only do we have no moral obligation to follow unjust laws, we do, in fact, have a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws. Systemic sin, whether perpetrated on a border, in the urban centers of our cities, or in our schools and workplaces, lives and breeds in unjust laws where the light of God has been blocked, covered, masked, or placed under a bushel. Unjust laws develop out of and envelop us in darkness. But Christ calls us to come out of that darkness and into the light of God that is broader, and brighter, and more all-encompassing that we can even imagine.

   The elder, in the first two verses of chapter two tells us, 

“My little children, I’m writing these things to you so that you don’t sin. But if you do sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one. He is God’s way of dealing with our sins, not only ours but the sins of the whole world.”

   This passage is not solely about human sinfulness. If it were there would be no good news here. Rather, the author points to the nature of who God is: “God is light and in God there is no darkness at all.” The Good News of the Gospel hangs on this gracious truth and revolves around this all-encompassing, sunlight-surpassing, sin-forgiving, darkness-busting light that emanates from God, and that meets us in the person of Jesus Christ. As the Rev. Zan Holmes told us in a sermon at annual conference earlier this month,  

“Jesus meets us where we are, but treats us as though we were where we were supposed to be.” 

   Where we are supposed to be is walking in the light of Christ as the body of Christ, as both individuals and as the church, made in the image of the God who is light and who is love. We are called to let our light so shine before the world that there is no doubt about who - and whose - we are; beloved Children of the God who is the light of the world. Amen.

6-17-18 “God is Love: Who Is Jesus?”

6-17-18 “God is Love: Who Is Jesus?”

   So I asked Naomi to preach about the love chapter from 1 Corinthians last week as a lead-in of sorts to where we’re going for the next four weeks. 1 Corinthians 13 is THE most popular result when you Google search for “wedding scriptures” or “love scriptures.” When you ask people what the Bible says about love, most people come to that passage, remembering Paul’s word, “love is patient, love is kind.” And that is a bit ironic, because if you really look at the passage, it’s really not about the love between two people at all - it’s about the love of God, and this passage is best understood in that way. But that said, if you believe, as I do and as 1 John affirms, that God IS love and that we are created in God’s image, then that within each of us that is “of God,” is also at one with God’s love. So in that sense, what it says about love in general holds true for us as well. More on that idea in a moment.

   I performed two weddings in May, and with both of those couples I met for pre-marital conversations three times. And part of what we talked about was the book The Five Love Languages, which I asked the couples to read together. One thing that the author points out in that book is that “while the word love permeates society…it is also a most confusing word” because of how we use it. And as I alluded to last week, in one breath we might say to another, “I love you,” and then in the next “I love tacos,” or pizza, or OSU football, or whatever.

 And hopefully we don’t mean the same things when we use that same word. 

   So before we even get to the question that is posed in the title of the message, we must first tackle the question, “what do we mean by the word love?” And more importantly, what does this word mean in scripture? While Psychology Today says there are seven different types of love, in the Bible we primarily deal with three: eros, which is romantic or sexual love; philia, which is love for another, love of family, and sometimes thought of as brotherly or sisterly love; and then agape love, the word used exclusively to describe God’s love - 

a love that is total, complete, self-giving, and all-encompassing.

   The word love appears in the Common English Bible 792 times, 25 of those in 1 John, and is only exceeded in the New Testament by John’s gospel, where it appears 40 times. I tell you that to help reinforce the idea that love is a consistent, if not THE most consistent theme found throughout scripture, from beginning to end, from Genesis to Revelation. But the book we know as 1 John goes further than the other biblical books. While both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament tell us to love God and to love our neighbor, and then show what that kind of love looks like, the writer of 1 John states forthrightly, in chapter 4, that GOD IS LOVE, and that if we do not love then we do not know God. With that blanket declaration on the table, then, over the next four weeks we’ll explore exactly what the author says about that and what he means by it. 

For now, though, let’s talk for a minute about this book, or letter, or essay, or whatever this and its two companion writings actually are

   The books, 1, 2, and 3 John are commonly described or categorized as letters, epistles in Bible-speak, but they don’t really look or read like letters, at least not like other letters in the Bible or letters that we might write. There are no greetings or salutations, there’s no addressee, and no conclusion or farewell sign-off of any kind. So while they’re called and characterized as letters, they bear no more resemblance to a letter than does a 140 character tweet on Twitter. 

   We also hear them referred to and think of them as books, but they really aren’t very long - not as we would expect a book, even a book of the Bible to be. They’re among the shortest writings in the entire Bible. So, thinking of them as books is a bit of stretch - they’re shorter than short stories - so maybe they’re more comparable to essays.

   And while these writings are titled 1, 2, and 3 John, we really don’t know with any certainty who penned them. Tradition links them to the Apostle John, commonly thought to perhaps also be the author of the Gospel of John, but scholars go both ways on that. There are enough similarities in themes, grammar usage, and writing style to suggest that it could be the same author, but at the same time there are also enough differences in those same things to throw authorship into question as well. Nowhere, in any of the the three letters does the writer provide a name or state who he is - and it most certainly is a he - only referring to himself in the second and third letters as “the elder,” a title that the apostle John never used to refer to himself in the Gospel. The best guess of most scholars is that these three letters were written by a follower of John, someone who was part of the apostle’s community, who was accustomed to and shared much of John’s thinking and word usage. Scholars believe that the letters were likely written a decade or more after the gospel, which would date them at the very end of the first century or even in the first decade of the second century. And that timing would make sense when we consider what it is that appears to have prompted the writing of 1 John in the first place - addressing the question of “Who is Jesus?”

   And this question has been a running theme throughout the New Testament, but most especially in the four gospels. We remember priests and pharisees asking at various times, “who is that man” that he does this, or says that? The disciples even ponder this, when in the midst of a storm, Jesus calms the sea and they wonder “who is this man that the seas and the winds listen to him and obey?” Jesus encourages their thinking about this subject when he asks the Twelve, “who do the people say that I am?” and then follows with “and who do YOU say that I am?” And we remember Peter’s response, “you are the Christ,” that is, the messiah, or the anointed one.

   In the aftermath of the great feeding story as told in the 6th chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus goes back and forth with the crowd and with this disciples about who he was and what it meant to be his disciple, and John reports that the number of followers dwindled after that, and even that some of the Twelve struggled with Jesus’ words and the depth of their commitment to him. 

   Theologian Ross West, considering these questions, suggests that,  “The crowd and even Jesus’ closest disciples were struggling with what is easily the most important question of anyone’s life—indeed, of all history: Who is Jesus?

   “Really, who is Jesus? It’s a question that when seriously considered brings about a division in the ranks of every group who asks it. It even brings about a division within our own hearts. Who is Jesus? The answers vary. For some, Jesus is the great teacher. He was a great individual with great ideas, who has contributed much by word and example. Jesus can be revered as one of the great teachers of history, certainly alongside Aristotle, Plato, Buddha, and Moses. Jesus is to be respected and even loved. 

For others, Jesus is the model person, the best person who ever lived, and we should strive to imitate Jesus—as long as we don’t perhaps take it too far.

   “For some, as in Jesus’ day, Jesus is the Messiah, but a worldly Messiah, as Jesus was to the crowd on those two days described in John 6. They wanted him to solve their problems, both there and thereafter. They were impressed that, like Moses of old, Jesus had supplied them with food in the wilderness. “Hey, we can follow a guy like this!”

   And West suggests that, “the overwhelming answer of the scriptures and of the church…through the centuries has been that Jesus is more than these descriptions or any others we might list. Who is Jesus? He is a human being, the person in whom God was uniquely present. Somehow, as Paul said, ‘In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor. 5:19). We may not be able to state the how of this truth very well, but we revel in its reality. Somehow, this person Jesus, who was flesh and blood, was the Person in whom the God of Israel and the universe was uniquely present.

   But then West implores us to not stop at that, to go further. “Give a little more thought to this question: Who is Jesus? Jesus’ contemporaries knew Jesus first as a human being. The scriptures affirm this part of Jesus’ nature. He was human like us. Indeed, Jesus was fully human. In later writings of the New Testament, especially 1 John, the major issue was whether Jesus was fully human. That little letter begins with the affirmation that indeed Jesus was. The first verse states, “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1).”

   That last line is important to understanding 1 John -  “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1).” The author of 1 John is addressing a question of Christology - that is, the study of who is Jesus Christ? John’s Gospel approaches the question from what is considered a “high Christology,” meaning that it focuses primarily on the divine nature of Jesus. And you’ll understand what I mean if you think about how John’s gospel begins compared to Matthew and Luke, for example. Whereas Matthew and Luke begin with human birth stories of Jesus, John begins with a poetic discourse that places the Christ alongside God the Creator at the very brink of Creation - in the beginning, the beginning of EVERYTHING, of ALL THINGS. So, a “low Christology” focuses on the humanity of Jesus, a high Christology on the divinity of Jesus. And while the Gospel of John comes from a place of high Christology, the letter 1 John comes from a place of a lower Christology. And it does so for a very important reason: to rebut a rising heresy known as docetism.

   Docetism, from the Greek, dokein, meaning “to seem” or “to appear,” is the claim that Jesus did not have a physical human body, that Jesus was not really human at all, but only appeared as such. Such doctrines were quite popular in the early church, such as at the time of this writing, and were often joined to dualistic ideas that only the purely spiritual were good, and that physical things, matter and flesh for example, were evil. 

If matter is intrinsically evil, the thought went, then Jesus would not have a physical body, but only the appearance of one. 1 John 4:1-4 takes on claims of docetism as the opening salvo of this book. In fact, even within the Gospels themselves - written earlier than these letters - the many instances of Jesus’ eating - even after the resurrection - seem to be an attempt to refute docetism. Alongside docetism was the heresy of Marcionism, which, among other unbelievable things, held that the god YAHWEH of the Hebrew Bible and the God of Love in the New Testament were two very different Gods, and that Jesus was not physically born at all, but simply appeared as a mature man during the reign of Tiberius. So what we see happening later in the church, and most especially in the Apostle’s Creed, is a pushback against these kinds of belief that denied the humanity, the birth, and sufferings of Jesus. And they pushed back largely through the development of creedal affirmations that Jesus “was born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.”

   1 John seems to be taking on these kinds of heresies when it begins by claiming that this is about what they have seen with their own eyes and touched with their own hands. Jesus Christ was a human being, flesh and blood, God incarnate. That’s what incarnation is all about - God in the flesh. But we also understand incarnation more broadly. God is present, not just in the flesh of Jesus Christ, but in the church as well. With the indwelling of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the church took on the role of the body of Christ. Whatever it is that God want to be done in the world, it is the role of the church to do that as the body of Christ. If God desires for the world to be fed, it is the church who is called to do that. If God desires for there to be peace in the world, it is the church who is called to lead the world to peace. It is God’s desire, God’s will, God’s preferred future that is to be enfleshed, carried out, incarnated in the life and acts, the mission and ministry of the church, not OUR will or desire that is substituted or superimposed onto God. 

   But beyond the church proper, incarnation takes place, not just in Jesus’ flesh or in the church as the body of Christ, but in our flesh as well, as individuals, as those who are created in the image of God. Scientists say our bodies are made up of so many dollars and cents worth of chemicals and elements and whatever. But did you realize that the proportion of those chemicals and elements in our physical bodies is the same as the proportion of those chemicals and elements in the known universe? The same proportion of carbon that makes up your body is found in comets and asteroids. The same proportion of magnesium is found in the human body, as the animal body, as the rings around Saturn, and so on. When God created everything, everything reflects God’s creation. When God created us in God’s image, God also created all of creation in God’s image. God is in us, we are made in the image of God. We’ll talk about this more when we get further into 1 John, but when we speak metaphorically about God’s body, the church as the body of Christ, and of creation being made in the image of God, we must understand that God's incarnation takes many forms within the biblical witness. God has always been and will continue to be present in human flesh as God's own body, in the physical body of Jesus that the elder referred to when he wrote that they had touched it with their own hands, and in the church that is the present-day institutional body of Christ. God is present in the world through spirit and through people who follow that spirit. God is incarnate in the world through believers and non-believers today because God’s presence is in all things. That’s part of what the elder wants us to understand. Yes, God was present in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, but also more than just there. The agape, all-encompassing, unimaginable, love of God that prompted God to create in the beginning, continues to be present in ways and in places that we grasp as well as in ways that are beyond our comprehension.

   Sometimes, to some people, it seems almost sacrilegious, even heretical, to think of Jesus as a human being who got thirsty, hungry, and tired, who experienced emotions like all of us. Jesus’ closest disciples, those who walked with him and talked with him, those who broke bread with him, tested his patience, loved him and betrayed him, had no trouble seeing Jesus like that, however. Neither should we. One of the most astounding verses in the Bible, one of the most powerfully unique claims of Christianity, is “The Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). Flesh!

   Who is Jesus? Jesus was a human being, fully a human being. The scriptures also affirm Jesus as fully divine. In ways we can only state and neither explain nor understand, the God of the universe was uniquely present in Jesus. This view of Jesus was no afterthought of the church after the days of the New Testament. It was not simply thought up and written down at a later church council. It is seen in the experiences of Jesus in the Gospels (see Matthew 16:16; Mark 1:11; 15:39), just as it is seen in the reflections of Jesus’ closest followers as they spoke and wrote of their experiences, in what would later become the New Testament. (Jn 20:31; Acts 2:32-33; Phil. 2:5-11; Col. 1:15-18; Heb. 1:1-4; 1 Jn 1:3; 2 Pet. 3:18; Rev. 1:4-5). And as the elder tells us, they wrote these things so that our joy may be complete. As the hymn tells us, “God is here! As we your people meet to offer praise and prayer, may we find in fuller measure what it is in Christ we share.”

   So, as we go from this place today, may your joy be made complete in knowing that God is with you and within you, even as you are the hands and feet, the body of Christ in God’s world. Amen.

5-27-18 “Three-Part Harmony”

5-27-18  “Three-Part Harmony”

   When I think of three-part harmony, the music of the iconic folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary is the first thing that comes to mind. Noel Paul Stookey has a deep bass baritone voice that when combined with the late Mary Travers’ rich alto and Peter Yarrow’s light and dancing tenor blends into a tight, moving, masterpiece of harmony. I saw them perform live on three different occasions and have several recordings of their music. And while each of the three recorded music on their own apart from the trio, none of them had the success as solo artists that their work together brought them. There was a mutual “indwelling,” if you will, that was birthed when they sang together, a flow of both melody and harmony that was as unique to them and their genre as Louis Armstrong’s music and voice was to his. You just know, when you hear one of their songs on the radio, who it is that is singing.

   Today, Trinity Sunday, immediately follows Pentecost in the liturgical calendar and is the day we think about, celebrate even, the idea of a triune God - or as described in song, “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” And the Trinity is not an easy concept - certainly not as easy as many preachers try to make it sound. As preachers, youth leaders, and Sunday School teachers, we often try to help people understand this idea of God as “three-in-one” by comparing God’s nature to a three-leafed clover, or by thinking about God the way we think about the states of water: as liquid, as solid, or as vapor. 

   And if it were simply about a math problem of some kinds, then we could find other comparisons to make as well, such as the Triple Crown of horse-racing or the three periods of a hockey game. But God is not a clover, nor is God water. And the nature of God resembles neither a series of horse races, nor a hockey game. The Trinity is not an idea that is easily understood or explained. Any time we talk about God, in fact, our language is by necessity symbolic, or metaphoric, or even poetic. Our mere words do not begin to convey the essence or nature of God. As is often said, if we think we understand God, then it is not God we are understanding. God is beyond our ability to comprehend or describe, even as we are made in God’s image. So our words about God, our descriptions of God, are at their best inadequate, and can be, at their worst, destructive. But as I have said before, how we think about God matters because it shapes what we think about God. And that may be one of the reasons that many pastors avoid preaching on Trinity Sunday, taking this as a Sunday out of the pulpit to allow an associate pastor or lay minister to preach on this week. 

   I don’t shy away from talking about the Trinity because it allows me the opportunity to admit my ignorance upfront and to then explore ideas with you that might help us both better appreciate what truly trinitarian thinking might mean for our faith. And I say “admit my ignorance” for one simple reason - in my opinion, any preacher who claims to truly understand the Trinity is fooling him or herself. While Trinitarian theology is certainly taught in our United Methodist seminaries, I can’t say with any certainty that it is covered in non-denominational schools or in Bible colleges. The word “Trinity” is found nowhere in Scripture - it’s simply not there. A line-by-line expository teaching of the Bible will not unearth the word or a Greek or Latin relative. The concept of the Trinity and the doctrine that followed, evolved over the course of the second to fourth centuries in the church out of ideas and phrasing within scripture and from ritual practices within the early church. The Nicene Creed, the church’s most prolific creed, or statement of belief, about God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, goes to great lengths to try to explain the nature of the three being of the same substance, and how the Christ “is begotten” of God while the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from God - all in an effort to explain how the three are equal, yet God the Creator is a little more equal than the others (a heretical idea for some) but not really. At the Council of Nicaea, where the Nicene Creed was formulated, the participants nearly came to blows over the wording used in this statement of faith. And while this was all well and good in the pre-modern, pre-enlightenment era, for those of us on this side of those time periods, in a post-enlightenment, post-industrial world who often feel like we have to figure out exactly how this or that works, precisely how A relates to B and why, the kind of soupy ambiguity that is often ascribed to the creeds in general and the idea of the Trinity in particular, often results in arguments akin to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin - the result of which is a general sense of irrelevance to our every day life of faith. So my hope today is to help you think about the Trinity a little differently, so that perhaps it can help guide you in living out your faith instead of just being some “religious” thing that makes no sense.

   When we talk about the Trinity what we’re really talking about is the relationship between God the Creator, Jesus Christ the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit, the Sustainer. These three together are referred to as the Godhead. Now, in our creeds and in much of the language used about God, we often hear God referred to as Father. Jesus refers to God as Father, translated from the word abba, which is an intimate term comparable to “daddy.” Some take Jesus’ words to the disciples, when telling them how to pray “Our Father, who art in heaven” as not only instructive but as prescriptive. But that is not the case - Jesus’ wording is about intimacy, not gender. The intimacy Jesus felt with God was as if God was his “daddy.” That may or may not be the case for you. It isn’t for many people. If your father was cold or abusive, that may not be a healthy God image for you. It isn’t for me for a couple of reasons. First, I didn’t have a strong father-figure growing up since he died when I was a child, my father was absent in that sense, so my concept of God has never been tied to a Father figure. But second, the title Father implies gender, it suggests maleness, and God is not male, God has no gender. Scripture describes God in many more ways - including with female pronouns or attributes - than just as Father. So I, like many others, strive to use gender inclusive language when I speak and think about God - not because it is “politically correct” as some accuse - but because it is generous and inclusive, and the Trinity is, if nothing else, an inclusive concept and description of an extravagantly generous God. 

   It is helpful, when thinking about the triune nature of God, to think of it as the ways in which we experience God in our lives and in our faith. So for example, we experience God as Creator when we see and experience creation all around us, but also when we consider that we are created in the image of God and that we, too, are creative and creating beings. We experience God as Redeemer when we hear and experience the words and teachings of Jesus Christ and understand that our redemption and salvation come to us through him and the way he taught us to live and to be with one another. And we experience God as Sustainer in the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit, the way that Jesus promised he would be with us always, to the end of time, and when we see the Spirit at work in people, in the church and in our own lives, giving us the power to follow Christ’s way.

   But it goes deeper than that. One of the $1.50 words theologians use when talking about the Trinity is the word “perichoresis.” The official theological dictionary definition is on the screen: A more practical way of thinking of it, and as it has been described by others before, is as a dance - the dance of the the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sustainer together. 

   The Rev. Peter Samuelson, a Lutheran pastor in Atlanta, Georgia, referred to the trinity as “the ultimate dancing with the stars.” He writes, “In ballroom dance there are two partners: a lead and a follow…  And as they say - it takes two to tango.  More specifically, it takes a lead and a follow to tango. When the two are properly positioned  ("in frame" to use ballroom dance lingo) they really then move as one.  This is the magic of ballroom dance: that two bodies become one - they move as one.  There is a lead who initiates the movement and a follow who responds to the movement but they move as one unit.  They are two in one.

     “If ‘it takes two to tango,’ how can a dance represent the Trinity?  Well, you can't really have a dance - and you certainly can't have ballroom dance - without music.  In this way you need three parts to make a ballroom dance: you need a lead; a follow; and you need music.

  The Holy Spirit is the music, the beat, the pulse, the rhythm by which the Trinity moves. The key element of this image of the Trinity - the reason that a dance is a good picture of what God in three persons is like is that it depicts God as movement. God is nothing if not on the move. Consider how God moved over the waters in Creation (Gen. 1) or how the Spirit drove Jesus into the Wilderness (Lk. 4) or how the Spirit (Acts 2) appeared as tongues of fire moving the reluctant disciples to witness. 

   While ballroom dance has certainly become a popular spectator sport, it is much more joyous as a participant. How do we participate in the "dance of the Trinity?"  It is through our participation in Christ. Paul teaches us that through baptism we die to sin and rise to new life in Christ (Romans 6).  Paul provides an enduring metaphor for our participation in the resurrected life of Christ when he declares in 1 Corinthians 12: "You are the body of Christ and individually members of it" (v. 27).  In the dance of the Trinity, then, we participate as Christ's body, following God's lead, into community.  God indicates to us to do those moves that God has led throughout the ages: moves of justice, mercy, peace and love.  It all moves to the music of the Holy Spirit who provides the inspiration, the pace, the occasion and the heart of the dance.”

   In addition to movement as Rev. Samuelson offers, though, I would also suggest that the nature of the Trinity is community. That is, the presence, the essence of God is community - an inclusive community of three in one. And that to dance the dance of Trinity means dancing both in community and with community. IN community of fellow Christ followers and WITH community of those we are called to engage, as in the passage from Matthew’s gospel known as the Great Commission.

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.: (Mt. 28:19)

  We may think of this passage typically in connection with sending missionaries or in terms of evangelism. In these contexts, we probably hear it as something like "go and get people into the church to do what Jesus taught.” But today we are invited to hear it more deeply, and differently. 

  A little sentence diagramming reveals that the first word of this text in Greek is not in the form of an imperative, but is a participle. That is, the idea of going somewhere else is not commanded, but rather is assumed. 

Jesus’ words are better understood as "As you go," not as simply "GO!"

   The only independent verb in the Commission is often translated "make disciples." However, to our modern ears, where the word make brings to mind perhaps production lines or business models, this may easily sound like disciples are something to be produced like so many widgets on an assembly line! In Greek, "to disciple" is a verb, and the command here might be better understood, not as “make disciples in every nation,” but more as "disciple people in every nation,” or “be disciples in every nation.”

   Discipling means to do with others what Jesus has done with his own disciples, and with us. It's not about putting people through classes or programs. It's not even about conversion or getting them to agree to become professing members of a congregation. It's about coming alongside people, walking with people in community, in the power of the Spirit so they, and we, learn to live the way of Jesus, the way of God's reign. And not just live it — participate in it, announce it to others, go where the Spirit sends us, and act fully as Christ's representatives in the world. Discipling others is coming along side them, and inviting them to experience and respond to the fullness of the Triune God alive and active - always and everywhere.

   The participles that follow specify parts of what that involves. The first is "baptizing people in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit." One image, seen more readily in the practice of baptism by immersion, is the drowning of death and sin and the raising again to life freed from the power of sin and death to walk in newness of life in Trinity, in community. 

This is not a call to baptize everyone we see, offering no instruction or relationship prior. To baptize someone in the name of our Triune God implies at least some process of coming alongside and helping them understand the nature of this Three-in-One God who gives new life and new birth in baptism. The community nature of this sacrament is one reason why we only do baptisms within the worship community and not separately or privately. 

   And so the second participle is "teaching them to keep what I have instructed you." The act of teaching here is not a synonym for the verb "discipling" above, but it is one part of the way discipling happens. The verb here especially means to help people learn the story, but it’s more than that. The teaching to be passed on faithfully is about how a disciple lives more than it is what they know. It’s something to be modeled rather than explained.

   Jesus asks those first disciples, and us, to teach others "to keep" or "to commit to practice" what he has instructed - not just know it but practice it - do it. There is content to be learned and lived. The stories, parables, and other teachings of Jesus and the church that continue to express that teaching are part of that. But the reason those stories, parables, and other teachings are there is not simply so we'll know them, but so we'll live them. So here Jesus commissions his own disciples to disciple others — not simply to teach them about Jesus then, but rather how to live fully as citizens and agents of the Triune God, in whose name we are baptized.

   The Holy Trinity is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to enter into more deeply. It’s a mystery of of inclusion. And such inclusion prevents us from understanding one Person of the Trinity without the others. God the Creator must ALWAYS be understood together with Christ the Redeemer and the Holy Spirit the Sustainer and so forth. They are ALWAYS together - distinct yet inseparable. Remember, one aspect of that definition of perichoresis was the idea of “interpenetration.” They are an inseparable part of one another. And the nature of God in this sense is more than our human thoughts and language can bear at times.

   Now, someone might think: So there are three gods? There would be if they were alongside but unrelated to the others; there would be except for the relating and inclusion of the three divine Persons - that perichoresis word. To think in terms of the metaphor of voices in three-part harmony - the Trinity is not three musicians who come together to play a trio - it is the harmonious song.      And it is a song that has always been playing...for eternity. The Three do not first exist then relate.      There wasn’t a start date for God - God is and was and always will be - another concept that is difficult for the modern mind to grasp. Without beginning and without end, the three - God, the Christ, and the Spirit - live together and are interconnected. That is why they are the one triune God, here and everywhere, in whom we live and breathe and have our being. They are the song, they are the dance. When the Godhead chose to take on human form, to incarnate, to show God’s love for all of creation, God the Christ took on flesh as Jesus of Nazareth that we might begin to know the true nature of God. The Trinity is the community in which we are a part and into which we are called to live, with and for others. Living in that way is what it means to be a disciple.

   What is this space in which we gather but a sign of our life together as the body of Jesus Christ? Here we listen for the Word of God the Creator, the Teaching of God the Redeemer, and find the power and inspiration of God the Holy Spirit who sustains us as we travel from Font, to Table, to the world to bear witness to all that we have known and seen and experienced in the deep fellowship of this all-inclusive community, this Triune God. 

Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord, God Almighty! God in three persons, blessed Trinity. Amen.