After the Chains Fall

Luke 8: 26-39

You have just heard, in my opinion,
one of the most mind-boggling stories we have in the Gospels.
For a number of reasons, it’s hard to get a handle on it.
We’re so far removed from the context of this story,
its culture, social mores, world view,
assumptions about human nature and the spirit world.
It’s kind of like, way out there somewhere.
It’s a wild, fantastic story,
that stretches us as we try to imagine it.
Try to picture an out-of-control naked madman
living in a cemetery,
who cannot be bound with ropes or chains,
who speaks in the voices of many demons.
And we can barely comprehend this scene
of a large herd of demon-possessed pigs,
who stampede down a steep bank in a frenzy,
and drown themselves in the sea.
Okay...?
This is the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ?
(thanks be to God?)

What is going on here?
What is the Gospel embedded in this story?
Well, consider.
Jesus had a pretty full week of ministry around Capernaum—
including healing the servant of a Roman commander,
raising to life the dead son of a poor widow,
fending off questions from John the Baptist’s disciples,
and the Pharisees,
telling a bunch of parables,
responding to the offensive behavior of the sinful woman,
in Simon the Pharisee’s house
(which I talked about last Sunday),
and having to deal with his meddling mother and brothers.
It’s been a busy few days.
He needed a change of scenery,
so he got into a boat with his disciples,
and crossed the Sea of Galilee,
maybe hoping for some peace and quiet.
And wouldn’t you know, a storm came up.
His disciples panicked,
and he had to calm the storm for them,
and teach them a lesson on faith.

So Jesus gets to the other side of the lake,
perhaps taking a deep breath...relief at last!
And they are immediately accosted by a screaming naked man.
Never a dull moment, when you follow Jesus around!

But what Jesus faces here, is actually quite normal for him.
Everywhere Jesus goes
he encounters people who are bound—
bound by sin, by disease, by grief,
by evil spirits, or by social isolation.
And Jesus meets these persons in bondage,
and sets them free, through healing, forgiveness, restoration.

This man who lived in the cemetery was the epitome of bondage.
He was bound in every way imaginable.
Sometimes physically, in chains and shackles.
At all times spiritually,
as this legion of spirits exercised complete control over him.
And certainly he was in social bondage.
He could never be among his people in community.
Forced to live on the margins, in the cemetery.
When you think of everything it means to be human—
self-awareness, self-control, being in relationship,
capacity to give and receive love—
this man had none of that.
He had even lost his name.
He could only call himself by a number: Legion.
He was beast-like. And he was treated that way.
He was separated, completely,
from the life God had created him to live.

Until he met Jesus, the liberator.
The freedom-giver.
The one who unbinds, who looses, who frees,
who restores people to the life they were made for.
The demons in this man knew exactly
what they were up against when they saw Jesus,
and didn’t try to fight it.
They just asked permission for a transfer to a herd of pigs.
And Jesus granted it.
The unclean spirits went into the unclean animals.
And as far as we know, that’s the last they were heard from.

So I ask again,
for us this morning, where is the Gospel in this story?
There are lots of interesting questions we could bat around.
We could hone in on the question of the demons themselves.
Such as where they came from,
how they took possession of the man to begin with,
why they needed permission to leave him,
how they could come to possess an animal,
and what happened to the demons
when the creatures they possessed died suddenly.
But I don’t think that’s where the Gospel is in this story.
The Gospel is in the person and work of Jesus.
Jesus is the Great Liberator.
Jesus breaks any and all kinds of chains—
physical, mental, spiritual, social.
That is the good news.
That is the Gospel.

And what gives this story the drama
is the way that people—and demons—respond to the Gospel,
how they respond to Jesus, and to his work of liberation.
And it is most fascinating.
_____________________

The response of the unclean spirits was immediate.
Upon seeing Jesus, they recognized him immediately
as the great liberator.
They knew their gig was up.
They were powerless to hold onto this man,
in the face of the liberator.
So they hightailed it out of there,
literally “high-tailed” it. Ever see a pig run?
But once the legion of spirits were out of the picture,
there were two other responses—
from the people of the community,
and from the man himself.
_____________________

The people were scared stiff.
Luke tells us they were seized with great fear.
I wonder why.
Why were they so threatened by this healing?

Could be they were upset
that Jesus destroyed a herd of pigs.
The farmers lost their livelihood,
maybe upset the economic stability of this little village.
The text doesn’t say that.
We don’t even know how many pigs were involved.

Or maybe,
it upset the stability of the village in another way.
As difficult as it was sometimes
to deal with this demon-possessed man in their community,
they had found a way to deal with him.
They kept him safely on the margins.
Greeks called this kind of person the pharmakos
the designated outcast who makes the system work.
Modern family-systems theory would call him the “black sheep”
or the “identified patient.”
Such a person fills a useful, although unhealthy, role in a social group.
When the group can focus their anxiety and energy
on the obvious problems of one,
they can avoid dealing with the complex problems of the whole.

The townspeople could all feel better about themselves,
when they all knew who the problem person was.
So maybe they simply did not know how to relate
to this new whole man in their midst.
They were comfortable seeing him as a half-man,
a wild creature kept safely at a distance.
But what would it mean to their community,
to have this person return, with a name,
living next door, going to work, going to market.
It was too much, too fast, for them to deal with.

Perhaps they were simply in fear
of the kind of power that Jesus represented.
They knew how much power the demoniac had,
to break chains and shackles.
Jesus obviously had more.
That was frightening.
_____________________

The power that binds people,
that holds them back,
that prevents their full humanity...
the power that oppresses—
that power is fearful and difficult to face.
But sometimes,
equally troublesome, equally mysterious,
and just as difficult to face,
is the power that liberates.

The power of God that sets people free,
that breaks the bonds of oppression,
that causes the chains to fall,
that power is not always easy to come to terms with.
It is also fearful.
Life may not suddenly get easy after the chains fall.
Freedom can mean a loss of security, of control.
Freedom can mean we don’t know where we’re going to end up.
At least bondage is predictable.
When we are chained to a wall,
we know where we’re going to be tomorrow and the next day.
After the chains fall,
it’s not necessarily easy to embrace freedom.
That has something to do, I think,
with why persons who are being abused,
often find it so difficult to leave their abuser.
It’s a frightening thing to leave, and chart a whole new path in life,
even if everyone else says it’s a path of freedom.
It may not feel that way
to someone who is contemplating freedom for the first time.
_____________________

It is after the chains fall, that we must lean hard on faith.
We cannot walk the path of freedom,
without a strong faith in the one who gives us freedom.
And by faith, I mean active trust in Jesus the liberator.

The townspeople and pig-herders,
were paralyzed with fear,
when they saw the man’s freedom from oppression,
and saw their own frightening freedom
to forge a whole new way of relating
to this real human being in their midst.
They were afraid because they didn’t trust this stranger
who just got off the boat,
and immediately upset the social balance.
They didn’t have the capacity to trust Jesus,
and to follow his lead.
They wanted him to leave. The quicker the better.

In contrast,
the man, who for the first time in ages was fully clothed
and in his right mind,
sat calmly and quietly at the feet of Jesus.
He sat at the feet of Jesus.
He assumed the physical posture of a disciple.
He sat where disciples sit—at the feet of their master.
He sat where Mary sat,
when her sister Martha was busy in the kitchen.
At the feet of the one who gave him freedom.

Surely, the future for this man had to be frightening.
Having lived for so long on the margins,
how could he dare to be with people again?
But he trusted Jesus.
Because Jesus had just freed him.
He didn’t know where the road might lead,
but he was ready to walk that road,
if it could be with Jesus.

So he sat at Jesus’ feet, waiting for the next move.
And when Jesus was getting back in the boat to leave,
at the people’s insistence,
the man begged Jesus to let him follow,
to let him be the disciple he wanted to be.
Which only made sense.
It’s what the man wanted.
It’s what the community wanted.
Leaving the community to follow Jesus
was the perfect solution all around.
The man wouldn’t have to try to re-enter the life of a community
that had long ago banished him to the margins.
The community wouldn’t have to get over the huge emotional hurdle
to let him back in.

But Jesus said no.
Why?
The demons got their wish.
They begged Jesus for permission to go into the pigs,
and Jesus went along with it.
But the man asked to be Jesus’ faithful disciple,
and Jesus refused.
What’s going on here?

Life is complicated after the chains fall.
It would have been easy to let the man follow along.
But I’m guessing Jesus knew there was still more work
for the man to do
before he was completely free and whole.
Getting rid of the Legion was the obvious first step,
and a huge step.
But being free involves figuring out who you really are at the core,
and living that identity to the fullest.
It only took a moment for the chains of spiritual bondage to fall.
But it would take a long time, maybe a lifetime,
to discover the depths of a life that is truly free in Jesus.
Tagging along behind Jesus of Nazareth,
and living that life of constant ministry
constantly on the move,
constantly at people’s beck and call,
would have given the man no space or time
to do the work of learning what freedom meant.

Instead, he returns to his people, to his community,
and takes the more complicated and difficult path,
of following Jesus when the way forward is not perfectly clear,
when there is still a particular shape to a life a freedom,
a shape that has contours, and confines, and parameters.
Freedom, within a community, is not the kind of freedom
that Americans are so fond of talking about.
And we talk a lot about it.
There is hardly anything in American society
we value more than freedom.
Our government is built around that value.
In a week and a half America celebrates Independence Day.
Our churches champion the freedom of religion.
And there is nothing we despise more in other cultures,
than a refusal to grant freedom to their citizens.
We are now in a war dubbed “Operation Iraqi Freedom,”
because we want to export the kind of freedom we value.
And I agree completely with the cultural value
that freedom is human right,
and freedom is a gift of God.
God’s gift of free-will is at the heart
of God’s relationship with us.
Just 5 weeks ago our worship service had the theme,
“Freedom is the Lord’s Doing.”
And I preached about that.
So I’m all for freedom.

But we misunderstand freedom,
if all we focus on is breaking the chains.
Because for followers of Christ,
when the chains fall, that’s the starting point.
That’s when we begin to learn the depths of freedom
within a community of followers of Christ.

Freedom in Christ,
is having a free and open opportunity
to trust more fully in person of Jesus,
to nurture a relationship with one who not only makes us free,
but to whom we bow as Lord.
Yes! Freedom, and submission, can coexist.

After the chains fall,
we face the same challenge as the man in the Gospel story:
mustering the courage to follow Jesus into the unknown territory
of complicated and sometimes painful human relationships.
We will never be independent, nor should we be,
no matter what we say on July 4th.
We will always need one another, truly need one another.
We will always need to learn to trust in one greater than ourselves.
True freedom is not unbounded personal autonomy.
True freedom is living a life of humble trust
in the person of Jesus,
and the way of Jesus.
True freedom is a life lived in submission
to Jesus Christ, the liberator, the savior, the redeemer.

It will take courage—
the way it took courage for the liberated man to walk back into town,
and start proclaiming what the Lord had done in him.
But it need not be frightening.
Because when we turn toward town,
in other words, toward the God who calls us into community,
we are turning toward a God of endless love.
A God who cares for all people,
even, and especially, the small, the weak, the vulnerable.
A God on whom nothing is lost.
We can truly trust a God who counts every drop in the ocean.
And in that trust, we will find freedom.
This is where freedom, and being held, come together into one.

Listen to the words of this hymn.
Nothing is lost on the breath of God
nothing is lost forever;
God’s breath is love,
and that love will remain,
holding the world forever.
No feather too light, no hair too fine,
no flower too brief in its glory,
no drop in the ocean, no dust in the air,
but is counted and told in God’s story.

—Phil Kniss, June 24, 2007

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An Unfortunate Side Effect of Being Good

Luke 7:36-8:3

I feel sorry for Simon the Pharisee.
I really do.
Jesus really laid into him in this story.
And Simon was not a bad person.
There is nothing in scripture to indicate that Simon was
corrupt, or conceited, or rude, or self-centered,
or had any serious moral flaw whatsoever.
He was almost certainly a good, decent, respectful, loyal,
and devout human being.
I personally appreciate what Simon represents.
I feel some kinship with him, as a matter of fact.
I preach a lot about the renewal of the church,
about returning to what God intends for us as a people,
to our calling to a communal and missional life.
I preach about pleasing God,
about living the life we were created for.
That’s what Simon was doing.

Everything I know about the Pharisees,
would indicate that, like you and I, they were good folks,
who had valid and noble concerns
about the welfare of their people.
They were all about Israel’s spiritual renewal.

It was their firm and sincere belief,
that if Israel would ever be free from their brutal oppression
by the Roman Empire,
if one of their own would ever sit on the throne of David again,
it would be because they returned to their spiritual roots.
The Pharisees, like every other Jew alive,
were waiting for the Messiah to come and deliver them.
And many believed, according to their interpretation of scripture,
that the Messiah would come,
when they achieved holiness as a nation.
When they were spiritually ready,
the Messiah would come and save them from their oppressors.

So, let me put myself in Simon’s shoes.
Here I am, a recognized religious leader of my people,
concerned about my people’s spiritual well-being,
wanting to make sure they get ready for the Messiah,
by living righteous and holy lives
as set forth by the laws of Moses,
that they follow the holiness code
that grew out of Moses’ laws,
and follow it to the letter,
so that God will be pleased to send us the Messiah.

And here is Jesus, purporting to be a legitimate Rabbi,
with twelve disciples,
who is going around the countryside wowing people
with signs and wonders,
drawing huge crowds of admirers.
And the word “Messiah” is being whispered among them,
and that idea is beginning to spread.

And I, Simon, being a good Pharisee,
have reasonable doubts about this man from Nazareth.
He might have the greatest intentions,
but he seems misguided, at best.
I heard he doesn’t require his disciples to fast,
he openly mingles with tax collectors and sinners,
even sits at their tables, eats from their plates,
and he blatantly broke Sabbath law recently,
by publicly doing his work of healing, on the Sabbath!
But...he’s only getting started; he’s a new rabbi,
so I don’t want to write him off completely.
I do want to be respectful, give him a fair hearing.
Being a righteous man myself, I’m not going to get nasty,
and just start bad-mouthing him for no reason.

So I extend the noble gesture of hospitality.
I invite him to my home.
I’m not going to bend over backwards
and make him think I’m a great fan of his,
but I’ll be nice, polite, and let him make his case.
If I listen to him respectfully,
he’ll be ready to listen to me,
and maybe with a little gentle coaxing,
I can help him out a bit, get him back on course.
He could be a good rabbi, yet,
and help us all get ready for the Messiah.

Standing in Simon’s shoes,
I think that’s what I would be thinking.
If you have your Bibles open to Luke 7, where this story comes from,
flip back a few pages, and check out the two chapters
leading up this story.
Interesting stuff here.
This is still early in Jesus’ ministry.
The Pharisees were not yet Jesus’ sworn enemies,
but they were getting increasing puzzled, and disturbed.
They wondered about him.
They kept asking him “why” questions, questions with an edge.
5:30—“Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
5:33—“Why do your disciples not fast?”
6:2—“Why are you doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?”
6:11—the first sign of anger toward Jesus
was when he healed a man on the Sabbath.

So Simon—concerned, skeptical, puzzled—invites Jesus to his home,
to be hospitable,
and to try to find out where he’s coming from.

And no sooner does his friendly dinner party begin,
than in walks this known sinner of a woman,
who behaves in an absolutely scandalous way toward Jesus.
Weeping, touching his feet,
letting down her hair to dry them,
and then kissing his feet, and anointing them.
And Jesus sits there, doing nothing to stop her.
It’s clear to Simon (see v. 39) that Jesus is no prophet,
or he would know what kind of woman this is.
A rabbi willingly lets himself become unclean, impure.
How can he do that, when he knows perfectly well,
that individually, and as a community,
we must remain pure, and holy, and righteous,
or the Messiah will never come.

I love what happens next. Jesus turns and says,
“Simon, I have something to say to you.”
Simon replies, “Teacher...speak.”
And Jesus tells a two-sentence story.
“A certain creditor had two debtors;
one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty.
When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them.”
End of story. Then Jesus asks,
“Which of them will love him more?”
Simon answered,
“I suppose...the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.”
Jesus says, “Right you are.”
So far, so good. Simon gave the right answer.

But then Jesus turns personal, and offensive.
He compares Simon to the sinful woman,
and says Simon is the one who doesn’t measure up!
“I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet,
but she has bathed my feet with her tears...
You gave me no kiss,
but...she has not stopped kissing my feet.
You did not anoint my head with oil,
but she has anointed my feet with ointment.”
Whoa! As if Simon had not just opened his personal home to Jesus,
shared his space,
spread out a nice meal,
and served up good wine.
And Jesus, the guest, has the nerve
to criticize Simon for what he didn’t do.
He didn’t wash his feet, or anoint his head,
or give him a kiss of greeting.
Okay, so Simon chose not to pull out all the stops
and treat Jesus like a greatly honored guest.
He had Jesus here to check him out, after all,
not to make him feel like royalty.
Simon is playing an honorable role here,
as a good, polite, hospitable Pharisee,
who’s trying to please God and do right by his people.
And a known sinner woman comes in and behaves badly,
and Jesus publicly honors her, and humiliates him!

Do you see why I say I feel sorry for Simon the Pharisee?
He’s concerned about pleasing God like I am.
Concerned about the welfare of his people like I am.
He is a decent, honest, community-minded citizen.
He is a good man.

But there is an unfortunate side effect of being good.
In the words of Jesus,
“the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”
There’s a built-in weak spot in good people like me,
and like Simon, and like most of us here.
We are not in the best position to give and receive radical love.
It’s harder to recognize and accept the gift of forgiveness
when it is offered to us,
because we don’t realize how much we need it.
And it’s harder to give it to others,
because it’s obvious how much they don’t deserve it.

It was patently obvious in Simon’s house,
which character was the good person,
and which one was the sinner.
Even Jesus didn’t dispute that point.
He knew the woman was a sinner.
And he knew Simon was a righteous man.
But the more important difference between the two,
was how ready they were to give and receive the radical love of God,
how ready they were to respond in gratitude
to the unmerited love and mercy of God.

The sinful woman had no reputation to protect,
she had no worry about what people would think of her.
The only thing on her mind, apparently,
was how to show her love and gratitude to Jesus.
Because it was through the presence and ministry of Jesus,
that she experienced the deep and unconditional love of God,
for the first time in her life.
She was broken in her sinfulness, and she knew it.
But she had been forgiven, and forgiven much.
So the only response that made sense to her,
was to lavish that love and gratitude
on the one who showed her the radical love that changed her life,
even if it came across as irrational,
even if it offended some people.

But we good people don’t often get to that point.
We are too busy protecting our good reputation,
being cautious who we hang out with,
too busy convincing ourselves and others of our goodness.
We rarely come face to face with our need for forgiveness,
our deep need to be redeemed by God,
our need to be saved.
What? We need to be saved? From what, we ask?

Next time we are tempted to brush aside this idea
that we are sinners,
in desperate need of God’s saving grace in Jesus,
think of Simon.
Remember that Jesus turned and said,
“Simon, I have something to say to you.”
Chances are, if we are good people like Simon,
Jesus would have something similar to say to us.

Being satisfied with the state of our righteousness is a dangerous thing.
It’s not only the Gospel reading that tells us that.
All the scripture we heard today underscores that point.
In 2 Samuel, King David was sure he was the righteous one,
and was indignant when he heard prophet Nathan
tell about this rich man who butchered the pet lamb
of his poor neighbor.
Until Nathan said, “You are the man.”
The poet in Psalm 32, in his day of suffering,
refused to face his sin head on,
and he wasted away in silence, it says.
And in Galatians 2,
it’s the righteous, law-abiding Jewish Christians,
who have a hard time dealing with the fact that Gentiles
who didn’t follow the law,
stood equally justified before God.
There is an unfortunate side effect of being good.
It makes it harder to face our sin.
It makes it harder to appreciate the gift of forgiveness
which is offered to those who turn toward God,
who repent of their sin.
And it makes it harder to offer the gift of forgiveness
to others who don’t deserve it,
especially to those who we look at,
and it’s patently obvious how great their sin is,
compared to ours.
But it need not be this way.

There’s a story I want us to hear,
a sort of modern day version of the Luke 7 story.
Only in this case, Simon does the right thing.
The righteous one in this story,
the one who had the moral high ground,
readily, and amazingly, offered love and forgiveness
to one who obviously did not deserve it.
We are fortunate to have this Simon with us today,
and to tell the story himself.
He is a Mennonite pastor from south Central Java, in Indonesia,
named Paulus Hartono.
Pastor Hartono, will you come and share your story?

--------
Paulus Hartono's words:
I live in Solo City, in Central Java. Solo is an Indonesian city noted for its many riots. Twelve times big riots have happened there. Some Islamic groups hate Chinese people and Christians. They want Indonesia to become an Islamic state. They hate the Chinese because Chinese have control of the economy. They hate Christians because they assume that Christian religion came to Indonesia from Dutch colonial rule, and that Christians are now oppressing the Muslims of the world in places like Iraq and Palestine.

In 1998 a big riot happened in my city. Almost 60 percent of shops, businesses and houses owned by Chinese people were burned. Some members of my congregation were victims of this riot. My congregation has 250 members; almost 25 percent are Chinese and 75 percent are Javanese. After the riot, I tried to teach forgiveness. For the first several years it was very difficult. They refused. But I continued to teach them to forgive like Jesus teaches us to do. When I contemplate Jesus’ words: “I send you out as sheep among wolves,” I know that I want teach my people to forgive through real actions of building relationships with the people who hurt us.

In 2003, the first time I visited the base camp of these radical Muslims, I saw many big signs with angry words like “NO COMPROMISE.” The commander told me that Chinese and Christian are infidels and “kafir” who may be killed or kidnaped.

I worked for two years to build a relationship with this man and I have seen good developments. The angry signs have disappeared. In 2005 they destroyed some churches in our city. I called the commander by phone and invited him to meet and talk and share together with some Christian pastors. This worked very well. It started to wake up our understanding of one another.

For the next days I invited him to go with me to help tsunami victims in Aceh in northern Sumatra where our churches were doing relief work. For two weeks we lived together, ate together, sometimes cooking together, singing and sharing together. After that experience the commander said to me, ”I have a second definition of an infidel ”kafir”. That is a “brotherly infidel”, one that we can trust and build friendship with.

From 2005 to 2007 we continued with a program of giving training in “peace building” to all of his member commandos. When we have a good opportunity, I ask them to share about their experience. When commander tells his story about the harsh way he treated Christians and Chinese, he weeps and apologizes, and I tell him that we have forgiven all of you.

One day the commander came again and explained that he now has a third definition infidel ”kafir”, that is the “kind infidel,” one they must trust and respect. Now they call me commander, too, although I have no gun because I am a Mennonite.

[end of Pastor Hartono's words]
----------

I do think there is a connection between
the ability of Pastor Hartono and his congregation
to look honestly at their own lives,
and recognize their own need for God’s grace and forgiveness,
and their ability to reach out in radical love and forgiveness
to one who so clearly did not deserve it,
to see, in their enemy, the spark of God’s image,
their common humanity.

May we all be so honest with ourselves and with God,
that we hold our lives before God and each other as an open book.
Repenting of our sin.
Seeking forgiveness and healing.

There’s a wonderful hymn text about someone who did just that.

In the stillness of the evening
inner restlessness befalls me
which I cannot overpower.
In the midst of joy and gladness
at the day’s abundant blessings,
silent pain is ever near me.

My defeats loom large before me,
and I know the day now passing
has been crushed to many pieces.
But as day draws to its closing
I surrender all my unrest
to the One who is beside me.

God is greater that our conscience.
He who know that I am helpless,
from the weight of guilt will free me.
All my troubled thoughts are quiet
for I am, in all my weakness,
still beloved and accepted.

Jesus Christ’s own word and promise
comes to me, a gift of mercy:
“All your sins are now forgiven!”
Thus the pieces lying broken
shall this very day be lifted
into love’s eternal wholeness.

If new days to me are given,
every hour with grace abounding
will give hope of new beginnings.
Peace of mind protects my slumber.
Courage is restored for living.
I can meet the new tomorrow!

—Phil Kniss, June 17, 2007

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(Trinity Sunday) God from Three Angles

John 16:12-15; Romans 5:1-5

As we already noted, today is Trinity Sunday.
Probably the only Sunday in the church year celebrating
not a teaching of Jesus, but a teaching of the church.
Trinity is rooted in scripture,
but you won’t find the word Trinity in the Bible.
So why is this doctrine so important to us, you might ask?
Why does the church set aside one Sunday a year to celebrate it?

And more importantly, is anyone here interested in hearing me
pontificate for 20 minutes on the finer points
of the nature of God in the doctrine of the Trinity?
There are volumes written about the nature and substance
of the Three-in-One God.
I could give you quotes from popes going back 1,700 years.
I could tell you how ecumenical councils worked for years
to hammer out language to capture such sublime truths
as the consubstantial nature of the Father and the Son.
I could review with you how the Eastern Orthodox Church
split from the Roman Catholic Church a thousand years ago,
fueled by a disagreement over whether the Holy Spirit
proceeded from the Father and from the Son,
or, from the Father, through the Son.
This could be a mind-numbing 20-minute sermon.

I don’t want to belittle those historical developments,
or the importance of the disagreements.
They did have important implications for the church and our faith.

But I want to move this conversation quickly to a different level.
I think everyone of us here shares something important in common.
We want to know God.
We wouldn’t be here, if that wasn’t the case.
We want to know God more deeply and truly.

There are different ways of knowing, of course.
There is knowing through observation,
and knowing through experience.
We can learn to know something by dissecting and studying it.
Taking it apart, observing the finer details, arguing about it,
until we have a shared understanding of its essential nature.
That’s what the ancient councils of the church were doing.
We can also learn to know something by living with it,
by relating our lives to it.
In this way of knowing we experience it,
interact with it,
develop a relationship with it,
and allow the knowledge to transform us.
There are times and places to seek both kinds of knowledge of God.

We have a good strong foundation in the early creeds.
The creeds did some important, unifying work for the church.
The Apostles Creed is still a great confession,
and one we continue to stand on.
But it’s one thing to speak truthful words about who God is.
It is quite another thing to be in a relationship with that God.

The biggest challenge we face in the church today is not
believing the verbal confessions of our faith.
The challenge is moving into the deeper kind of knowledge.
To know God more deeply,
by experiencing the rich and vibrant and various ways
that the living triune God encounters us in life,
and enters into relationship with us, and transforms us.

That is the place I want to linger in these 20 minutes,
as we think together about the Trinity.
If we know anything at all about God, it’s that God is relational.
Someone said that everything sacred, everything that is of God,
is relational.
People have tried, and failed, to know God in the abstract,
as a purely objective reality that we can study and observe
in the same way we study math or science.
But knowledge of God only becomes real,
when it is a lived reality,
when we allow the reality that is God
to impinge upon the lived reality of our ordinary lives.

Bishop N. T. Wright of England had an imaginative way of putting it.
He said when we argue about God in the abstract,
about God’s existence, or God’s nature,
or God’s activity in the world,
it’s kind of like “pointing a flashlight toward the sky
to see if the sun is shining.”
He said speaking about God is like “staring into the sun.”
It’s too dazzling to look at it straightaway.
We need to look around to enjoy and appreciate
how the light of the sun illuminates life around us,
how the stuff of life reflects, and relates to the light.

Nevertheless, we seekers of God don’t give up trying
to catch a glimpse of the sun itself,
trying to discover the truth about the nature of God.
The doctrine of the Trinity came about because
early Christians were seeing this beautiful light reflected
in so many different ways all around them,
and wanted to catch a glimpse of the sun.
We have the wrong idea about this doctrine,
if we think 1,700 years ago when this doctrine was formulated,
a bunch of theologians who lived in an ivory tower
got together as a purely intellectual exercise,
to make something simple into something complicated.

No, it was that in the early church,
ordinary believers in Jesus
experienced the activity of God in complex ways.
It was their lived experience with their faith that made it clear
that God related to creation in different ways.
They experienced God as majestic, powerful, and awe-inspiring.
They experienced God as gentle, compassionate, and intimate.
And they had stories handed down by recent ancestors,
of experiencing God present in the flesh,
in man named Jesus of Nazareth.
So it was their lived experience with God,
that was given to the theologians to work with,
to help find language to talk about it.

God is not merely a concept. God is known in relationship.
Let me quote N. T. Wright again, from his book Simply Christian.
“It would be a mistake to give the impression
that the Christian doctrine of God is a matter of
clever intellectual word games or mind games.
For Christians it’s always a love game:
God’s love for the world, calling out an answering love from us,
enabling us to discover that God not only happens to love us...
but that he is love itself...
The...heart of God’s own being [is] the love
which passes continually between Father, Son, and Spirit.”

And according to N. T. Wright,
the Trinity, which is all because of Jesus,
keeps us grounded in the worship of a relational God;
it keeps us from worshiping God as a cosmic notion of goodness.
Again, in his own words, let me read a couple paragraphs.
“Once we glimpse the doctrine of the Trinity
we dare not slide back into...paying distant homage
to a god who is...merely a quasi-personal
source of general benevolence...
Christian faith is much more hard-edged, more craggy, than that.
Jesus exploded into the life of ancient Israel...
not as a teacher of timeless truths,
nor as a great moral example,
but as the one through whose life, death, and resurrection
God’s rescue operation was put into effect,
and the [world] turned its great corner at last...
It is because of Jesus that Christians claim
they know who the creator God of the world really is.
It is because he, a human being,
is now with the Father in the dimension we call “heaven”
that Christians came so quickly to speak of God
as both Father and Son.
It is because he [is still] in heaven
while we are on earth...
(though the Spirit makes him present to us)
that Christians came to speak of the Spirit, too,
as a distinct member of the divine Trinity.
It is all because of Jesus that we speak of God the way we do.
And it is all because of Jesus that we find ourselves
called to live the way we do.
More particularly, it is through Jesus that we are summoned
to become more truly human,
to reflect the image of God into the world.”

Those were a lot of powerful words.
I hope you caught even half of them.

The Trinity is not a dry, intellectual exercise
in the study of the nature of God.
The Trinity is putting into words
what it means to worship a God who is with us, really with us,
in a way that puts a claim on our ordinary daily lives,
in a way that compels us to respond to God,
to relate to God, in one way or another.
Accept or reject. But respond, we will.
In obedience or in rebellion, but relate to God, we will.

It is the witness in scripture to our relational God
that has given rise to this doctrine of the Trinity.
The scripture readings we heard this morning are prime examples.

Paul was trying to tell the church in Rome about all of this,
about how it’s all because of Jesus,
that we can relate to the God of the universe, in peace.
Romans 5:1—“We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have obtained access to this grace.”
And Paul was telling them how because of the Holy Spirit
they could experience the real and present love of God.
Verse 5: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

It is that real, concrete, present, and multi-angled relationship
with the triune God,
that makes a joyful and hopeful life possible,
in a world of suffering.
It’s the reason Paul could say, in v. 3,
that he finds grounds for joy even in suffering,
“knowing that suffering produces endurance,
and endurance produces character,
and character produces hope,
and hope does not disappoint us,
because God’s love has been poured into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit.”

And the Gospel reading this morning, from John 16,
gives another picture of this relational God,
how the triune God is a divine community in itself.
If you look at verses 14 and 15, of John chapter 16,
you see Jesus describing to his disciples,
this interactivity between himself and the Spirit and his Father.
“[The Spirit] will glorify me,
because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
All that the Father has is mine.
For this reason I said that [the Spirit] will take what is mine
and declare it to you.”

Jesus is trying to reassure his disciples,
that they can experience the presence of God in ways
that do not require Jesus to be physically present.
This must have been the real, burning question
that was occupying their thoughts,
and fueling their fear and anxiety,
here at end of Jesus’ ministry,
when things were starting to come unglued.
The disciples were coming to believe that Jesus was from God,
that Jesus was the Anointed One, Son of God.
They were just beginning to get accustomed to that thought.

But they could not get their heads around this other idea
Jesus kept repeating over and over,
that he would soon be leaving them.
So how was this supposed to work?
Jesus was the real and distinct revelation of God the Father
to the community of believers.
He was the incarnation of God.
God in real flesh.
God present. Emmanuel.
Okay, they could accept that.
But how was God going to continue
to be present in the community
when the incarnation stopped?
See, when Jesus talked about leaving them,
he was talking about the end of the incarnation.

Eugene Peterson has an interesting angle on what’s happening in John.
He compares John with the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Those Gospels present the story line of Jesus’ public life,
follow his actions during three years of teaching and healing.
The action gradually gathers momentum
until that one final climactic week in Jerusalem,
where the real action takes place.
But John does something different to get the story across.
Peterson says that in John, (quote) “we find ourselves involved
in a world of leisurely and extended conversation,
discourses that expand and ruminate
on something that has just happened...
[As] we are...in the company of Jesus...he takes his time,
repeats himself, picks up a phrase and then drops it,
circles around and picks it up again,
like someone holding a gemstone up to the light
and slowly turning it so we notice the various colors.”

I can relate.
The Trinity is not something for us to dissect and examine
until it makes perfect rational sense.
The Trinity does, however, speak some deep and beautiful truths
about how we relate to God, and how God relates to us.
For us to grasp the Trinity, we don’t need a neat and tidy
point-by-point outline,
or the quintessential story that will put all the pieces together.
We need a leisurely conversation, Gospel of John style.
We need to look at this gem from different angles,
and soak in the beauty it reveals.

The purpose of the Trinity is to help us know God,
to know more deeply, more truly, more dynamically.
Deep knowledge of God will not come from rational analysis.
No, it’s like a multi-faceted gemstone that reflects the light
in different colors and intensities,
depending on the angle from which we’re viewing it.
The Trinity helps us see God from three angles.
God the majestic sovereign,
creator of the universe,
all-knowing, all-powerful.
And, God who understands my human frailty,
God who has been in my shoes,
God who knows suffering, and continues to suffer.
And, God who is near to comfort,
to guide and empower in the present,
to speak the words of God to us today.
God who brings together earth and heaven.

It is our life calling to know this God, not by looking on from a distance,
but to know by participating, by living with,
by letting the truth of God make a difference
in the particulars of our ordinary lives,
by engaging in the kinds of practices
that nurture this deeper knowledge and participation in God.

When we recognize that way of knowing as our life calling,
we will read the creeds in a different way.

Let's now recite the Apostle’s Creed,
a creed shared by Christians all over the world,
dating back to the third century.

But before we recite the words,
I invite us to reflect, in silence,
on how these truthful words
relate to the particular realities of our ordinary lives.
To what experiences or practices of our lives
do these words give truthful witness?

How, in your daily life, do you relate in a particular way,
to God as almighty, as creator of heaven and earth?
How does Jesus sitting at the right hand of the Father
make a difference in the way you face suffering,
or in the way you pray?
What does it mean for you, in the particular,
to believe in “the forgiveness of sins?”

Let us reflect, in silence...

Let us now read together, in unison,
this confession of our faith in the triune God:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come again to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.

Amen.

—Phil Kniss, June 3, 2007

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