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+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
On this first Sunday after Pentecost, the Church observes what is called Trinity Sunday. It is right that we do this, because we worship a God of three Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This is a great mystery, something that we cannot fully comprehend. Nevertheless, over the centuries, men have tried to illustrate the Holy Trinity in ways that we can better understand. St. Patrick is said to have used the shamrock to illustrate the Trinity--each of the leaves of the shamrock representing Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the entire shamrock being one God. Or there is the analogy of water: water comes as a liquid, a vapor, or as a solid, yet all three are water. But all that really does is get you mocked by Lutheran Satire for using bad analogies! Fundamentally, if we look at the Athanasian Creed, we confess that God is a God of three Persons, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Each Person is co-equal and co-ternal with the others. There are not three Gods, but one God. While the Scriptures reveal this to us, the Trinity is not explicit. The word trinity never appears in the Bible. But over the centuries, as the Church has reflected on the Scriptures and on God's saving acts through history, it came to understand that God has revealed Himself as a Trinity of Persons. St. Athanasius said that the Son of God was fully God. St. Basil and St. Gregory declared that the Holy Spirit was also God. And when we then read the Scriptures through the lens of this understanding, we can see all three Persons of the Godhead at work in the economy of salvation. In Exodus, we see God the Father speaking to Moses from the burning bush, commissioning Moses to go in His name to deliver the people of Israel from bondage in Egypt, and then leading the people through the wilderness with the pillar of flame. In Romans, St. Paul talks about God the Holy Spirit works in us to transform us from the inside out. Through the power of God the Holy Spirit, we are empowered to cast aside our sinful nature (the flesh) and walk in the power of the Spirit; to live a life of holiness and righteousness. St. Paul says, For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!" Then in today's Gospel lesson from St. John, we read about Jesus' famous encounter with Nicodemus, where Jesus declares to him, "You must be born again!" To be born again is to be spiritually transformed by the saving power of God, the saving power revealed in the mighty works of God the Son Jesus Christ through His death, resurrection, and ascension, and through the power of God the Holy Spirit. Jesus then declares those famous words, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life." Here again we see the Persons of the Godhead at work: God the Father sends the Son who dies on the Cross for the salvation of the world. God the Father also sends the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the empower the Church to carry out its mission of proclaiming the Gospel, to draw people into God's fellowship, and to transform them so that they die to their sinful nature and live according to the divine nature of God Himself. To believe that God is a Trinity of Persons is to believe in the God of the Bible and to recognize His saving acts on behalf of the human race. The evidence for this is to observe the claims of the counterfeit religions of the world. They deny the Trinity. Whoever they are; Moslems, Mormons, or Moonies, they all deny the holy Trinity. And to deny the Holy Trinity is to not only reject God, but to reject the salvation that God the Holy Trinity brings us. Because without each Person of the Trinity, salvation is not possible. Rather than exhaust ourselves by trying to fully understand this sacred mystery, it is better for us to simply worship and adore the Unity. As we spend time in His presence, and we experience His love and power, we recognize that He is God and we are not. And when we fully rest in that truth, then we begin to understand who we are and what we were created for. We begin to live in the reality that our God is holy and mighty, and that we are to love Him, serve Him, and give all the glory to Him. +In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
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“And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions…And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. A very blessed Pentecost Sunday to all of you! Today marks the 50th day since Christ’s resurrection on Easter, Today is the day we celebrate the coming of the promised Holy Spirit in a way that had not been seen before. In the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit fell on certain individuals whom God had chosen prophets, priests, and kings. But today, on the Feast of Pentecost, we see God pouring out His Spirit on all His people; young and old, rich and poor, people from every tribe and tongue and nation. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost transformed those gathered in that Upper Room from a beleaguered group of people hiding out from the authorities into divinely empowered and bold group of men and women who went out into the Greco-Roman world boldly proclaiming the Gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ, living a life of radical discipleship, and turning the world upside down with their lives and their message of love and truth. This new humanity redeemed through Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension is what we call the Church. The Church born on this day at Pentecost was and is a living organism where every member has a vital and important role to play in the building up of the Body of Christ and in the spread of the Kingdom of God. This Church was so powerful and alive that nothing could stop the spread of the Gospel. As we read in the Book of Acts, persecution of the Church in Jerusalem led its spread to Judea and Samaria. Persecution in Judea and Samaria caused it to spread to the wider world; to all the places mentioned in Acts Chapter 2: Rome, Cyrene, Crete, Asia, Pontus, Cappadocia, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Iran. The British historian Edward Gibbon, writing in his magisterial work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, credited the spread of the early Church to the power and authenticity of its message and common life. Through the Church’s ministry of healing and deliverance ministries, through its universal message of salvation through Jesus Christ, it appealed especially to those of the lowest parts of society. It took just 300 years for Christianity to spread throughout the Roman world and displace paganism as the official religion of the Empire. Today, the Church is a worldwide movement with Christian communities existing in nearly every country and nation in the world. All this was set in motion when the Holy Spirit fell on that small group of people in the Upper Room on Pentecost. Sadly, we Christians here in the West seem to believe that the power and zeal of the early Church is lost to us. We’re not seeing the growth. We’re not seeing lives transformed. But that power and zeal is not lost to us. Growth and a harvest of souls is still possible. My friends, the Holy Spirit is still here and He is at work. The Church that Christ established and that was born on Pentecost has the same power and authority that it had in those early days. We need to open the eyes of our faith and we need to surrender to the love and power of God. When I was the Chaplain at the Union Gospel Mission in Fort Worth, we ran an adult Christian discipleship class called the Alpha Course twice a year. At the conclusion of each Alpha Course, we would have what was called the Alpha Celebration in the main chapel on campus. It was a time to give thanks and celebrate what the Lord has been doing during the just completed Alpha Course. We would sing songs and hymns and I would give out certificates to residents and volunteers. I would also administer the Sacrament of Baptism to those who asked for it. I would then close the evening with a time for people to stand up and give testimony how the Lord had been working in their lives. What I discovered during my time at the Union Gospel Mission was that every time we gathered to thank God and to worship Him, lives were touched. At the Alpha Celebration last May, four people came forward to be baptized and six people came forward to rededicate their lives to Jesus Christ. A woman who was baptized declared that Christ had freed her from 30 years of addiction. A 9-year-old boy who was also baptized testified that Jesus Himself appeared to him in his dreams and that Jesus was calling him to preach salvation to others. There were tears of joy and a celebration of God’s great and mighty works. It's not just happening at the Union Gospel Mission, but it’s happening all around the world. People are coming to Christ in places like Iran and Nepal and China. In Africa, it’s not Islam that is on the move, but Christianity! “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions…And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” The prophet Joel wrote these words five hundred years before Day of Pentecost. He wrote them to the people of God suffering in exile in Babylon, waiting for the day when they could return home and wondering if God had forgotten about them. Joel gave them these words of hope and encouragement to remind them and assure them that God had not forgotten about them, but He had great and wonderful plans in store for them, plans that were greater and more wonderful than they could imagine. As we gather on this Pentecost Sunday, it feels like we are exiles and strangers in our own land. Our country has changed in many ways over the past 60 years. The Church has experienced significant decline during that time; congregations have shrunk, churches have been closed. But that is not the final word. Today’s celebration is a reminder that the same God who sent His Holy Spirit to us on Pentecost, the same Holy Spirit who inspired the Prophet Joel to write those words, is the same Holy Spirit who is here and at work among us today. Will you yield to the Holy Spirit and let Him have His way with you? He wants to transform you and make you an instrument of His love and His power so that the Kingdom of God is advanced, and so that God will be glorified in our lives. +In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. [Jesus said] “They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent Me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Twenty years ago this month, I graduated from Nashotah House seminary in Wisconsin. As a gift to myself for graduating, I went on a guided tour of the UK led by one of my seminary professors. It was marvelous! It was fun being a part of a group and it was fun moving around from place to place. Two of the places that we visited really stood out for me: Iona and Lindisfarne. Iona is a remote coastal outpost in western Scotland, on the Irish Sea. Lindisfarne is in northern England, near the Scottish border on the North Sea. Both sites are known in history as the locations of famous Celtic monasteries. Celtic monks from Iona and Lindisfarne not only created a vibrant Christian community, where God was worshipped and beautiful manuscripts were made, but they also served as a base of operations for missionary work throughout the British Isles and Western Europe during the Dark Ages. These monasteries flourished during the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. Unlike earlier Christians who lived during the time of the Roman Empire, they did not have the benefit of Rome’s sophisticated transportation system, nor the peace and prosperity that Rome provided. Nor were they located in major cities, such as London, Paris, or Rome, but they chose to operate from remote areas. Yet they took the Gospel to places where it had never been preached, and to places where the Church had once existed, but had reverted to paganism. They took the Gospel to Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, France, Switzerland, and Germany. They did not follow conquering armies, but came as peaceful missionaries, who brought the light of the Gospel and preserved the knowledge of earlier times through the copying of manuscripts. They lived in the time we call the Dark Ages, a time of chaos, warfare, with no stability or safety and a loss of knowledge. These Celtic monks were in the world, but they were not of the world. It was their zeal for the Gospel that led them to go out from their remote outposts to difficult and sometimes dangerous places. In a dark time, they brought the light of the Gospel and of knowledge to places that desperately needed it. Thomas Cahill wrote a book about what these men did, and he titled it, “How the Irish Saved Civilization.” The monks certainly must have understood the words that Jesus spoke to the disciples in today’s Gospel from St. John. In His valedictory address to His disciples, Jesus prays the High Priestly Prayer over them. It is His prayer of blessing, of exhortation, and of commissioning. Jesus is looking ahead to the time when He is no longer with them, after He has completed His mission on earth and ascended back to the Father. Jesus knows that they will start off as a small group of people in a hostile world. They have already witnessed the hostility to Jesus and His ministry, which will culminate in His arrest and crucifixion. And Jesus knows that even after His resurrection and ascension, that hostility will still be present and ongoing. So, Jesus prays that they would be properly equipped to go out into a dark and hostile work to proclaim the life saving message of the Gospel. First, Jesus prays, “Father, keep them in your name, which you have given Me, that they may be one, even as we are one.” Jesus prays that we, who are His holy and set apart people, would remain connected to the Father through the Son. This connection is to be as strong and as intimate as the Father’s connection to the Son. The organization that Christ established to accomplish this is the Church. Through the Church, we enjoy fellowship God and with other believers, we receive the Sacraments, and we are taught from the Word of God. Furthermore, the Church serves as the place of refuge from a hostile and dark world. Just as the Celtic monks established monasteries as refuges from a hostile barbarian Europe, so the Church is our safe place where we can worship God, love each other, learn the Word of God, and then reach out to a lost and hurting world. Second, Jesus prays, “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.” Although the world is a dark and dangerous place, Jesus did not take us out of it, but instead, calls us to go out into it. Rather than escape this hostile world, we can expect God to protect us and help us as we go out in His Name. Now this protection does not always mean protection from physical harm; throughout history Christians have suffered persecution—in the Book of Acts we read about how the early Christians and Paul suffered the loss of property, beatings, imprisonment, and even death because they believed in Jesus Christ. What Jesus is praying for is that we would remain spiritually secure in Him and would have the power to resist the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Third, Jesus prays, “Sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth.” Jesus prays that you and I would remain in the faith that was given to us from the Apostles; that we would be made holy by the Word of God. With this prayer, Jesus foreshadows His own great and mighty acts which He accomplished for our salvation, His death, resurrection, and ascension. Because of what Christ has done, we are sanctified and saved to be His people who are in the world, but not of it. Finally, Jesus prays, “As you sent Me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake, I consecrate Myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.” Jesus forshadows the Great Commission that He gives the disciples at His ascension. He commissions them to go out into the world in His Name, in the same way that the Father sent Him into the world for the salvation of the world. The Church is to continue the ministry of the Son of God to bring life and salvation to humanity enslaved by sin and death. The Church’s power and authority comes from Christ Himself, who, through His death, resurrection and ascension has sanctified the Church, and imparted His divine life into the Church. The past few weeks in Adult Sunday School, we’ve been talking about the Ten Commandments. Our discussion has caused many of us to lament the current state of American culture and society that has forgotten the Ten Commandments and has forgotten God. While American seems in many ways to be more prosperous than it was sixty years ago, morally and spiritually, it is a much darker place. And throughout what was once known as the Christian West, the Gospel has been forgotten and paganism has reasserted itself. That’s where we come in. Jesus Christ has commissioned you and me to go out into the world in His name and with His authority and power. And we can look to those faithful and brave Celtic Christian monks as our inspiration and an example. In a dark and dangerous time they went out into the world with the light of the Gospel, bringing truth and salvation to people who had never heard about Jesus Christ or who had forgotten about Him. They didn’t come from large cities, but from simple outposts of faith in remote areas. St. John the Divine Church is a small mustard seed of faith, a small outpost in a darkening world. Jesus Christ has commissioned us to bring the light of the Gospel to dark places. As St. Peter writes in 1 Peter 2:9, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.” +In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. “[Jesus said] As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you. Abide in My love.”
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. When I was a kid, I can remember listening to the Beatles on the radio. One of their more famous songs was, “All You Need Is Love.” Released in 1967, the song became a hit during a time when our nation was rocked with conflict and unrest over things like the Vietnam War and civil rights. People were angry with each other, and it seemed like the nation was going to break apart. The song’s words and message were simple: All you need is love. It was a powerful message of hope. Love, the song promised, was the answer to all the anger, misunderstanding, and hatred that was raging through the country. Happily, things did improve in the country eventually. The Vietnam War ended, people embraced the civil rights movement and we started to figure things out and get along with each other once again. Sadly, it seems today that we are once again back where we were in the late 60s and early 70s. We’re fighting with each other once again. But today, things are different from the late 60s and early 70s, because when the Beatles sang “All You Need Is Love” we thought we understood what love was. Today we don’t. Today the word “love” has come to mean something completely different than what we thought it meant. “Love” today means a form of narcissistic indulgence combined with enabling. We say to each other, “If you love me, you will let me do what I want regardless of the consequences to myself or others. If you love me, you will always agree with my choices no matter what.” This new definition of love has left us perplexed, unfulfilled and unhappy. We get what we demand, and no one ever says no to us. And we’re miserable. In today’s Gospel lesson from St. John, we hear Jesus talking to His disciples. John has included in his Gospel Jesus’ great valedictory discourse to His disciples before His arrest, crucifixion, and death. Jesus is talking about love. He says, “As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you. Abide in My love.” Jesus is talking about a love that we used to know and understand before our current madness. Jesus is talking about a love that is transcendent and powerful, a love that has the power to heal and transform. Jesus is talking about divine love or agape as it says in the Greek. Jesus is telling His disciples that the only way for them to grow and prosper in their life with God and with each other is to embrace love, the divine love that God the Father gives the Son, and Jesus the Son offers to them. Jesus exhorts them to “Abide in My love.” To abide means to rest in, to inhabit. Jesus says that His love is a way of being that we embrace and hold fast. The image that always comes to my mind is that of a child sitting on his father’s lap. Sitting on your father’s lap when you were a child is a place of warmth, safety, and intimacy. When you’re sitting in your father’s lap you know that all is right with the world and nothing can harm you. To put it another way, when Jesus invites us to abide in His love, He is inviting us to union with Him. Union means a oneness of heart and spirit. It means intimacy and trust. Jesus is inviting you and me into a relationship with Him that is like the relationship He enjoys with the Father. One of complete love, trust, and oneness of purpose. Our response to Jesus’ words is to ask, “How?” How do I abide in Your love, Jesus? Remember, we are confused about the meaning of love in our society today. We tend to think of love as a form of toxic narcissism combined with enabling. But Jesus is pointing us to something that we used to know but forgot. Love is always about the good and true. Love is directed towards another’s good. When we abide in Jesus’ love, we begin to understand that it’s not about us, it’s about Jesus. And Jesus tells us how to abide in His love: He says, “If you keep My commandments you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” Once we begin to yield our life and obey, then we will begin to abide in His love. When we abide in His love, then we begin to understand what true love is, and we are transformed by it. That’s why Jesus goes on to say, “These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” To obey is not slavery, because to obey is to embrace His love and life. To obey means we are free to become the people we were created to be. To obey means to break the power of sin over our lives. Jesus continues, saying, “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” If we are to abide in Jesus’ love, we are to keep His commandments, particularly to love each other as He has loved us. And Jesus describes His love for us as sacrificial: It is a great love because He lays down His life for us on the Cross, so we, should lay down our lives for each other. Jesus defines for us what love looks like. Love means seeking the other’s good. Love means laying down your life for the sake of the other. Love means obedience to the good and the true. Love means intimacy, oneness of purpose and the yielding up of one’s life for something greater. Jesus then sums up the meaning of all this. He says, “You are My friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from the Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I choose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.” One of the most encouraging things to know about our relationship with Jesus is that He chose us. It’s a great relief, because it means that we don’t have to do anything to earn His love. He chose us because He loves us, and because He loves us, He wants to bring us into union with Him so that we can participate with Him in the transformation of the world and the building of His kingdom. Because Jesus chose us, it means we don’t have to try to measure up, we only need to learn to walk with Him on the road of discipleship and transformation. The closer we get to Jesus, the more we learn that love is really all you need. It’s the love of Jesus that empowers us, heals us, and transforms us. It’s our love for Jesus that moves us to love each other to go out into the world and bear much fruit, fruit that will last. +In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. |
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