Do You hear?

FPC Willmar

Sermon

June 3, 2012

Trinity Sunday

In The Message translation of the Scripture, John 3: 17 says “God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again.”

We have been taught to focus on John 3:16 since childhood, but these verses aren’t about “salvation” in some isolated way.  They are about the new creation made by God and shown to us in the life of Christ and the Spirit through whom God gives us the courage to live as new beings in the new creation.  That’s salvation:  Life lived today in the new creation.

God sent His Son so that we might have salvation, so that the world could be set right again.  This is the first gift of God’s grace.  That life of salvation lived in the new creation is not for tomorrow or the day after, not at the end of time or on some day with a lot of 6’s in it, but right now. 

You cannot separate your eternal salvation from the historical reality of this day because if you have accepted the news that God has saved you, then you enter into God’s new kingdom – the one that will be fully realized in the end but which is already with us now – you enter into God’s kingdom right now.  Your life will be changed – right now.  You will change your life, right now.

Just as God brought about the creation the first time, so God brought about creation the second time.  And you cannot separate salvation from the act of the new creation.  The prophets didn’t do it; Paul didn’t do it; Jesus didn’t do it!

There’s a little hymn called “In The Garden,” written by Bob Dylan.  Yes, Minnesota’s own Bob Dylan.

One of the verses says: “When he spoke to them in the city, did they hear?  Nicodemus came at night so he wouldn’t be seen by men saying, ‘Master, tell me why a man must be born again?’  When he spoke to them in the city, did they hear?”

You see the contemporary faith of the people at the time of Jesus separated personal salvation from the new creation even though it’s clear in the Hebrew scriptures that they are joined and inseparable.  So the Pharisees and the religious leaders didn’t want to be reminded of the message of the prophets.  They wanted to believe that there were certain specific rules and regulations that were carefully spelled out that they could follow in order to earn their own salvation without having any impact on their lives in God’s old creation.

But Jesus says to Nicodemus, “‘You're not listening. Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original creation—the 'wind hovering over the water' creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life—it's not possible to enter God's kingdom.
⁶ When you look at a baby, it's just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can't see and touch—the Spirit—and becomes a living spirit.’”

This is “Trinity Sunday.”  For a great many people, the concept of the Trinity has lost much of its meaning because we misunderstand the concept of “person.”  It didn’t mean the same thing to the early church fathers who wrote the creeds as it does to us.  We think of three different people when we think of the three persons of the Trinity, and in the process we either get lost in a very weird mathematical puzzle or we worship three different gods!

What the early authors of the creeds meant by the three person of the Trinity was simply that our God – when reduced to language that we might begin to comprehend – had three forms of existence in our lives.  God is the creator, the parent, of all that is.  God’s essence among humans is revealed in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  God’s continuing presence among us is the presence of the Holy Spirit.  The God who has been given to us and the God who has been revealed to us remains always for us a mystery beyond all human comprehension.

The first gift of God’s grace is the gift of the revelation found in the self-giving love of Jesus Christ.  God gave Himself for us and to us.  That’s where grace begins and salvation is accomplished by God for us in that grace. 

Let me try to bring it back to earth, because God’s grace and God’s forgiveness and our salvation are meaningless unless you recognize their activity in your life today.  

I have learned about God’s love from the love my wife has given to me.  Like many people, I went through many years of my life screwing up a lot, hurting people, trying to make my own way in this life.  I never got very concerned about hurting people.  I usually managed to convince myself that it was what the politicians call collateral damage.  I never meant to hurt them, it was just the indirect result of my selfishness.  I could always figure out some way to make up for it:  jewelry, clothes, some trinket or bauble.  And for a great many years the people around me would exact some form of payment from me every time I did something to hurt them.  Whether they called it penance or retribution, it amounted to the same thing:  I would have to pay to earn their continued forgiveness, friendship or love. 

Since that’s what my experience was teaching me, at some level I thought the same must be  true of my relationship with God because how we love one another is how we love God.

Predictably, shortly after I met Karen, I did something that I wanted to do, literally ignoring her while I did it, and placing her in a very uncomfortable and pained position.  She called me out on it, and predictably I said “What can I do to make it up?”  Well, if she had been pained by what I had originally done, she was angered, saddened and confused by my response.  She said:  “I forgive you.  You can’t do anything to make up for it, but I forgive you.”

As I reflected on that notion perhaps for the first time in my life, I realized that the appropriate response was not to try and buy my way out of it.  The appropriate response was to alter my behavior – be less selfish – and thereby not cause her additional pain and sorrow.  I still couldn’t earn her forgiveness and love, but I could respond genuinely lovingly by being less selfish and more open to her feelings.

Then it really hit me.  That’s what grace and forgiveness were all about.  God forgives me.  I can’t earn that forgiveness.  It’s mine through the grace of God who has been revealed to us as the essence of self-giving love.   I can’t buy my way out it either.  The appropriate response is to return God’s love by changing my behavior; by thinking of the impact of my sins on God who loves me and who is made sorrowful by my selfish stupidity.

Do you exact retribution every time someone hurts you?  Do you take revenge on every slight?  Do you expect to have to buy your way into other people’s love?  However you view your relationship with those around you is going to be a very accurate mirror of how you view your relationship with God.  The saddest news is that if you – like me – thought that you always had to earn your own way then you probably haven’t yet understood the gift that is yours in the love of God.

You can’t earn it.  You can’t buy your way into it.  You can only accept it and respond in love putting God’s wisdom, God’s wishes, and God’s will ahead of your own. 

You have been saved solely by God’s grace.  It’s done.  God’s kingdom awaits your presence right now. 

To enter that kingdom, we must indeed become like infants all over again.  That doesn’t mean that we act childishly.  It means that we trust in a childlike fashion.  We must learn for the first time how to respond to God’s love.  If we do, then the Spirit will mold us and shape us into the new creation. 

“God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again.”  Amen.