The Arrogance of Humanity

Sermon as preached at Lambs and Evington UMC on 6/7/15


Read 1 Samuel 8:4-20

I have to admit that sometimes I hate going out to eat with Heather, not because she’s not good company, but because sometime she is so frustrating when she orders. For example we’ll go to a Chinese restaurant that we have been to before and she’ll order the Kung Pao and I’ll remind her, you didn’t like that last time, but you liked my General Tso’s, are you sure you want that? And she insists she does, but lo and behold when the food comes out she doesn’t like her food as much as mine. And the worst part of it all is that she then eats my food.  Heather is not alone in this; we are all stubborn about certain things. Even when others try to show us the mistakes we are making, we at least want it to be our mistakes to make. We don’t like others telling us what is good for us or what we want; we want to decide that for ourselves.

            As we read the Bible we see that time after time the Israelites fall into this same arrogance. Here in 1 Samuel we see the beginning of one of these fateful decisions.  The Israelites have been trying for some time to figure out a leadership style that they like. First they had Moses and Aaron and later Joshua as their leaders, but this later evolved into a group of Judges that would lead them. Now however the Israelites looked around them and saw all of these powerful nations with great militaries and enormous wealth and they were all lead by a King. Seeing the success of these nations, the Israelites began to demand a king. This upset Samuel, and certainly didn’t go over very well with the King of Kings. God even says to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.” For as upset and as offended as God was by this demand, like a parent who has to let their child make their own mistakes, God allows the Israelites to have a king, but first he has Samuel give them a strong warning. Samuel tells of all of the bloodshed, abuse and corruption that will come with a king, but even after this warning the people still cried, “No! but we are determined to have a king over us,  so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles."       

  We should not jump into thinking that we are any better than the Israelites. Far too often we act as though we know what is best for us and not God. Our actions are only proof of this costly arrogance. I personally am probably one of the biggest culprits. I don’t know how many times that I have come to making a tough decision, not primarily through prayer but through trust in my own abilities. And when I did pray it was often a short quick prayer asking for an easy answer, and then later asking that God endorse my decision. I am no better than the Israelites who had already made it up in their mind that they were going to have a king, and then ask for God’s permission. This is a fundamental flaw however, we have gotten our roles reversed. It is not our job to come up with the plan and make decisions and then ask God to make it so; it is our job to listen and follow the will of God and respond to what is asked of us. Unfortunately, like the Israelites, we make great mistakes when we are arrogant enough to think that it is we and not God who should be calling the shots.

            For as difficult as the itinerant system is in the United Methodist Church can be for pastors and churches alike, I truly believe that it is a system that humbles us before God and reminds us that the church and its future is in God’s hands, not ours. Especially with our current bishop, you can be assured that the decisions that are made are made out of a prayerful discernment of God’s will. For individual churches and for pastors, moves aren’t always what we wanted, and sometimes they don’t make sense to us, but often the work of the Holy Spirit doesn’t make much sense. Just look at some of our congregational brothers and sisters and we can see the strength in our system. I have seen pastors fired from their position simply because they preached the Word of God that the people didn’t want to hear. Likewise, there are smaller churches that desperately need a new pastor to come with great leadership, but the pastor they really need overlooks them because they are too small. For as difficult as the itinerant system can be, it really does remove a lot of the arrogance both from the churches and from the pastors that we are the ones who are supposed to make all the decisions, and it helps remind us that God is in control.

            I say this today having learned this lesson first hand, as I prepare to leave this place and head to my new appointment. I love this place and all of you, so in all honesty this would not have been my decision, I would not have wanted to leave and I have heard that many of you feel the same way. And yet I am reminded that it is not my decision to make for God has something great in store for both my ministry at Lane and for the Ministry that Pastor Marci will bring here at Lambs/Evington. I say this with confidence because it was only three years ago that this same trust brought me here as a city boy fresh out of seminary to rural Altavista, a place that honestly I had confused with Buena Vista until I looked for it on a map.  If I had had to make the decision myself it would have likely brought me not here but somewhere closer to home in Richmond. I think about that and the wonderful ministry opportunity that would have been lost. I would not have met you all, would not have been part of this wonderful community and would not have been part of this fruitful ministry these past 3 years. And so I leave here humbling myself, not crying for anything other king than the Lord who has led me here, and leads me forward in ministry to serve. I pray that you may also humble yourselves before the Lord and know that even if this is not what you asked for, this is what the Lord is providing, and it is good. With the Spirit’s guidance the ministries of this church will continue, not by our own hands or decisions, but through the power of the King of Kings.

Ascribe to the Lord

Sermon as preached at Lambs and Evington UMC on 5/31/15


Read Psalm 29

Read John 3:1-17

“Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength. Ascribe to the LORD the glory of his name; worship the LORD in holy splendor.”  These are the words from psalm 29 that we read together earlier. But as we read it, did we actually stop to think about what it was that we were saying? Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength, worship the Lord in holy splendor. What we are saying is that we attribute all honor and glory to God. In essence we are being called to give credit where credit is due. As the psalm continues this becomes more and more explicit. The psalm describes the voice of the Lord breaking the cedars, causing cattle to skip and flashing flames of fire. The psalm tells us that the Lord sits enthroned as King forever. In other words, when we say ascribe to the Lord, we are ascribing everything to the Lord. We recognize that everything belongs to the Lord and that God shall be glorified and Worshiped because of it.

Image Courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity Library

            Today marks a day in the Christian Calendar known as Trinity Sunday, the day in which we celebrate the totality of God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As we look at the psalmist ascribing all of these things to the Lord, we do so recognizing that it is the work of all the trinity.  As we look as the creation story we can see each person of the trinity at work. The most obvious is God the Father as he speaks the world into creation, but John reminds us in his prologue that “In the beginning was the Word (that is Jesus Christ) and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”  At the same time we can read about the Spirit hovering above the waters in creation. Even here in this psalm, though not explicitly stated, when can see the trinity in work. We see the works of creation so often attributed to God the Father. We see the flashing flames of fire that we associated with the Holy Spirit. And we hear about the Lord who reigns in heaven as king for all eternity, the role that Jesus now fulfills after his ascension into heaven.

            On the surface it is easy to recognize the Holy trinity here in the scripture, but as we begin to dig deeper and question more, understanding the trinity becomes much more difficult.  After all, how can 3 be 1?  We learned from an early age that these are in fact different numbers (unless that new common core curriculum can teach us something different). And if the three are one how are the same but different? If it makes you feel any better we aren’t alone in asking these questions, in fact it was a great debate in the early life of the Church, In fact different councils were held to discuss and hash out an understanding, including the council of Nicea (from where we get our nicean creed) and the council of Constantinople. Through these councils and creed we get a rough statement on the Trinity. It is one God in three distinct persons, yet one substance or nature.”

Totally makes sense now right? We can all go home. Over time people have tried to use different analogies to try to help explain. Some have used and egg differentiate between the white the yolk and the shell. Others use water to show that it exists in three forms, liquid, gas, and solid. For as helpful as these analogies can be, they are also sadly wrong. They fail to fully grasp the trinity by falling into different heresies. Water for example helps us to think of how 3 different things can be one, but it ice doesn’t exist anymore when it becomes water; that would be like saying the Father didn’t exist when Jesus came to Earth, or that Jesus doesn’t know sit on the throne because the Holy Spirit is with us. The egg fails because it doesn’t recognize the unity of the trinity. You can take the away the shell of an egg and it is still an egg, you can’t take away the Father and still call it God, if that were the case the trinity would be three gods not one.

            As humans, especially in this age of information we can get really frustrated with the trinity. We believe that we should be able to understand it, and if we can’t than there is something wrong with its principle. Jesus’s discussion with the Pharisee Nicodemus in John 3 may give us a way to go about addressing the trinity. This passage is loaded with verses that are probably very familiar to us. We have the discussion of being born again, and of course the famous John 3:16. Often lost in this dialogue is the way that Jesus challenges Nicodemus’s way of thinking. Like us, Nicodemus wants all the answers, he wants it all to make sense, and so when Jesus says we must be born again, that just does not compute. How are we to be born again. Are we to enter into our mother’s womb a second time?  How? Sounds oddly familiar to our questions about the trinity.  But listen to how Jesus responds, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”  Jesus compares our knowledge to that of the wind, we can’t fully define it or see it, but we know it. But still this answer is not satisfying to Nicodemus, as it might not be to some of you.  He again asks, “How can these things be?” to which Jesus kind of mocks him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? Aren’t you supposed to be smart, aren’t you supposed to be a teacher and leader for the people and you don’t get it? “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things.” And there’s the real kicker. In our search for truth and knowledge we want to believe we can have answers for everything, and still there are things here on Earth or in the universe that we simply can’t explain or understand. If we fail to even understand these things, how do we expect to understand God?  The trinity is simply a mystery, and all we know about it is through what has been revealed to us. What we say about it is just our best understanding of it. The trinity is not a theological concept for us to learn and fully understand, it is not theoretical nonsense, it is the very nature of God which we as humans cannot fully understand. So instead of asking how does it work, or how is it possible, maybe we should instead be asking different questions about the trinity. Maybe we should ask what  would it mean if there was no trinity.

            How many of you love the Christmas season? Me too, if I’m being honest I actually hate the summer. Being a fair skinned red head I actually hate being in the sun, lying out on the beach doesn’t sound like relaxing it sounds like torture. I actually prefer the cold and the chill of Christmas time. I’ll take winter and Christmas over the dog days of summer anyday. I love the decorations and the traditions.  In Richmond one of those traditions happens late on Christmas Eve. At the historic Byrd theater, they show the classic Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” In the movie George Bailey played by James Stewart faces many difficult situations causing him to wish that he had never been born. With this wish an angel comes and shows George what the world would look like without him. As he watches his family, friends, and city all functioning as if he never existed, he begins to realize that his life really did matter to so many. He in fact had a profound impact on the lives of so many. In the end he is in fact pleading for Clarence the angel to send him back, he wants to be with his wife and family, and celebrates when does in fact return. It took seeing what the world would look like without him for George to realize his importance.

Maybe we can take a cue from this classic movie and think about what the world might look like without the trinity, maybe then we can start to see why it is so important. As we do I am sure we too we find ourselves falling into the trap of some of the classic heresies, but even if we do, I think this little thought experiment will be helpful. We may begin to understand the importance of our belief in the trinity that separates us from our Unitarian friends. So let us think what would the world look like without the trinity.

Let’s picture if God was only a Unitarian God as some believe. At first it doesn’t really seem that bad. You would still have the God of all creation who formed us in his image and breathed into us the breath of life.  I could still stand on the top Mill Mountain like I did yesterday and admire the beauty of creation all around me. As followers we could still delight in a God who made covenant with us to be our God and for us to be God’s people. This picture is not very different from the one that we typically ascribe to God the Father, the first person of the trinity, and honestly this view is not too different from how we typically think of God.

            In this understanding however there would be no God incarnate. A world without the trinity would not have a self-emptying God who became human and humbled himself to the point of death, even death on a cross. There would be no new Adam giving us as humans new life through his life death and resurrection. There would in fact be no good news of Easter, no joy of resurrection and no hope that we or any of creation would be saved. There would be no great hymns of power in the blood, or Old rugged cross. If we did believe in Jesus, he would either only be a man who would not have the power to save us, or we would have to believe that he was a different, lesser God than God the father we worship. When we look at what it would mean if there were no trinity, we begin to see exactly what we would be missing, and they are somethings that are essential to our faith.

            And we haven’t even looked at all of what we would be missing. That was just if there was not second person of the trinity, but what would it look like if there were no Holy Spirit. There would be no Pentecost, no birthday of the Church and likely no 3000 baptized on that day.  If there was no Holy Spirit then Jesus’s ascension would have been like abandonment. We would have had God live and dwell with us, die and rise again only to have him leave without giving the Advocate to be with us. The term A.D. when used to talk about years is often thought to mean “after death” when it in fact means anno domine, the year of the Lord, celebrating the resurrection of Christ and the establishment of the Kingdom of God. But if there were no Holy Spirit would we still celebrate the year of the Lord or would it mean for us after death; a time to remember when God stopped being present with us. If there was no Holy Spirit our groans would simply be groans, for we would not have the Spirit to intercede for us. Just as was the case if there was no incarnate God, if there was no third person of the trinity our very understanding and belief in God would be shattered. While we may not be able to understand the trinity, we can understand how important it is.

            Still there are many who will not like this explanation. There are many who do not want to embrace the mystery that is the trinity. In philosophy there is even a negative term for this mystery called ex machina. Back in the time of Greek plays it was a common occurrence for there to be a problem in the plot that nothing could solve until a God carried in by a machine or ex machina would come in and solve. In philosophy this term is now used whenever God is used as a quick fix to explain something that can’t be explained. I am sure there are some who feel this way about the mystery that is the Trinity, that when we don’t know we just chalk it up to being part of mystery of God.  Maybe this isn’t a bad thing, as Jesus says if we can’t even understand these earthy things how are we supposed to understand what is heavenly? Maybe the psalmist is right, and we should ascribe to Lord glory and strength, ascribe to the Lord glory of his name and worship the Lord in his Holy Splendor. Maybe instead of trying to figure it all out we as simply called to cry “Holy, holy, holy; merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessèd Trinity!”

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