This is adapted from a sermon I preached on Trinity Sunday this year. Many thanks to Josh Pothen for his service as scribe.
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Trinity Sunday. The lessons appointed for today include some
of the most familiar passages of the scriptures from Isaiah, chapter 6 to John,
chapter 3. This latter includes the
often quoted text that begins, “For God so loved the world…”
Some years ago while I was
pastoring a church in Montreal, we used a service that provided formatted
copies of the lessons of the day for insertion into bulletins. One Trinity Sunday there was a typo in the
John text for today. It read as follows:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son to the end that
all who believe in him might not parish but have eternal life.” That’s parish, P A R I S H not perish, P E R
I S H. The typo brings into relief a
thought that is worth considering. That
God send Jesus that we might not parish (or do church) but have eternal
life. I will come back to this.
Today is Trinity Sunday, and it is
the Sunday of the year that we are asked to, whether we like it or not, deal
with the reality of God as Trinity.
It's a day that we remember and
celebrate the fullness of God revealed (and that's exactly the right word)
to us by Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the day we stop and
realize that we know and understand God not as we would like him to be,
nor as we understand him (for a fully comprehensible God would be no God at
all), but God as He is:
Trinity. Three
Persons. One God. Mysterious. Ineffable. Majestic.
Loving. Powerful. And terrible, as in, causing terror.
I want to look at Isaiah's
encounter with God as He is: in His majesty, in His awesomeness and in his
terribleness. Awe is this sense of overwhelming otherness that we miss so often
as we live in our relationship with God.
But this is what happens to Isaiah in
Isaiah 6:
In the year that King Uzziah died I
saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his
robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with
two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he
flew. And one called to another and said:“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of
hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!" And the foundations of the
thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with
smoke.
The faith that we are called to,
that Jesus brings us into through His cross and sacrifice for us, is a faith
that brings us into relationship with this God. The sort of God
whose train fills the temple, whose presence makes mountains smoke. Even the
voice of the seraphim--who are not even God, they're just holy--their voices
make the threshold shake. Isaiah encounters the real, the true, the
living God.
When we come into relationship with
God as He is--the Father, through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit--we
see the Lord. And what changes us in His presence is that we actually have
a vision of God. Now I don't necessarily mean vision vision,
like falling into a trance and seeing a picture (although that can happen. Look
it up. It happened to Peter – Acts 10:10). But we have a fresh unveiling, a
fresh revelation of the fullness, the presence, the might, the glory of
God. And it changes us.
It is this vision and its attendant
change that creates the prophetic spirit within the church. When we encounter God, if on some level we
are not afraid, we are not paying attention.
Following immediately upon this
vision is Isaiah’s recognition of His own unfitness:
And I said: “Woe is me! For I
am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a
people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King,
the Lord of hosts!”
The prophets always, always see
their unfitness as soon as God reveals Himself. Moses sees this bush on
fire, so he takes off his sandals. He's in the presence of God, and God calls
him to the task. And what does Moses say? "Yes, sir I'll go"? No, he
does not. He says things like, "I don't know what to say. What's your name
anyway? On top of that, I stutter and I don't speak very clearly, and they're
not going to believe what I have to say. Could you send someone else?"
(Exodus 3 and 4).
When the word of the Lord came to
Jeremiah, he said, "I don't know how to speak. I am only a youth."
(Jeremiah 1:6)
A vision of the Lord brings forward
the prophetic gifts in the church. In the prophetic church’s response there is
always this sense of the church being unfit for the task.
So we have a vision of the Lord as
He is. Not some tamed-down, watered-down version of God that's our pal or our
buddy, but the Holy One of Israel who, in an incredible contrast,
actually IS our friend. Figure that one out. We understand our own
unfitness: "For I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in
the midst of a people of unclean lips."
Sometimes I think we feel pretty
good about ourselves. And on some level that's not bad. We shouldn't feel bad
about ourselves all the time. However, sometimes I think we congratulate
ourselves because we're faithful Christians and here we are going to church and
all those pagans out there aren't and aren't we good people. And we're really
thinking, "God is lucky to have people like us." It's hyperbole, I
realize, but it's true, isn't it? We don't stop and think that in the presence
of the Holy God, we are all unfit.
And as unfit as Isaiah is, as we
are, this is what happens:
Then one of the seraphim flew to
me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the
altar.
Put yourselves in Isaiah's shoes.
I've got this incredibly terrifying vision, and then this bright burning
angel with six wings flies and gets a red hot coal from the altar and brings it
towards me. This is not going to go well.
And he touched my mouth and said:
“Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin
atoned for.”
You see, the true prophetic church
encounters the living God, understands our own unfitness and then
experiences the power of God to change, forgive, heal and transform.
I want to point out where Isaiah goes
after this:
And I heard the voice of the Lord
saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am!
Send me.”
He encounters the atoning power of
God as the terrifying hot coal touches his lips, and he goes from "Woe is
me" to "Here am I." That's the action of God. That's God as He
is. That is the power of God’s healing
atonement in us.
So we have this beautiful,
wonderful picture of the transformation of Isaiah. And that’s where the story stops. Right? At least that where the lesson stops
today, but rhere is more to be said and the second half of the chapter is not
as happy.
What happens? Well, God preps him
for the mission:
And he said, “Go, and say to this
people: “‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on
seeing, but do not perceive.’ Make the heart of this people
dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see
with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their
hearts, and turn and be healed.”
Here's the deal, prophetic church:
You're going to go out, and it's not going to be a cakewalk. I remember a
few years ago someone was prophesying over me, and they said some very
encouraging, positive things, which I really appreciated.
Bit it was really upbeat in
contrast to what God is preparing Isaiah for.
God says to Isaiah and us,
"This is not going to be a screaming success right out of the gate. You
are going to a dull and indifferent people. They don't want to hear, and they
don't care. You might care deeply, but they could care less." It's like
when you're having a conversation and you bring up the Bible as the ultimate
authority with somebody who'd just as soon burn a Bible as read one. They don't
care. We're lucky if they're indifferent, if not antagonistic.
Then I said, “How long, O
Lord?
Because I can do anything for a
short period of time, as long as I know there's an end in sight.
And God says this...Are you ready?
Because I don't think you are. I do not think the church in North America
is ready for this word and what, I believe, is imminently upon us.
How long?
And He said: “Until cities lie
waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the
land is a desolate waste, and the Lord removes people far
away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land. And
though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again, like a
terebinth or an oak, whose stump remains when it is felled.”
So here's the problem about the
prophets: They're so gloomy and doomy. Because, as we all know, in the modern
church, because we want to be attractional and make sure people feel good
when they come here, we need to hear an upbeat message! Something that's
encouraging! Something that'll make people feel good about things!
But Paul says to Timothy, "For
the time is coming"--and friends, it's upon us--"when people
will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate
for themselves teachers to suit their own passions." (2 Timothy
4:3)
That's not them, by the way. We
never talk about "they" because "they" aren't the problem.
I'm the problem. We too easily surround ourselves with the very things we want
to hear. We hear also from the Old Testament in Jeremiah, "They
have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there
is no peace."
We cannot speak peace when there is
no peace.
So as we think about that prophetic
reality, encountering God as He is means proclaiming the truth as IT is. I
want to be really clear about this: The prophetic message is not about feeling
good. The prophetic message is about the stark reality that we are facing and
the real hope we need to face it. We would like perky and upbeat, at least I
would! The perky and upbeat message makes us feel good about God,
ourselves and the world. But friends, we don't need to feel good. We need the
real Christian virtue of hope.
I want to read the last line of
Isaiah chapter 6 and remind you: "The holy seed is its
stump."
That is the prophetic message. The
prophet tells us that in spite of the fact that this is going to be hard work
and nobody's going to care and it's going to get worse, that the holy seed is
its stump. That God is going to act.
So where does hope come from? Hope
comes from the encounter with God as He is, as I've outlined already. Being
transformed by him. But hope is also formed because we practice the
virtue. We choose the hope.
You know how I feel about
Christians who are like, "AAAHH! The world's going to hell in a handbasket!"
The world is going exactly where God intends it to go. Stop having a hissy fit.
The German theologian, Josef Pieper,
says this: "Today when we speak of despair, we are usually referring to a
psychological state into which an individual falls almost against his
will.”[i] As it is used in Pieper's work, however, the
term describes a decision of the will. Hope is engendered because we
choose it.
The mood state of hope and despair
will follow consistent will decisions of hope and despair. So if we choose,
"AAH! It's not going to work out," then we're going to feel it a lot.
If in an encounter with the Holy One of Israel we choose to hope, the mood will
also follow us as well.
We can choose to hope because God
is as He is, and He has met us in Jesus Christ. Leanne Payne says this:
"We as Christians, of all people, have every reason to be
optimistic."[ii]
We do not need good feeling,
although it is a plus when it comes. We need hope in stark and sobering
circumstances.
I come back to my opening thoughts
on John 3:16.
Our calling as Christians in this
time and this age is not to "parish". By that I mean, create a nice
place for us to come to church and feel good about. We need something deeper. Way
deeper.
Now don't get me wrong and think I
am suggesting that we don't really need to go to church; that we can worship
God wherever we are. Foolishness. Utter
foolishness. You can't. Because that’s not about worshiping God as He is. It's
about worshiping God as I'd like him to be: "I would like to worship God
without the pesky trouble of all those other Christians with whom I would have
to be in relationship.” And we are pesky. We are irritating. We are sinful. We
say things we shouldn't say.
A time is coming, friends, when we
will even more urgently need the fellowship together to remain
faithful. Because it is not going to be simple. It is not going to be
easy. The cultural shift, the philosophical shift of our time has gone away
from the church, and we've lost that battle. The ship actually has
sailed on that one. The ferry has left the dock.
The writer of Hebrews says
this: "Do not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of
doing", because you will not survive.
How we think about the church needs
to radically change. He did not come into the world that
we might PARISH, but that we might have eternal life. We are so often too hung
up on things that don't amount to a hill of beans. We get our knickers in a
knot about something not being right at church on Sunday, and we don't
realize that it’s not a big deal. We are blessed just to be able to have a
place to meet together publicly.
We need to get in touch with God as
He is, because it's only God as He is who's going to give us the strength to be
faithful in the season that's ahead.
Canon David Roseberry of the Anglican
Church in North America said this, in and email I received this week.:
"Nearly every week there is some eruption in the culture that should make
us all go to God and pray for wisdom and discernment. How do we lead our
church? How do we think about these things? How does the church stand and
proclaim the Gospel and bear witness to its truth in a post-truth age?"
Great questions. Really, really
great questions. Because I don't want a club.
One of the phrases we throw around
a lot in our diocese is, "This is not your grandmother's Episcopal
church." And we're usually saying that in the sense of, 'We're not
stuffy.' Well it's true, we're not your grandmother's Episcopal church. Yet
that is exactly what we're trying to build, isn't it? Church and church
experience as we have known it in our lifetime.
And what we're trying to build,
frankly, can feel like the Anglican club, or the Presbyterian club or the
Pentecostal club of Burlington, Vermont, rather than what the church
needs to be right now, which is this (and I choose these words very
carefully): a crucible for the formation of radical disciples for Jesus
Christ.
The truth is, your grandmother's
Episcopal church has not prepared us for the coming time, nor has it stemmed
the philosophical slide of the past 50 to 100 years. We are doing
something wrong, friends. Let's try something different.
I hope that I have been
prophetically gloomy and doomy enough for you. But I want to come back to
the end of Isaiah, because "the holy seed is its stump."
About eight years ago in our
backyard, we had a tree that was dead. We cut it down, and left the stump
there because we were too cheap to grind out the stump like you're supposed to.
And then, lo and behold, a tree grew. Now that tree is beautiful and healthy.
It's not as big as the last one yet, and the stump is all rotted and rather
disgusting. But out of the stump comes a tree, which one day will be as
beautiful as the last. Probably not in my lifetime. But this isn't
about my lifetime or your lifetime. This is about the life of the church.
I realize I painted rather a
bleak picture on Trinity Sunday. But I don't want to lie to you. It's a
bleak time. And it's going to get harder. We may be decimated: reduced to
a tenth. We may be even more than decimated. But this is the work
of God. And whatever happens to the church, God will raise her up.
So friends, I call you on this
Trinity Sunday to encounter God as He is. To lay aside the
stupid stuff and care about the things that really matter. Because we do not
need to feel good. We need real Christian hope, and we need to be a crucible
for the formation of radical disciples. Because that's what happens when you
encounter the real God as He is.
[i]
Josef Pieper, Faith-Hope-Love, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1997, p. 114
[ii]
From a lecture at the PCM conference in Montreal in 1994.