Sunday, May 31, 2015
Holy Trinity
Old Testament Isaiah 6:1–8
Psalm Psalm 29:1-11
New Testament Romans 8:12–17
Gospel John 3:1–17[1]
I don’t know about you but for myself, in the texts for today, I hear ambiguity and reliance upon the Father, Son and Spirit in our lives and in creation. Maybe you didn’t hear that today but I hope by the end of the sermon today, you will hear this, just like a tune that gets stuck in your head and you cannot shake off. Anyone going, “Oh great! Just what I want, something stuck in my head that I can’t stop thinking about?”
Psalm 29 speaks to both the power and majesty of God. The Lord is over the waters; the Lord’s voice shakes the wilderness and strips the wilderness bare. The Lord is full of majesty, which we can associate with as a king, a ruler. Kings and rulers at their best, look out for their subjects. They care for and protect the people in the land. God is majestic in all that God is and does.
How can that be, that God is majestic, when we have wars, fires, floods, droughts, human and natural disasters that commonly occur? Oklahoma and Texas are under water, while California suffers from a drought and a human made oil slick on its cost. Where is the caring God in the drought, oil slick and floods? God is enthroned as king forever. God is in God’s entire kingdom, in the midst of both good and all that is bad. God is there, using all for God’s healing of creation, to make creation whole again. It may be hard to see God at work but is it about seeing or is about believing in the promises of God and thus having faith in what God delivers?
Isaiah has a vision, where his sin is blotted out with a live coal. God removes the sin and guilt, and then Isaiah can hear the Lord calling. God heals, calls and then we can respond to the call. What you did not hear in Isaiah, as Paul Harvey would say, is “The rest of the story”. In verses 9-10 comes the real ambiguity and the reliance upon God.
9 And [God] said, [to Isaiah] “Go and say to this people:
‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’ 10 Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.” [2] To be healed by God.
What are we to do and not to do? Does God want us not to comprehend and understand? Really God, this is what you want? Keep listening, God comes to us and works with what we do. God reveals God’s self in interesting ways and I would say, most often we see what God has done, rather than what God is doing. The Father reveals the Son, and for the majority of people, this is realized after the fact.
The Word is revealed as the incarnate Son in Jesus and is made known for all upon the cross. Only God can do for us what is done in the cross. Oh sure, we think we can take care of any problem that comes our way. It seems to be the new way of taking care of our brokenness, in the way of the “me myself and I”, instead of the Father, Son and Spirit. We are actually led by the Spirit of God and because of this, we are called the children of God.[3]
The Spirit intercedes and takes our cries to the Father and bears witness with our spirit, that we are children of God. God’s majesty is revealed in God’s Spirit, to carry our cries to the Lord who’s glory thunders and whose voice is powerful and who gives strength to God’s people. The Bible tells the story of the Father and Son, through the Spirit, that takes a broken creation and tell how creation will be made whole again.
God is in control, but that also does not mean that God is a puppet master pulling the strings of what happens in creation. God spoke creation into being. All that happens, happens because of God’s creation. God can and does continue to use what happens, all of what happens in the world, to bring all of creation out of its brokenness and into being whole again.
What does that look like and how do we know if we respond in ways that God wants? I hate to say it, but we cannot know what God is up to. We can say what God intends for creation in the end, but as soon as we think and align our interests as being that of God’s, we place our relationship with God, in danger. It is God that does, not us. Yet this does not relieve us of our responsibility to respond to God.
Is it in God’s interest that the floods of Texas and Oklahoma do not exist? Is it in God’s interest that the oil slick in California took place? Is one war over another war any better? Should we not go to war, should we go to war because we believe that God is on our side? “…we place our relationship with God in peril—if we identify our interests with God’s interests.”[4] God comes to us in the Spirit. God uses us and what all people do, or not do, for God’s purpose.
The Spirit comes to us so that we can be born of the Spirit, in Jesus Christ. The incarnate Word became human in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, through the Spirit, not to condemn the world but in order that the world could be saved. In all things, God is powerful. God defeated death in the cross, so that we could have enteral life.
We trust in the promise of the Lord, for all of creation, knowing that the voice of the Lord is powerful and full of majesty. We have faith in the Father, who sent the Son into the world. The Lord gives strength to God’s people. In all things, God the Father will use the Son and Spirit to bring peace and healing to all of creation, so that all of creation is in Shalom.
[1] Revised Common Lectionary (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2009).
[2] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Is 6:6–10.
[3] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Ro 8:14.
[4] Richard S. Dietrich, “Homiletical Perspective on Psalm 29,” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, vol. 3 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 37.