Read


[PDF]Read - Rackcdn.com3aeb93606db191aa6eb8-e18715aa5137102103abab6b7c06e410.r32.cf2.rackcdn.co...

3 downloads 243 Views 97KB Size

Sermon for Trinity Sunday1 31 May 2015

Emmanuel Church, Greenwood Parish (The Rev.) Christopher Garcia

What is your love language? What is your love language? If you aren’t familiar with the concept of love languages, let’s imagine for a moment that I was able to preach, fluently, in a different language. If I was preaching in Mandarin Chinese, or Russian, most of us would have no idea what I was saying. Yet if I was preaching in Spanish, say, or perhaps German or French, there might be a few of us who could remember enough from school or travel to get a little bit of the sermon. In 1995, Gary Chapman, a pastor and experienced marriage counselor wrote a book that went on to become a bestseller, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate.2 Chapman’s premise is basically simple. He says that each us use one of five different ways – he calls them love languages – to show our love for another person. Chapman’s five languages are: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch. Chapman’s big idea is that if you are speaking one love language, and your spouse is speaking another, there’s going to lack of communication of love, or at least miscommunication. Just as if I was preaching this sermon in Japanese, and no one here spoke Japanese – it could be the best sermon I have ever preached, but it wouldn’t do any good. Let me illustrate with a more concrete example. My primary love language is Acts of Service. That means my instinct is to show love by Acts of Service, by doing things for other people. I want to serve, to be useful. My wife, Cheryl’s, love language is Quality Time. Cheryl’s natural way of showing love is Revised Common Lectionary, Year B. Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17. “Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.” 1

Northfield Publishing, ISBN 1881273156. There’s a more recent edition available: Gary Chapman, The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts (Northfield, 2015; ISBN 9780802412706). 2

2 by giving someone her undivided attention, just enjoying their company and presence. What we do together isn’t very important to Cheryl, as long as we’re doing it together. You can see how this breaks down. Christopher comes home from a long day at work and sees things that need to be done. So my instinct is to pitch in and do. Cheryl, however, just wants my time, my attention. So I go off to be helpful, to fold laundry, or pick up toys in another room, and I think I’m doing a good thing, showing love. Cheryl sees it, however, as a form of rejection. She wants my time, my attention, not my help. Once we figured that out, and as long as I can remember, things get a lot better. Today is the last day in the Lent/Easter cycle of the calendar. Next Sunday we give way to the numbered, ordinal Sundays of the church year, and the church puts on green for long season until Advent begins a new church year. Today is Trinity Sunday, the day in the church year we celebrates the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the three Persons of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One of my favorite seminary professors used to tell us that it is almost impossible to talk about the Trinity without confessing a major heresy. God is infinite; we are finite; human words and ideas cannot do justice to the infinite. So at the risk of heresy, I thought we might illuminate this doctrine of the Trinity, this Trinity Sunday, by looking at the triune God and what God does, by using this idea of Love Languages. God speaks several love languages. We believe in one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance. But the Godhead is all one – not three. We believe in one God, not three Gods. Confusing? Let’s look at it this way. God has several love languages. All are ways that God goes about being God, that is, loving us. God creates. God redeems. God sanctifies. God’s three love languages are creating, redeeming, and sanctifying. I do not mean to use the names or descriptors of Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier as substitutes for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If we look, we can see that creating, redeeming, and sanctifying are– three natures of one God, in which all three persons of the Godhead share. Just like our human love languages, these are all ways that God is God, showing God’s love for us.

3 The prologue to John’s gospel tells us “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him.” 3 John was clearly talking about God the Son, yet here we have the eternal Word -- as Creator. Or Genesis begins the creation story: “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”4 Yet the word translated as wind could also be translated as Breath, or Spirit. So here we have, in the second verse of the Bible, God the Holy Spirit, as Creator. Some of us can understand God best as Creator. We see God at work in the beauty of the hills that surround us, in the glory of nature, in the wonder of a spider’s web or a newborn infant’s tiny perfection. We see God’s love at work imposing order on chaos, bringing something out of nothing, creating. Yet not all of us can speak this love language. Several people in the Bible reading challenge this year have really struggled with the idea of an Old Testament God who judges, who can destroy imperfection or opposition, a God of infinite power and majesty. We got a taste of that in our first lesson this morning, in Isaiah’s vision of God. We hear Isaiah say, “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple.” Isaiah goes on to explain how God’s attendants speak, and the whole building shakes and fills with smoke. The prophet is afraid to even look at God, because God is so powerful and pure, and Isaiah knows that he is so much less, so impure, living among imperfect people. The psalmist writes that the voice of the Lord is powerful voice, yes, the voice of the Lord is a voice of splendor. Yet the voice of the Lord is so powerful that it breaks the legendary giant cedars of Lebanon, makes mighty oaks writhe, and strips forests bare5. Sometimes, it’s more than we can bear, this love language, of an allpowerful creating God. So the God who creates is also the God who redeems. Since the very beginning, God has been redeeming us, calling us back into right relationship with himself, always ready to wipe out the past, take us back, patch us up, give us another chance. 3

John 1:1-3a.

4

Genesis 1:2.

5

Psalm 29:4-5, 8.

4 God redeemed a wandering Aramean, Abram, promised to make a great nation of him, and brought him and his family to Canaan.6 When famine struck, two generations later, God redeemed the family by sending Joseph on to Egypt, Joseph who later told his brothers, “What you intended for harm, God intended for good.”7 Generations later, when the Hebrews were in slavery, God redeemed them through the work of Moses, leading them out of slavery and eventually back to their promised land.8 The rest of the Old Testament can be read as a record of redemption. Throughout Eastertide, we prayed in our Eucharistic prayer “When our disobedience took us far from you, you did not abandon us to the power of death. In your mercy you came to our help, so that in seeking you we might find you. Again and again you called us into covenant with you, and through the prophets you taught us to hope for salvation.” 9 That salvation comes in the person of God made flesh, Emmanuel, the infinite become finite; God with us in the person of Jesus. Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection are the ultimate example of God’s redeeming love language, but as you can see, certainly not the only one. God’s redeeming goes on even today. Broken relationships are put back together again. Hearts that were once hard become tender again. For many of us, this love language of God as redeeming is the easiest to understand, the easiest to approach. And God doesn’t stop there. The same God who creates and redeems also sanctifies. God’s desire is for all of us to share in God’s divinity, God’s glory. God wants us to be holy as God is himself holy. The Old Testament Law of Moses is an early call to holiness, to living apart, living a life dedicated to God, a handbook for sanctification. Jesus himself sanctified, driving out unclean spirits, consumed by zeal, driving out animal dealers and money changers from the temple precincts. In last week’s Pentecost lesson from the book of Act, we heard of how the Holy Spirit came and divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among the frightened, hiding disciples, and a tongue rested on each of them, and all were filled with the

6

Genesis 11 – 25.

7

Genesis 37 – 45.

8

Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

9

Book of Common Prayer, p. 373 (Holy Eucharist Rite II, Eucharistic Prayer D).

5 Holy Spirit.10 Even today, when we baptize a new Christian, we anoint her head or his head with oil of Chrism, and say “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ’s own, for ever.”11 If we let him, God continues to sanctify you and me. God shows God’s love by showing us ways we can grow, things we can leave behind, habits that stand in our way to full life in God. God wants to help us prune them out, so that we can bear ever more fruit, and be the happier, healthier people that God created us to be. So what is your love language? Is it Words of Affirmation? Acts of Service? Receiving Gifts? Quality Time? Physical Touch? All of these are ways we show love, receive love, understand the same love. And so it is with God. God loves us by creating, by redeeming, and by sanctifying. Which of God’s love language helps you experience God’s love most clearly? Creating? Redeeming? Sanctifying? What is your love language? Amen.

10

Acts 2:1-4.

11

Book of Common Prayer, p. 308 (Holy Baptism).