Scriptures: Proverbs 8:1-14, 22-36, Psalm 8
Romans
5:1-5, John 16:4-15
This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, when
we lift up the doctrine of God as existing in three persons, traditionally as
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - and yet as one God. The persons of the Trinity
have also been named as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, as God above us,
Christ beside us, the Spirit within us, as Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, and
Life-giver. And yet the word "Trinity" is nowhere to be found in
Scripture. The doctrine of the Trinity is a human attempt to express God's
actions as found in Scripture and as experienced in the life of believers.
Beyond naming God's actions, the doctrine also expresses that *relationship* is
at the heart of God, as the persons of the Trinity are said to exist in
perichoresis, in a kind of eternal dance of self-giving love, one person to the
others - a dance of self-giving love into which we are invited.
On a personal level, Trinity Sunday
holds memories for me, as I preached my first sermon, before I was a pastor and
several years before I was called to Emanuel Church, on Trinity Sunday. It was
at a Liberian immigrant congregation, meeting in Southwest Philly, that was
seeking affiliation with our denomination, the United Church of Christ.
Somehow, despite my preaching, the congregation stayed awake. Their pastor,
Tubman Sarpe, held an altar call after my sermon – which caught me unprepared,
as altar calls really aren’t part of what I’ve experienced in most UCC worship. And a young woman came up, and we prayed with
her.though I have no idea what may have happened to her since. And then they asked me to bless the walls of
the space they were renting, which was a room in a church being used by an
Ethiopian congregation. Though that congregation eventually disbanded, and I
believe their pastor may have returned to Liberia, one of the members of that
congregation, Isaac (who had invited me to preach and would not accept
"no" for an answer despite my repeated refusals), has been a close
friend ever since, and is with us at Emanuel Church when his studies permit.
Today’s Scriptures set a spiritual
feast before us – they are very rich, and any one of them could be the basis of
countless sermons – but this morning we’ve read them all, and this sermon will
touch on them all to some extent – perhaps think of this morning’s sermon as a
kind of spiritual appetizer tray, and if some part of it whets your appetite,
you can dig deeper and feast at your leisure during the week. The
book of Proverbs, which we rarely read on Sunday mornings, is part of the
wisdom literature contained in Holy Scripture – other examples of Wisdom
literature are Ecclesiastes, and also the book of Job, which provides a very
different outlook from that of Proverbs.
Wisdom literature is a type of literature found in many ancient cultures
that contains teachings of sages about how life works. The message of Proverbs is that to some
extent our lives are the result of our choices:
Good actions lead to good consequences; bad actions lead to bad
consequences – or as Jesus put it in the New Testament, you reap what you sow –
or in the words of the children’s Christmas song, “He knows if you’ve been bad
or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.”.
And the examples of good actions found in Proverbs includes both
reverence for and obedience to God and also the use of worldly wisdom in terms
of foresight and planning and common sense. Proverbs includes frequent warnings
not to be led astray by temptation from bad company, not to be led astray by
dishonest or violent men or tempted by unfaithful women, warnings to be
industrious and not lazy, to be respectful of elders, to avoid drunkenness and
dissipation.. As I said earlier, the
book of Proverbs and the book of Job provide very different perspectives on
life. Proverbs 3:25-26 says to those who
follow wisdom’s precepts: “Have no fear of sudden disaster or of the
ruin that overtakes the wicked, for the Lord
will be at your side and will keep your foot from being snared.” Of course, you’ll remember that in the book
of Job, a righteous man was overtaken and ensnared by one sudden disaster after
another. Proverbs envisions a safe, predictable
universe in which good things happen to good people, while Job envisions the
universe as much less predictable and much less safe, a universe in which the
entire life of even the best of us can be swept away in an hour – beyond our control
or even our comprehension, yet still under God’s command. Both books are considered to have important
things to say about God’s dealings with humankind, which is why both are in our
Bibles. It’s not that we’re asked to
pick one viewpoint over the other; we are invited to hold both viewpoints in
tension as we navigate through life.
In today’s reading from Proverbs, we
encounter Lady Wisdom, whom we metaphorically understand as wisdom personified
- a rare female image of the divine - whom some Christians have identified with
the Holy Spirit – which is likely why the compilers of the Revised Common
Lectionary chose this text for Trinity Sunday. In Proverbs 9, Lady Wisdom is
contrasted with one whom we might call her evil twin, Dame Folly. Both are
pictured as crying out to passers-by, "You who are simple, turn in
here." Those who accept Lady Wisdom's invitation also hear these words:
‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside
immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.’ Those who accept Dame
Folly's invitation, by contrast, embrace their own destruction. Proverbs
comments, regarding those who accept Dame Folly’s invitation: '[T]hey do not know that the dead are there,
that her guests are in the depths of Sheol.'
In our reading from John’s gospel,
we receive wisdom of an entirely different order. Jesus is at table with his disciples,
breaking bread with them for the last time before his arrest. He has just warned his followers that they
would face opposition, that they would be driven from their places of worship
and even killed – and that those killing them would think they were doing God a
favor. (Saul before his conversion gives us a Biblical picture of what this
looks like; the predations of those who bomb houses of worship or gun down
worshippers or who maim and kill LGBT persons in God’s name are modern day
examples of those who think they serve God by committing mayhem and murder.) After laying all this on them, Jesus tells
them that he is going away, but that the Holy Spirit would come to lead them
into the truth, to remind them of all that Jesus had taught them. He also said that the Spirit would prove the world
wrong: “about[b] sin and
righteousness and judgment: 9 about sin, because they do not
believe in me; 10 about righteousness, because I am going to the
Father and you will see me no longer; 11 about judgment,
because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” This may be hard
for us to follow, but basically Jesus is saying that the world’s unjust
condemnation of him, an innocent man, to the point of considering him worthy of
death, not fit to draw breath, proves that the world’s wisdom, the world’s
values, the world’s evaluation of sin and righteousness and judgment, are
upside down and backwards, are utterly wrong in every way. The world called Jesus, the righteousness of
God, sin, and called the corrupt religious and political leadership righteous. They
released Barabbas and crucified Jesus. But the world was doubly wrong, in that
the cross the world used to try to stop Jesus instead became Jesus’ launching
pad to glory. This is important, because
while the book of Proverbs contains a lot of basic worldly wisdom, the
crucifixion of Jesus demonstrates that worldly wisdom – even when found in
Scripture - has limits, and that there is a wisdom of the Spirit that puts the
world’s wisdom to shame. And in our own ideas about justice, if we think the
planet would be better off without this or that category of people, we need to
ask ourselves whether we’re lining up with Jesus, or with those who hung him on
a cross.
Jesus
went on to say that there was much more he wanted to tell them, but that he
recognized that they were overwhelmed with grief because of what he had already
said, and simply could take in no more.
But he said that the Spirit would lead the disciples into all truth, and
take Jesus’ teachings and declare them to the disciples – and would also, in a
somewhat vague phrase, “declare to [them] the things that would come.”
The
ancient Greek word used in this text for truth is “aletheia”, Its derivation is interesting. The root, “lethe”, means oblivion or a state
of being forgotten or concealed. And the
preceding letter, “a”, means “not”. So
in John’s Gospel, truth, or aletheia, means that which is not forgotten or
concealed; put another way, that which is remembered or revealed. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, then,
is the spirit which reveals, the spirit that helps us remember and makes sure
we do not forget. We get in trouble when
we forget – when we forget who God is, when we forget who we are in relation to
God, when we forget our connection to everyone and everything else on this
planet. When we forget, when we lose
godly perspective, we become obsessed with our own plans and priorities. Spiritually we become curved in on ourselves,
which is the visual image Luther, and Augustine before him, used to describe a
state of sin – Luther and Augustine used the Latin phrase “incurvatus in se” or
“curved in on oneself” to describe the human in a state of sin and apart from
God. The Holy Spirit helps us remember
our connection to God and the rest of the world, keeps us looking outward, brings
us to and keeps us in a state of mindfulness – if we allow it. Under the guidance of the Spirit, we are even
willing to suffer for the truth as Jesus did, remembering, in the words of our
reading from Romans, that “knowing that suffering produces
endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and
hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
In
order to walk rightly before the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, we must remember who we are before God. Psalm 8 gives us a beautiful perspective. On one hand, when we look at the heavens, the
moon and stars, we may well feel our comparative insignificance – especially when
we consider photos of the earth from space, the blue marble we live on, and
realize that we’re on one smallish planet in a solar system that’s part of a
rather insignificant galaxy. We really are nearly microscopic in comparison
with the universe that surrounds us. We may well ask God, “What are human
beings that you are mindful of us, mortals that you care for us?” And yet God prizes us beyond all measure, has
“crowned us with glory and honor.”
While
I praise the beauty of Psalm 8, I am troubled by the thought that God has put
everything else in all creation, in the words of the Psalm, “under our feet”. For Christians, one would think that love for
God would lead not only to love of neighbor but also love of the natural world
in which God placed us, that Christians and other people of faith would be the
greatest humanitarians and environmentalists the world has ever known – but
historically, this has not been the case. Indeed, instead of appreciating and
caring for God’s creation, we seem to have wiped our feet – and other body
parts – all over it. When it comes to
wiping out entire species of animals and insects, we punch well above our
weight – worst of all, without even being aware of it! Romans (8:21) speaks of the whole creation
groaning in bondage, and we seem hellbent on adding to its travails.. While we have greater awareness than we once
did of the damage we have caused and are causing, this awareness doesn’t seem
to lead to a change in direction. What
would it look like to live in harmony with creation? What would have to change not only in our
personal and spiritual lives, but also in our economic lives, our political
lives, in the way our communities are organized? Our survival on this planet may well depend
on our finding out.
.
In
our lives outside this house of worship, may we be attuned to the wisdom that
comes from God, that peculiar wisdom in which we are fulfilled, not by hoarding
for ourselves, but by sharing God’s self-giving love with our neighbors. May we remember our place before God and in
creation, and seek to cooperate with God in renewal of the earth. May our lives reflect the guidance of the
Spirit, and may we walk humbly before the Triune God all our days. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment