Holy Trinity Sunday 2010

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

A few years ago, a local congregation sponsored a “Ceremony of the Four Colors of Humanity.”  TV and newspaper reports said that participants sat in a circle around a large drum—whose beat symbolized the heartbeat of Mother Earth—while a  spiritual leader decorated them with small red, black, yellow, and white ties.  During the ceremony, people walked through wisps of smoke rising from a small dish.  The smoke, organizers said, carried prayers from the group to heaven.  Later, participants sprinkled crumbled tobacco leaves on small fires, while they said prayers in front of the flames.

People who were interviewed said how deeply moving and spiritual it all was.  But no one said to whom those prayers were addressed.  No one said whom the ceremony was intended to honor.  Unless it’s nothing but a group therapy for the participants, a religious ceremony is supposed to make contact between the worshipers and some “Higher Power,” some “Supreme Being,” some “god” of one type or another.  But nobody said, or knew, or cared, who or what that “god” was.  And all this took place on the lawn of a church, which is one group who should know exactly which god it is worshiping.

Today is the Feast of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Today the Christian Church makes it clear to the world, and to ourselves, which God we worship.

Everyone believes in a god, whether or not she admits it, or even knows it.  To steal a definition from Martin Luther, a god is anything—anything at all—to which we look for all good, and in which we find refuge in time of need.  Anything to which our heart clings and entrusts itself, is our god.  For some people “progress” is a god, for others, it is sexual satisfaction.   Peace of mind, a good investment portfolio, health, power, learning, prestige, family, nation, the belly—anything at all can serve as a god.  Whatever is nearest and dearest to us, that ‘s our god.

Therefore, the most important theological question is which god people believe in.  Your god is what drives your life.  If you know on which god a person hangs her heart, you’ll know all about her life.  If her god is the god whose name is “personal advancement,” then she’ll step on anybody to get what she wants.   And the reverse is true: if you observe how a person lives his life, then you’ll know which god he worships.  If he lies, cheats, and steals, then he worships the god whose name is “greed.”

There are now, and always have been, many gods in which people believe.  Our ancestors in the faith, the Jews, lived in a world as pluralistic and diverse as ours.  Surrounding their nation were neighbors who were into all sorts of spirituality.  Some believed in a god who was always angry with human beings, a god so fierce that he had to be appeased with a offering of blood sacrifice to satisfy his lust for death and destruction.  Some believed in a god of fertility, a sexual god who chief act was the reproduction of crops, animals, and humans.  Some believed in a god was indifferent to living things altogether, a god who was so remote from this world that he took no direct hand in it and simply let things happen as they may.  Israel could not believe in these gods.

Neither can you

 But if you listen closely to the talk of some body-builders, astrologers, masseurs, psychotherapists, herbalists, political junkies, vegetarians, investment counselors, or just secular men and women in the street, you’ll find that many believe in the same gods.  These are necessarily bad people; it’s just that if they push the claims for their commitments too far, their interests become a religion.   Every time I read in the paper about some new spiritual group springing up in York, or of someone making ultimate claims for his life passion, all I can think is that the same teachings and practices were popular three thousand years ago in Babylon or Assyria.  Modern peoples’ newfound religious experiences are usually nothing but a rehash of stuff that’s millennia old.

But what is really alarming is that if you listen closely to the talk of people who stand in the pulpits of our churches, and who sit in pews of them, you will find that they too believe in the same antique gods.  How can a congregation sponsor a “Ceremony of the Four Colors of Humanity”?—it’s the worship of some foreign god we do not acknowledge.  How can churches purge the proper Name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from their worship and still count themselves as Christian?  The question, “Which god do you believe in?” is one that we must ask not only of those outside the Church, but always of those inside it.  To judge by the conduct of our lives and the propriety of our speech, we Christians too believe in a false god or gods.      

 In all of history, there has been only one person who believed rightly and completely in the true God.  He was a son of Israel , a Jew named Jesus.  He clung with his whole heart to a transcendent Power he called “Father.”  This one God was not cruel, or self-serving, or indifferent; he was a power who could be spoken to as intimately as a child speaks to his loving father.  To this loving Father, Jesus surrendered himself, and gave up all his hopes and his religion and his nation and everything that was his.  There has been only one man who went utterly to death because he believed with his whole heart in a Power whom he called “Father.”

And in the power of his Spirit that Father raised Jesus the Jew from the dead.  From the first true death, came the first true life.  And that settled the matter about which God people should believe in.  To be God is to be the Lord of life and death.  To be God is to end that which is ended, and to begin that which is to be begun, and to brook no interference in doing it.  To be God is to raise the dead.  Any would-be god who can’t bridge the gap between life and death, between being and nothingness, is no god at all.  Progress, capitalism, a cocaine high, peace of mind, perfectly sculptured abs, power, family, nation, heightened sexual prowess—these and all the other powers to which people cling as if they were gods, have no ultimate power and are nothing but fakes.  They are all pretenders.  Or as the Bible calls them, “idols”—creations of our own imaginations.  The gods of Israel ’s neighbors—Astarte and Baal and Molock-- and their warmed-over modern counterparts are not God, in spite of our worship of them.  Only the God of Israel and the God of Israel’s son Jesus has accepted the terrible burden of true divinity.  Only the God of Israel and Israel ’s son Jesus kills and makes alive.  Only the God of Israel and Israel ’s Son Jesus is truly God.  And he has given us his proper Name by which we may know and worship him: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

We ourselves do not yet believe fully in this God.  But we shall.  The Father of Jesus will kill us and make us alive.  The Father of Jesus will put to death all our false hopes and wrong trusts.  He will put a new heart within us, a heart that will cling to him and to no other.  When God has made an end to us and given us a new beginning, then we shall know for certain that there are no other gods on which to hang our hearts, except for the one on whom Jesus hung his heart. 

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.