Sermon 5/30/2021 “Why worship gives us life”
Preacher: Jo J. Belser
Location: Church of the Resurrection, 2800 Hope Way, Alexandria, VA
Text: (All of them)
Day: Trinity Sunday, Year B
Over the years, you may recall, I have joked that Trinity Sunday should be called “Heresy Sunday.” It’s just so difficult to accomplish the task given to preachers this day—to explain the triune nature of God—without slipping one way or another into false doctrine about God.
The reality is that there is no true way to explain God using logic. Instead, we have our experience of God. And THAT is what the doctrine of Trinity is: thousands of years of distilled experience about God.
Fortunately for me this year, Ian Markham’s sermon here last week explained the Trinity, saving me from a potential lapse into heresy. In case you’ve forgotten Ian’s explanation, here it is in summary:
- God-the-Father is the God of creation, the divine force that creates and sustains our material being, the God we pray to.
- God-the-Son is the nature of God revealed in Jesus the Christ, the “Word” of God to us. Through Christ Jesus we glimpse what God is like: complete love.
- God-the-Holy Spirit is the energy of God that does God’s work, from hovering over the water at creation to animating us in mission today to share God’s love with the world.
Having taken Ian’s systematic theology course in seminary and having read his book on the Trinity, let me just say YOU got the short form of the explanation!
As for why it is important that we know this experience about God, Ian took a shortcut. He told us a benefit of being physically present regularly at worship is that we live longer, two years longer on average. The implication is, perhaps, that being in the presence of concentrated God-energy also known as the Holy Spirit somehow rejuvenates us and keeps us juvenated (a word I made up that means “young”).
What this suggestion points to is our most fundamental understanding about God: God is relational. God exists in perfect relationship with God’s self and from this perfect relationship of love God created all there is.
Our gospel lesson today attests to God’s motivation for becoming at-one with all of his creation: “God so loved the world…” You and me. No strings attached, though we humans attach some: “You must believe in God for God to love you,” we sometimes say. Then “GONG” should go the heresy bell.
We love God because God first loved us—that’s what scripture tells us. And when we return God’s love, we have life.
What did God do as a result of his love for us? He sent his only Son, Christ Jesus. So that we might also have life: life while we are physically alive as well as continued life after this earthly one.
The point is this: God encounters us in our historical context. God seeks us out and meets us where we are, gives us unconditional love and offers us life.
Our first lesson tells us how God meets us: In worship, “high and lofty” in the temple and on a scale so vast compared to us we hardly dare to be in God’s presence. Perhaps you have had such a worship experience in church, an experience of such utter awe or perhaps just in utter peace you know you are in God’s presence.
More often lately, people report having their experience of God in nature, in awe of all that God has created with a sense of our own smallness, our puny-ness in comparison with our Creator. Our first lesson reassures us that we are called to serve and that God will heal us of a sense of unworthiness by making us both able and worship to be of service.
As a result, we say to God, “Here am I, send me” and God equips us for the task he has called us to do. We hear these words, “Here am I, send me” at ordinations or experience then when we see a need or an injustice in our world and resolve to step up.
Our Song of Praise today, Canticle 13, tells us the proper response to becoming aware of God’s presence in our lives: We give glory to God, we thank God, and we acknowledge that we ourselves are not God. This last bit, acknowledging that we are not God seems so obvious we wonder why we would ever need to acknowledge this reality. Except, we humans often act like we are the highest power in the universe.
These three steps, though (giving glory to God, thanking God, and bowing to God) are the essence of worship. As a result of worship, we are in relationship with God and the others who worship with us, then carry this togetherness out into the world.
Ian is right, by the way: There IS a major health benefit from living in right-relationship with God and others. Right relationship keeps us balanced and keeps us from thinking so highly of ourselves we replace God’s ways with our ways. As a result, we do not unbalance the forces God uses to sustain creation and raise health risks. For example, when we consider ourselves God, we may pollute the environment and raise our risk of getting cancer. Conversely, being in right-relationship with God and others keeps us from thinking so little of ourselves that we give in to despair. And despair seems lately to end up in mass shootings or suicide-by-addiction, or by simply dropping out of life.
The apostle Paul alludes to unbalanced living. He calls living in wrong-relationship living “according to the flesh.” By this he means living s if our material world is all there is. Paul calls living “according to the flesh” as a life in a “spirit of slavery.” We are stuck, hooked, unable to extricate ourselves by ourselves. Paul insists that to have authentic life we need to acknowledge and live by—be in relationship with—God’s Spirit.
When we live this way, in right-relationship that Paul calls living “according to the Spirit of God,” we will be truly alive.
Like God, we are meant to be in relationship. Our triune nature compels us to be at-one with each other and God. Ian told us we will live longer if we attend worship regularly. He didn’t tell us this to make us feel better about choosing life. He told us this eternal truth in a non-church way, hoping perhaps it would help us to share this Good News with all you love: “Come to church with me; you will live longer.” This is certainly easier to understand than trying to explain the Trinity.
