Sermon Notes on John
16:12-15
Embodying
the truth of the Holy Trinity.
He was her only child. She could still remember holding him
just after they weighed him and cleaned him up a bit, the way he looked so
quietly into her eyes. All of the diapers, the cuts and bruises, the school
crises, the times of joy and triumph, the times of sadness and heartache, they
all came rushing back with the tears. In fact they seemed to empower the tears
and the sobbing. She couldn’t believe he was gone.
As she held his limp body in her arms, people were rushing
around, trying to figure out where the bullets had come from or whether it was
flying debris that had killed him and the others around him, but at this moment
she didn’t hear or see them. At this moment she was filling an ocean and
shaking the earth and screaming at the Creator who had deserted her when she
had cried out for her God.
How could such love be so powerless in the face of this
hatred and violence? How could this God be real and create a world in which such
cruelty is everywhere?
Two, equally horrible possibilities filled her heart.
Either there really wasn’t a God after all, and we human beings really are just
random accidents of nature, victims of whatever comes along, or perhaps, she
thought, there is a God, and this God doesn’t care.
With her dead son in her arms, none of it seemed to matter
anyway… and if there was a God she hated him for putting her in a world like
this and for taking away her future.
My sisters and brothers in Christ, this is the true final
exam for our theology. It is in the face of stories like these that our
understanding of God either holds us up or is crushed under the weight of the
real world.
The woman in our story could have been from just about
anywhere on earth. She might have been from Virginia
or Iraq, Darfur or Los Angeles, but the
question in her heart is one that we who are the body of Christ have to answer.
To be a person who bears the name of Christ, to profess our
belief in the Holy Trinity is not just an intellectual exercise. The details of
God’s nature are not the point. They are beyond what we can know anyway. The
real question for us as disciples of Jesus Christ is this: what good is our Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to this woman who has
just lost everything she ever cared about? How will our lives, our prayers, our
worship, and our plans bring real healing and hope to
her heart? How will our understanding of the Holy Trinity empower us to bring
an end to the violence, cruelty, and hatred in her world?
Here is the problem:
We say there is a God who created all that exists and
provides for all of our needs, and wants the Spirit’s will to be done on earth
as it is in heaven, but she can see that we are more committed to a sporting
event or a social gathering than to being and experiencing the presence and
power of this one Jesus called “Father”.
We say that the very will and Word of God really did walk
around on two legs as one of us, that he really did reveal God’s very self to
us, that he actually died and rose again to make our forgiveness and our
relationship with God possible, But she notices that, in spite of all this, we
can’t seem to fit him into our schedule.
We say there is a Holy Spirit who fills us, empowers us, and
guides us into all truth, but she sees that we are powerless, clueless, and
self-centered; mostly absent while the world is filled with hatred and violence
around us?
Let’s face it folks, the reason we wouldn’t know what to say to this woman is that we
don’t have anything to say. The awesomeness
of the Holy Trinity has been reduced to a mysterious doctrine, baffling to all
but our experts. We have demoted the Word made flesh into a self-help mechanism
to help us get through our overstuffed lives.
Here is the truth, given to us by the very Holy Spirit Jesus
promised.
God, the creator of all things, cries with this woman. God
feels her loss with more intimacy and pain that she could possibly know. This
same God has called you and I to walk with her, to
carry her if necessary, through this time of sorrow and to dedicate our lives
to stopping the hatred and violence that caused her loss. You are called to be
the very arms of God, You are called to be the Love of
the Creator for her.
Because God created us with a free will, there is, and there
must be, evil in the world. God has felt the pain of this personally in the
flesh of his own Son, Jesus. But because Jesus has conquered death, we can work
to bring God’s will to pass here on earth, just as it is in heaven, without
fear. We have been saved, we will be OK. We can take risks for the sake of the
kingdom. We can put down our TV guides and be God’s good news in her life.
We have been given the gift and the power of the Holy
Spirit. God is with us and in us and will give us what we need as we follow
Christ into the fearful and difficult places. The Spirit will give us the words
to say. Or the Spirit may give us the wisdom to know when there is nothing to
be said, when God’s presence is the best thing that we can be.
There is a dying, crying, pain-filled world out there that
is convinced that our idea of the Holy Trinity is irrelevant…religious
mumbo-jumbo. God is calling us to live in a way that proves the world wrong,
that shows them the life, love, power, and truth of the Holy Trinity. Amen
