Trinity Sunday

 Trinity B 2018 RCL

Isaiah6:1-8; Canticle 13; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

                                                        Rev. Dr. Adam T. Trambley                               

May 27, 2018, St. John’s Sharon

Glory to you, Lord God of our fathers; *
you are worthy of praise; glory to you.

This morning is Trinity Sunday.  We can approach a doctrine like the Trinity from one of two perspectives.  One option is to try to intellectually understand what God as Trinity means, at least as much as we can, which isn’t very much.  This kind of study is worthwhile, but only in support of the more important approach. That approach is to see the Trinity as a magnificent attribute of God that draws us more deeply into the worship and awe of God.

Think about it. The most common way we think about the Trinity on a regular basis is as a doxology.  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, and we close most of our collects with some kind of Trinitarian formula.  The basic understanding of our Triune God is one that leads us into worship. 

We only need a basic understanding of the Trinity to carry us into worship.  God as Trinity means that God is a family of love at the very heart of who God is.  God as Trinity means that God has a loving relationship with the other persons who are also part of God, and more importantly, that those persons of God can enter into loving relationships with us.  The loving relationships at the heart of God allow us to enter into the center of God’s life through a relationship with Jesus Christ that the Holy Spirit enables.  Such love in the midst of God calls forth a response of worship and praise in us, both because of who God is and because of what that means for us. 

Glory to you for the radiance of your holy Name; *
we will praise you and highly exalt you for ever.

This particular canticle that we sang between our first two readings, and which Ron is signing now, is sometimes called the Song of the Three Young Men.  This hymn of praise is found in early Greek versions of the Old Testament book of Daniel.  Those churches that have traditionally used the Greek Old Testament, like the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, include this hymn as part of their Bible.  Protestant churches that began after the Reformation to use translations of the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament tend to ignore this hymn or, like the Episcopal Church, place it in the Apocrypha and use it sometimes but not consider it at the same level as scripture.

This hymn occurs in the Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego story.  These three young Hebrews living in Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar refuse to bow down to an idol that the king has built.  So Nebuchadnezzar throws them into a fiery furnace that is so hot that the soldiers who throw them into it are charred to a crisp.  But God protects Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and no fire harms them.  The Greek book of Daniel recounts an extended song of praise that these three young men sing in the midst of the furnace.  These verses of praise, minus the final doxology sung today, make up the beginning of that song.  The song then continues with verses exhorting all creation to bless the Lord and praise him.  Much of this song makes up Canticle 12 in the Book of Common Prayer and includes verses addressed to natural phenomenon like the sun and stars, winter and summer, and storm clouds and thunderbolts, before moving on to mountains and hills, fish and whales, birds and animals, and finally people.  While walking around this fiery furnace, these three young men spend a few minutes asking everything they can think of to join them in praising the God who is saving them.  They are an example to us.  We, too, could send out an expansive a set of invitations to join us in worship and awe of our Trinitarian God when we consider what God has done in our lives. 

Glory to you in the splendor of your temple; *
on the throne of your majesty, glory to you.

In our first reading this morning, Isaiah gives us another window into the life of praising God.  Isaiah thought he was going into the Temple and has instead entered into the bottom of God’s heavenly throne room.  The Temple of Jerusalem in those days was beautiful and awe-inspiring.  Some of the portions of scripture we often skip as too boring include vivid descriptions of the colorful fabric and precious metals used in the Temple’s adornment.

Isaiah enters this glorious sanctuary and is given the vision of something even more glorious.  God is seated on his throne, and the hem of his garment fills the tabernacle.  God’s is so lofty and uplifted that just the bottom piece of his royal robe is enough to fill the most important worship site built to date.  Imagine how huge the rest of the garment, and the Almighty God who is wearing it, is if just the cuff filled up this entire church this morning. That enormous scale is what Isaiah sees.

What Isaiah hears are the hosts of heaven praising God.  The Seraphim and others are singing the holy, holy, holy we use during our eucharistic prayer, but the sound is so deafening that the temple is rocking  That, brothers and sisters, is some worship.  

Glory to you, seated between the Cherubim; *
we will praise you and highly exalt you for ever.

As Isaiah encounters this incredible heavenly worship, he is overwhelmed with a sense of his own inadequacy.  He knows he has messed up and his people have messed up.  Yet here he is with angelic laser light shows blinding his eyes and seraphic sub-woofers pounding his chest.  He huddles up into a ball, so God sends a Seraph to touch his lips with a hot coal and heal him.  Now Isaiah is able to participate in the heavenly worship and to answer God’s call in mission.

Isaiah shows us what happens when we are powerfully pulled into the praise of our Trinitarian God.  The nearer presence of God makes clear to us our own sins and failings.  We know this is the work of the Holy Spirit.  Yet we are also forgiven, healed, and made whole.  God wants us to be present to him in worship and to go out in mission because that is how we enter into his love.  When we worship God, we are invited into the love that makes up the heart of who God is.  When we do God’s work that he has given us to do, we share in God’s mission, which is the outpouring of his love from the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit into the larger world. 

We are invited into that worship in this place this morning.  We will sing the holy, holy, holy with angels, archangels and all the choirs of heaven, and we offer other hymns and praises, as well.  I’d invite you to picture the hem of the Almighty’s robe filling this place.  Imagine one small corner of God’s garment flowing down from the reredos and altar into our church while it is also filling every other church and chapel, sanctuary and synagogue, earthly temple and house of worship where God is being praised this morning.  Imagine being so close to such an enormous God, a God who invites us deeply into his life of love, and makes us worthy not only to stand before him, but to enter into the divine life of loving God and the divine mission of loving neighbor.  This God is worthy of our highest praises.

Glory to you, beholding the depths; *
in the high vault of heaven, glory to you.

As a further reminder that God is not removed to some unbridgeable throne room in a remote heavenly realm, we have Jesus’ words in our gospel.  He says he has descended from heaven.  He is the incarnation of the God who loves us so much that he was willing to leave this amazing, eternal worship to live and die as one of us.  He came down from the place of honor among the angles to reconcile us back to God, so that we could once again take our place in the center of God’s life.  His teaching that we could be born from above, born again, confirms for us that we are meant to be people at home in the high vault of the heavens where God is praised and where God’s children, whether Isaiah or Jesus or us, move out in loving mission for the love of the world.  Jesus reminds us that God so loved the world that Jesus came so that we might share that eternal heavenly life. 

The basic life of the Trinity that we see in the scripture is that we are created out of the love of God.  Jesus, the Son of God, became a human being out of love for us so that we could reenter the loving relationship with God that we were created for.  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus that allows us to know the love of God and to live into that love through loving relationship with Jesus and with one another.  Such a God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is beyond our clear understanding, but we don’t have to fully understand someone to love them.  We love God by accepting the invitation he gives us to enter his courts in worship, and to love our neighbors as he has loved us.  Brothers and sisters, let us love. 

Glory to you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; *
we will praise you and highly exalt you for ever.

Here is a version of the Canticle sung by St. David's Church, Houston, TX.

Let Light Shine Out of Darkness

 Proper 4B 2018 RCL

2 Corinthians 4:5-12, Psalm 139; Mark 2:23-3:6

                                                        Rev. Dr. Adam T. Trambley                               

June 3, 2018, St. John’s Sharon

In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians that we heard this morning, God said, “Let light shine out of darkness.”  Paul goes on to say that this same God has “shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”  Then he continues that, “we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” 

Think about it.  God’s light does not shine just in the heavenly spheres where God dwells in light inaccessible from before time and forever.  God’s light shines also from places that were previously dark.  God’s light shines with all the power and the glory of his presence perhaps most profoundly in those places out of which we would not expect to find his light emanating.  We know a couple of those places from scripture. 

Open the Bible up to page one and we see the primordial darkness.  In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void and darkness covered the face of the deep.  Then God said, “Let there be light” and there was light.  Then, in the prologue of John’s gospel, we read that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and, that in doing so, the light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.  Scripture gives us these two most powerful occasions when God acted -- the creation of universe and the salvation of the universe through the incarnation.  In both instances, the language to describe those transformative works of the Almighty is light shining out of darkness.

Paul is talking today about a third way that God’s light shines out of darkness.  He wants us to compare it to those other incredible examples of God’s illumination.  Paul wants to let us know that God is also shining in the darkness of our own hearts and lives.  Precisely into the darkness of our hearts God is shining the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.  Now that is a long sentence that we can parse out more fully some other time.  But we note that the phrase connects light with knowing God, and then connects knowing God with seeing Jesus.  So when that light shines in our hearts, we are going to see Jesus and share what we see of Jesus.  But Paul is saying that having this light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ doesn’t just happen automatically.  No, instead God made the decision to shine his light into our hearts when they were still places of darkness. 

Now we tend to object to such a sentiment in one of two ways.  We tend to either give ourselves too much credit or to give God too little.  One the one hand, we refuse to acknowledge how dark a place our hearts can be.  We can think, “Of course, God is going to shine into somebody’s heart as good as mine is. Why wouldn’t he?  I mean, he’s lucky to have me, right?”  Here, we can believe that God is not so much shining in our hearts as maybe powering up our own innate luster a bit.  On the other hand, we are inclined to believe that we are so bad that God could not possibly shine in our hearts.  We think that the best God could do is to allow us to wallow in self-pity in the corner while his light goes to more worthy recipients.  The main problem with both of these attitudes is that we make too much of ourselves and too little of God.  At our very best, we can but reflect some of God’s light.  If we are going to brighten the lives of those around us, we are going to require God to be at work in us.  And make no mistake, God can work in each and every one of us when he chooses to.  God is perfectly capable of healing and forgiving whatever we think might be wrong with us to show forth his glory.  Later in this letter, Paul even talks about God’s power being made perfect in Paul’s weakness and boasting of it. 

Paul also talks about God’s light shining out of the darkness of our hearts in another way.  He says we have the treasure that is the light of God’s glory in clay jars.  These clay jars, by the way, are us.  As Episcopalians, we like to see all the stuff we use for God plated in gold and silver, like the vessels we use for communion.  But Paul says God’s power is most clearly shown as belonging to God because that power manifests itself in us.  We are made of clay, formed out of the stuff of the earth, so we are literally a clay vessel.  Yet, we can also think of ceramic jars, perhaps cracked in places, with the light streaming out through the cracks.  No one would mistake the beauty and power of the light within for the fragile housing encasing it. Nevertheless God’s chooses to put the candle of his light in the oddest of ceramic holders, which are us.   

God’s light shining out of our darkness, out of the cracks in the ceramic containers of our hearts and lives has two implications that I want to explore briefly.  First, other people are going to experience God’s light through us, and, second, God is going to use the places in our lives that we might think of as particularly dark to shine his light for others in some of the brightest ways.

Saint Paul is saying we are going to be the light of God, the light of Christ, for other people.  Our job is to take allow that light to shine forth from us, to put it on the lampstand so it shines throughout the household.  We will be the only candle some people will see, so we are called make Christ known to others in our words and deeds.  The old spiritual says it this way, and feel free to sing along, This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.  This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.  This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.  Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. 

We’ve talked at various times about how we can let the light of God shine through us.  We can tell our stories about how God has made a difference in our lives.  We can offer acts of service to others.  We can invite people to join us for church.  We can offer prayers when people are hurting or troubled.  We let the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ shine through us when we love other people and let them know that we are loving them because God has first loved us. 

Sometimes the places in our lives that God uses most effectively to shine his light to others are the darkest areas of our own lives.  The difficult experiences we have had, the mistakes we have made, and the pain we have borne can be the deepest cracks in the clay jars of our lives that let the most light escape.  People in recovery are the ones who are able to reach those still in the grasp of addiction.  Former gang members have had the most effective inner city ministries to current gang members.  Divorced folks are best able to reach others going through the pain of a broken marriage.  Cancer survivors can walk with those undergoing chemotherapy.  Those who have lost loved ones too early can minister best to those whose grief is more recent.  People who have made a series of mistakes can be the best people to tell others how to avoid them.

We may think that God wants us for our strengths, but God is plenty strong enough already.  He can use all of us, but the places where he consistently and regularly shines his light are in midst of our weakest places.  We may not want to linger in those painful memories, but God is not afraid of them.  He will use our past to transform the present and future of other people whom he loves.  Then, as his light passes through us, we will find that our own wounds are healing as they are used to share the love and power of Jesus Christ with others.

Our God does not limit his light to those place with plenty of current illumination.  Instead, he says, “let light shine out of darkness.”  We are the clay jars that God is using to show forth his glory.  As we become vessels of the light of Christ, we will find that even our darkest, most painful places are healed and used for spreading the love and good news of Jesus Christ.  God wants each and every one of our hearts to shine with the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and to share that light with others.