TRINITY SUNDAY

Reposted from 2014

Isaiah 6:1-8 * Psalm 29 * Rev. 4:1-11 * John 3:1-17

“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Were I to go around asking people what they think these words mean, many would think that to see the kingdom of God is to “go to heaven when you die.” I would not want, in any way, to lessen one’s faith in the gift of eternal life. The truth of God’s promise is certain, that all who are in Christ will live forever in God’s kingdom. But to see the kingdom of God is not simply a future experience to which we look forward; to see the kingdom of God is to see here and now that God’s kingdom has come. The fullness of that coming will be in the future, when Christ returns in glory to rule forever as king of the whole earth and will be glorified in His saints. But the kingdom of God has already come, and that kingdom presents each of us with a daily choice about where we stand, what we do, and how we think.

          On Trinity Sunday you may well expect a doctrinal dissertation on the theological truth that our One God is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:18,19). In previous years I have presented that to the best of my ability by God’s grace. But today I want to proclaim how that revelation of the Trinity has everything to do with seeing the kingdom of God. The revelation of the Trinity is also the revelation of our salvation. God did not use clever academic theologians to reveal the doctrine of the Trinity. Rather, God entered into His own created world and revealed our salvation and the doctrine of the Trinity by personally bringing His kingdom into the world of human experience.

          The coming of Christ into the world as the Incarnate Word was a real historical event in matter, space and time. As Saint John the Apostle put it:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full (I John 1:1-4).”

And the coming of the Holy Spirit when the day of Pentecost had fully come, about which we read just last week (Acts 2), with visible manifestations and clearly evident supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit, was also a real event in the world of matter, space and time. Hence the shocking, downright scandalous words (but for being the truth) of St. Peter:

“This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear (Acts 2:32,33).”

Indeed, the Day of Pentecost is part two of the Incarnation. In the Gospels we see the Word made flesh, Jesus the living embodiment of the kingdom of God. We see Him doing good, healing, teaching, casting out demons, showing compassion to those who were sick or tormented, forgiving sins, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God (see Acts 10:38). We see His victory over sin and death by His cross and passion, and by His resurrection and glorification. In everything Jesus did or said, recorded in the Gospels, we see the kingdom of God overthrowing the power of darkness and commanding full human allegiance.

“And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:20,21).”

Indeed, at that point the kingdom of God was a Man, the Incarnate Word Himself, overthrowing the powers of darkness, proclaiming light and revealing truth. Wherever He stepped foot, the kingdom of God was present.

And it clashed violently with the sinful world. It was not a peaceful coming. It met with the full resistance of human sin and of demons. It always came with a demonstration of power. Whether healing, casting out demons or calling Lazarus and others back into the world by overthrowing death itself, the power of God’s kingdom was manifest. It was seen and heard. Nonetheless, the time came when the world was allowed to reward the good Jesus had done with the cross of suffering and death. The kingdom of God was not welcomed by the sinful world. But the greatest demonstration of power followed on the third day, when Christ rose from the dead into a life that never ends.

Do you see how that is mirrored in the experience of the Apostles in the Book of Acts? Once again the kingdom of God came into the world, for “They were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance (Acts 2:4).” They too went about preaching, and healing and doing good. They too proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom of God, by proclaiming all that Jesus had done and taught. They too worked miracles, cast out demons, and clashed with the sinful world. They too were given their crosses of suffering and death, as the world persecuted Christ in them. But they were never defeated.

The kingdom of God had come with the power of the Holy Spirit; the Church became the living Body of Christ by His power and several gifts (I Corinthians 12). And in these two great historical manifestations of the kingdom of God, the coming of Christ and then the coming of the Holy Spirit, human salvation was revealed and so was the mysterious truth of the Trinity. For the Father sent the Son, and the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit. In both of these historical events it was God Who was manifesting His power and his presence, shining a light in the vast darkness of human sin and pain, setting captives free and giving life to the dead.

St. Paul constantly used the simple little phrase, “In Christ.” It is in his epistles. What does that mean? How is that your identity? The answer is, in having been born again you were translated out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s Son.

“For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; Strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness; Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son: In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins: Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell; And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven. And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight: If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister. (Colossians 1:9-23)”

I could use my time this Sunday to give you a very academic talk about the doctrine of the Trinity and present it in abstract terms. There is a place for theological dissertation. But I have preached to you the gospel of the Kingdom of God, because that is the cue I get from today’s reading of the Gospel of John, chapter three. My great concern now is that you see the kingdom of God, that you see it in history, in the future when Christ returns; but also that you see it now.

Two great forces demand your daily allegiance: "Choose this day whom ye will serve (Joshua 24:15)." One is the kingdom of God and the other is the power of darkness. Or we could say, the Lord Jesus Christ or the world. When I say “the world” I mean it as St. John used the term. He wrote, “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not (John 1:10).” The world," as used that way, means the great power that controls whole nations of human beings, that sends them to war against one another, that moves them to exploit the poor, to steal basic necessities of life from whole peoples, and basically to deceive everyone into sin and death. It lures you with “The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life (I John 2:15-17).”

But you are not of the world. Christ has chosen you out of the world, “Therefore the world hateth you (John 17:19).” You have been translated out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son. And, as that kingdom was manifested in power in the Gospels and in the Book of Acts, we can learn to depend on that same power. Every minute presents us with a choice between the corrupt thinking of the world, and the truth of God’s word. Every issue, every moral choice, all of your daily actions – we must not live as the world around us lives; we must think not as the world thinks, but as servants of God with renewed minds (Romans 12:1,2).

My message to you all on this Trinity Sunday is this: You have been born again and you are in Christ. Open your eyes now to see the kingdom of God.

AMAZING GRACE!

AMAZING GRACE! In Basic Baltimore Black = Gospel Music Style

ALIEN FILES A THREAT TO FAITH?

Hogwash. I say, Bring it on.

A group of popular American pastors have warned that President Donald Trump’s release of ‘alien files’ could shatter Christian beliefs, according to the Daily Mail.

They have claimed that US intelligence officials have held a series of meetings with them and told them to prepare churches to hold the Christian community together in the wake of the revelations’ shockwaves.

Popular evangelist pastor Perry Stone said that the alien files could include reports and possibly videos of aliens and extraterrestrial spacecraft.

“You’re going to have people who are going to say if there are galaxies and there are allegedly other creations in the galaxies, then the whole creation story is a myth, and you’re going to have people that’s going to apostatise and turn from the Christian faith because they have no answer for what they’re about to hear,” said Stone.- Firstpost

I have run into this before. Someone insists that there cannot be aliens according to the Bible. They quote Psalm 115:16 which states, "The heaven, even the heavens, are the LORD's: but the earth hath he given to the children of men." (KJV) Well, I am glad they know scripture well enough to quote some of it, but what does the subject of space aliens have to do with “the children of men?” Haven’t they ever watched the Bar Scene from Star Wars? (I mean the first Star Wars, you know, Episode Four). I dig that crazy jazz, and I detect a definite Earth influence in it; but those aliens don’t look anything like “the children of men.” The evidence appears to indicate that they all come from outer space, which is why we call them aliens. I mean, I do not want to be accused of being insensitive, but they look kinda weird if you ask me.

I also think that this Perry Stone fellow might ask what “the heavens” really means, and he definitely needs to look up the definition of the word “myth” in the Dictionary. I mean, I hate to break this to him, but many saints and Church Fathers recognized that the Creation Story is a myth, and that the first eleven chapters of Genesis contained, for them, a great deal of spiritual truth by way of allegory. But that is the problem with Fundamentalism. If you do not believe that the Universe was created in exactly six twenty-four hour days, and only very recently - a mere six thousand years ago - as a literal fact, then you are not allowed to believe that God created the universe at all, or that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

“What do you mean it isn’t all one book?”

I have had the regrettable duty of breaking this fact to Fundamentalists many times, and I mean by Fundamentalists both Protestant Evangelicals and those who have moved on from Fundamentalist Evangelicalism to, as is inevitable for many, atheism. The Bible is not a book. It is a library, a collection of ancient writings in Hebrew and Greek that was created over several centuries, and it includes several genres, indeed every literary genre that existed in Antiquity. The opening of Genesis is called, properly, “the Song of Creation,” a poetic telling that has been interpreted in various ways, most often as truth that transcends mere recitation of facts. The original Fundamentalists were members of gnostic sects who believed that an evil god or evil gods are depicted in the story as creating man to keep him as a slave in a garden, and the serpent helped to set the first man and the first woman free to be like the gods in knowledge, for which cause the chief of those gods banished them from Eden (not the Gnostics: There was no one group called the Gnostics). And, if you insist on a literal reading of the story, their interpretation was as good as any. But their interpretation contradicted Judaism and Christianity, and it missed the spiritual truth, full of moral teaching, that Jews and Christians believed.

In his refutation of Gnostic and pagan views (particularly in Contra Celsum and De Principiis), Origen of Alexandria interpreted the fourth day of creation, in which God made the sun, the moon, and the stars (Genesis 1:14-19) not as the temporal, material creation of lights, but as a symbolic pedagogical event within his broader cosmological framework. Gnostics, such as the Valentinians, taught that the material world was created by an evil demiurge (Yaldabaoth) and, according to them, the luminaries were instruments of fate designed to trap souls in matter. Origen, in opposition to that gnostic teaching, wrote that the only true God is the good Creator of both the Old and the New Testaments. According to his Christian doctrine, as stated in Contra Celsum, the luminaries should be seen allegorically. He refuted the doctrine that stars are divine beings ruling by the imposition of fate. He saw them as lights that serve a purpose as stated in the text: “Let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.” (Genesis 1:14, 15) Contradicting the gnostic insistence on what we today would call a literal reading, he also pointed out that if there was no sun before the fourth day, how could there have been evenings and mornings? I have come across atheists who use the same argument against what is, in most cases, their own former Fundamentalist beliefs as an argument against a literal interpretation of Genesis chapter one. Of course, they imagine that by showing the folly of a literal interpretation they are somehow destroying Christianity, oblivious to the fact that earliest known use of that very argument was written by an Egyptian Christian, a Church Father, in Alexandria, who posited it as a defense of the Christian faith.

This is what I have seen many times. After they cease to believe in Christianity, they still insist on interpreting everything to do with God and the Bible as Fundamentalists. There are, to be sure, former Catholic, former Orthodox, former Anglican, former Lutheran, etc. atheists who tend to think the same way. In their case it seems they, while not formerly Evangelical, were, nonetheless, somehow also fundamentalists - “f” in the lower case. No doubt that is partly because television preachers and other cultural forces have caused confusion on a massive scale. Of course, when dealing with real Protestant Fundamentalists, I notice that their Readers Digest version of the Bible, a mere sixty-six books, never existed in that abridged form before the nineteenth century.

The very term “Bible believing” is problematic. What they mean is that they believe what their own Fundamentalist Magisterium (located perhaps in Chattanooga or somewhere) has infallibly declared. As my friend, an Orthodox priest named Patrick Henry Reardon has said, “I feel sorry for my Catholic brethren, because they have only one infallible clergyman.” I was reminded of his words when I came across the infallible utterance by Ken Hamm that space aliens do not exist, but that even if they did “they cannot be saved.” Well, I am glad we have that serious theological question resolved. Obviously, if God had made the mistake of creating other intelligent biological beings in His universe, He would certainly lack the imagination to come up with a way to save them from the effects of…Adam’s fall? It looks like we are back to that “the children of men” issue. (I mean, do these guys look like the children of any men that you know?)

I think that Mr. Spock would fail to see the logic of Ken Hamm’s ex cathedra declaration. But poor Spock is eligible to be no more than only half-saved; Doctor Who and Martin O’Hara are screwed.

The good thing is that most of the Christians in the world are not of the intellectually deprived Fundamentalist stripe. It is a relatively new gnostic sect that serves mostly to churn out angry atheists. Having no authority to interpret the Bible according to a received authoritative Tradition, an ancient Tradition that provides a large enough room for an authentic faith that cannot be overthrown by recognizing mythology and allegory in service to truth, what they call “faith” might indeed shrivel up and die if “alien files” are released (though I think it more likely that the White House announcement was to distract attention from certain other files). For them, unless you believe that the flood of Noah literally covered the entire planet Earth (even though the Bible says no such thing inasmuch as the word usually translated “earth” is eretz, meaning the land - kol h’eretz: “the whole land”), because that literal belief in a world-wide flood is what their American Fundamentalist Magisterium requires if you want to qualify as “Bible believing,” then you are unable to believe that “God is Love,” or that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. After all, it’s all one book you know, just like the local library is all one book rightly divided over many shelves, that is, if you are a library believing reader.

This is the problem with a complex system of faith. The more a structure depends on each and every part to hold it together, the more vulnerable it is. Fundamentalist “faith” cannot escape desperate fear because it is fragile. It takes only enough of a jolt for one domino to fall over, and everything comes crashing down. I know of one man who lost his entire faith because he noticed that the Gospel According to Saint Matthew mistakenly attributes a prophetic oracle from the Book of Zechariah to Jeremiah. How come the Universal Church, having that obvious human error in front of its eyes has continued to exist for two thousand years, and no Church Father, no bishop, no pope, ever saw it is as a problem? Maybe it is because it is not a problem: The point that was revealed is this: What happened on the first Good Friday was foretold by the prophets. Would realeasing “alien files” contradict the infallible Fundamentalist interpretation of Psalm 115:16? Yes, it would. Would it destroy Christianity, or overthrow the faith of any authentic believer? Of course not. Do they have “alien files?” If so, I say, Bring’em on. Show us the aliens themselves. I am among those who will have only a greater appreciation of God’s handywork in all of its variety.

INTERVIEW ON "HOPE RESURRECTED" WITH LANCE CONLEY

I was recently interviewed by Lance Conley on his podcast. For the URL to this same interview you can use this link, and can Like and Subscribe for more of his content.

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