Galatians 5:1,13-25: “The Fruit of the Spirit”

Faith vs. Works

One Sunday morning, a teacher was attempting to teach her Sunday school class about the doctrine of salvation by faith.  She asked the class, “If I went to Church every week and tried to live my life following the ten commandments, would I get into heaven?”  “No!” answered little Johnny.  “If I sold my house, my car, and all of my other possessions and gave all the money to the church, would I get into heaven?”  Johnny replied, “No!”  “Ok, well, if I spent my whole life being charitable, loving my family, and being kind to everyone I met, would I get into heaven then?”  Johnny again replied, “No!”  The teacher was somewhat surprised by little Johnny’s intellect and thought that he might already be grasping the subject, so she asked him, “how do I get into heaven, then?”  Johnny replied, “You have to die first.”

Little Johnny the Theologian?

In a way, little Johnny’s answers points to what Paul is talking about in our reading today from his Letter to the Galatians.  Johnny’s answers suggest the understanding that we are not saved by what we do or our ability to adhere to certain standards of religious behavior.  This was the Apostle Paul’s message and the point that he wanted to emphasize in the letter.   The Letter to the Galatians helped influence Martin Luther develop his doctrine of salvation by faith alone because it emphasized that there was nothing humans could do to obtain righteousness before God, but God bestows faith and salvation upon us as a gift.  Luther believed that the Catholic Church’s emphasis on adhering to the sacraments did little to establish a relationship with Christ, which Luther (and most Christians, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant today) believe is crucial for our salvation.

Luther stated in his book, Disputation against Scholastic Theology, “We do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds but, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.”

Letter to the Galatians

Paul wrote this letter to the Galatians because his credibility as an apostle and his established ministries were under attack by a group of Jewish Christians who came to his churches after Paul left to form other churches and claimed that Paul was not true Apostle of Christ and that his message was incomplete.  When word of their attacks reached Paul, he wrote this letter to counter their false teachings.  At the beginning of his letter, Paul gave a little bit of his call story.    He wrote that he “advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age” and was “far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.”  As we know from the story in the Book of Acts, Paul was a Pharisee who persecuted Christians until he had a vision of Christ that temporarily blinded him, and he became a converted follower of Christ when his vision was restored.

In Galatians 2:15, Paul wrote, “when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being,”  Paul, as is evident in his letters, had a great philosophical mind, and God used his skills to proclaim the gospels to educated and uneducated Greeks and Romans. 

Judaizer

Paul understood that Jesus’s message was not bound by the laws of Judaism, and he did not force his disciples to take on Jewish customs. 

Paul began his ministry in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), where he encountered the Galatians, descendants of a Celtic tribe that settled in Turkey several centuries earlier.  His ministry in that region was very successful, and he established many other churches throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.  Other Jewish-Christian missionaries, however, traveled through the region sometime after Paul had left, and they did not agree with Paul’s methods.  They told believers in Turkey that the men must be circumcised and that the people must follow Jewish dietary laws and customs to be true followers of Christ.

Paul wrote this letter to counter the teachings of these missionaries, which Paul called, in a rough translation of the original Greek, Judaizers.  They, Paul believed, were putting the burden of Jewish law on the gentiles, but Paul writes in Galatians 2:16 that Jewish believers, “know that a person is justified (made righteous) not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.  And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.

Freedom

This message was important not only for the Galatians but also to Martin Luther and all believers today.  In the opening of our reading today, Paul proclaims, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”  We know that we often fall short of the standards we set for ourselves, let alone those proposed in Old Testament.

We have all broken at least one commandment, and maybe a few of us have done so a few times.  Paul wrote of his repeated failure to stop sinning on his own in his Letter to the Romans 7:21-24:

 “So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being I delight in God’s law;  but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.  What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?

He provides the solution in the next verse,  Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Perfect Love

As Paul reminds us in Romans 3:23, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  But Paul encouraged Galatian readers, “Stand firm,” and “do not let yourselves be burdened by the yoke of that slavery to sin.”  We could never attain righteousness for ourselves, so Jesus gave us the example of perfect love.  Jesus went to the cross to show us that our weaknesses and failures do not separate us from the love of God.

Returning the Love

We return that love through open-hearted service, not through obeying rules.  A person who loves identifies with people, gets down where they are, even below where they are, and ministers to them. Verses 13 and 14 state, “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free.  But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.  For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Sarx

The Greek word for flesh, sarx, means more than our basic understanding of flesh as blood, skin, and tissue.  This, as we know, is usually the case with the Greek terms in the Bible.  Sarx means flesh as we understand it, but it also refers to sensuous or animal nature.  Without any suggestion of depravity, animal nature involves our cravings that, without some moderating influence, may incite us to sin.  Sarx represents our lizard brains in modern terminology.  In verses 16 through 17, Paul provides a remedy to free ourselves from the bondage to sarx, “So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.  For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh.  They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.”

God gives us the gift of the human body; it is intended to serve God and creation.  We are not called to reject or hate our bodies, we are called to use them to share the love given to us as a gift by the Holy Spirit.  The law reminds us that sometimes we are powerless over that nature, but God’s Spirit leads us away from the bondage to sarx.  As we serve others, the Holy Spirit bestows the gifts of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control to help us serve more effectively.

The Little Flower

An illustration of grace superseding law can be found in a story told about a man many of his New Yorkers admirers called the Little Flower.  Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor of New York City during the worst days of the depression and all of World War II.  The mayor was short in stature, 5 foot 2 inches tall, but he had a huge heart, hence the nickname.  Mayor LaGuardia did much to help New Yorkers survive the great depression, but he is best remembered by popular antidotes of his kindness.  LaGuardia would show up at orphanages with buses and took the children to baseball games, and when the New York papers went on strike, he read the Sunday funnies to the kids over the radio.

On a very cold night in January 1935, Mayor LaGuardia went to the night court that served the poorest neighborhood in New York City, dismissed the judge for the evening, and took over the bench himself.  That evening, along with the traffic violators and petty criminals, a tattered older woman was brought before him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread.  She told LaGuardia that her daughter’s husband had deserted her, her daughter was sick, and two grandchildren were starving, so she took the bread out of desperation to feed them. 

But the shopkeeper from whom the bread was stolen refused to drop the charges.  “It’s a bad neighborhood, Your Honor,” the man told the mayor.  “She’s got to be punished to teach other people around her a lesson.”  LaGuardia sighed, turned to the woman, and said, “I’ve got to punish you.  The law makes no exceptions—ten dollars or ten days in jail.”

 But even as he pronounced the sentence, the mayor was already reaching into his pocket.  He extracted a bill and tossed it into his hat, saying, “Here is the ten-dollar fine, which I now remit; and furthermore, I am going to fine everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat.”  So he handed his hat to the bailiff and they collected an additional $47.50 from some seventy petty criminals, traffic violators, New York City Police officers, and one red-faced store owner.  Everyone in the room gave the mayor a standing ovation.

True Justice over Legalism

God’s grace directs us to true justice over legalism.  Jesus Christ died to pay the penalty for our transgressions, so we have nothing to prove.  We no longer are slaves to our failures and are free to live new lives.  Therefore, standing before God, we can be assured that Jesus has given us the righteousness we did not earn.

Fruits of the Spirit

Paul promises that the Holy Spirit will produce the fruit of the Spirit, “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”  The fruit of the Spirit keeps us from sin and helps us to walk like Jesus

The Kingdom of God

Jesus said that the kingdom of God is in our midst, and he gave us examples in parable form: 

1)      The kingdom of God is expressed in the father who looks for his prodigal son coming over the horizon to return home,

2)      It is expressed in the love of the shepherd who leaves the other sheep safe in their pen and searches for the lost sheep. 

Little Johnny was right, we do die before entering the kingdom of God, but we die to our failure, our shame, and our loneliness when the Holy Spirit calls us to God’s grace, leads us home, and leads us to help call others find home.  Amen. 

Luke 8:26-29: "Healing from Within"

Scary Movies

I’ve grown up watching scary movies.  We watched classics like Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman, as well as the not-so-classic cheesy horror movies like the screaming skull on Saturday afternoons.  When we were teenagers, my brother Greg, my cousin Richard and I would see the more gruesome scary movies of our day: the 80’s slasher movies like Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Chucky, and the bride of Chuckie.  They were over-the-top in their gruesomeness but did not seem realistic.

The story always had the same characteristics.  A superhuman, diabolically evil being would lurk in the shadows, stalking the victims as suspense among the audience was building, and then suddenly swoop out and kill the victims.  The victims usually did something wrong to seal their fate.  The bullies and the sexually promiscuous characters met their demise first.  The heroine (slasher movies of the 1980s often depicted teenage girls as the hero) was brave, resourceful, and usually the most virtuous character in the cast.

She would end up killing the villain… or at least so we would think, until the monster suddenly came back to life and had to be defeated a second time.

Possession Movies

Movies about demonic possession were usually the darkest of the horror movie genre.  The Exorcist, released in 1973, was the first of this genre to gain wide popularity.  These movies were more nihilistic, and evil is depicted as more powerful.

In the Exorcist, the team of two priests was able to expel the demon, but both priests died in the process.  I have noticed that many of our most popular movies now have more nihilistic themes, even our superhero movies.  Evil forces seem so overwhelming that even superheroes struggle mightily, sometimes unsuccessfully, to keep them at bay.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

What makes these stories so popular?  Theologian Walter Wink believed that most of our popular movies and certainly the horror and slasher movies use an ancient form of storytelling called “the myth of redemptive violence.”  Wink states that power structures since the era of the Babylonian empire “have used this myth to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.”  “The myth of redemptive violence,” Wink notes, “is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known.”  In these stories, order obtains victory over chaos through violence.  The myth of redemptive violence is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo.”

Today’s Demons

Modern stories about demons and demon possession provide relief from tension generated by the chaotic forces in our lives -- impending climate collapse, looming economic recession, the perception of increased violent crime (even if crime statistics might not bear this out), increased homelessness, drug deaths, and suicides, etc.  But as movie plots become more cynical, when the heroes fail, our culture may be signaling that our demons are overpowering.

New Understanding

Today, with our increased knowledge about mental illness or epilepsy, modern people rarely attribute these conditions to demonic possession.  However, there still seems to be a spiritual dimension to illness: a cycle of self-accusation or anger at family members often accompanies severe illness or death, which is surely spiritual darkness.

The Antithesis

In our gospel story, Jesus deals with evil quite differently.   The gospel provides the antithesis to the myth of redemptive violence.  In the exorcism accounts in the New Testament, the person “possessed” cannot be blamed.  They had been invaded by a stronger, spiritual power, which only Jesus could expel.  God does not will suffering, and even Jesus did not escape suffering and death.  Suffering is a fact of life, and our faith helps us endure suffering.  When we emphasize personal responsibility for keeping ourselves healthy, we often blame the ill for their illness.

The Adversary

1.  When he announced the kingdom of heaven, Jesus proclaimed a new regime that counters the darkness of this world: the suffering, the illness, the hatred, war, disease, and most importantly, death would be expelled.  According to the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament, this world’s darkness comes from the adversary, the evil force in this world, Satan.  The proper name “Satan” comes from the Hebrew word “ha satan,” meaning adversary.  In the New Testament, the Greek word used for Satan is “diabolos,” which we translate as Devil, but it also can be an “accuser” or “adversary.”  Richard Beck notes in, Reviving Old Scratch that, in the Bible, Satan and the Devil are interchangeable names for the personification of all that is adversarial to the kingdom and people of God.  Satan is the personified enemy of God.

Some people may have difficulty believing in an entity that embodies evil, but the New Testament makes the struggle between Jesus and Satan a key theme in the gospels.  In modern times, we witnessed the incredible power of evil employed in the Nazi occupation of Europe and the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, the Stalin Regime’s massacres in the Soviet Union, and the Khmer Rouge’s massacres in Cambodia.  In the United States, we have our examples of systemic evil: the Wounded Knee massacre at the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, the institution of chattel slavery and racism in America, in today’s spike in murders and mass shootings, many spurred on racism, misogyny, or homophobia.  Once unrepentant evil is unleashed, it is difficult to stop.  I have no problem personifying that evil as Satan and those actions as demonic.

Expelling the Demons

Evil can be overpowering, but Jesus came to free us from the mental slavery of suffering and guide us to communities where we are supposed to care for each other.  The New Testament frequently addresses the topic of demons in the four gospels and the Book of Acts.  In these stories, demon-possessed people are frightening, cast off from their communities, and live in iniquity until they encounter Jesus or the disciples.  Jesus expelled the demons with a command, and the person, released from spiritual bondage, found wholeness and community.  Then they can proclaim their salvation, find like-minded followers, and form ecclesia, congregations of believers.

He Who Commands the Winds and Waters

The setting of our gospel story is given in the few verses before our reading.  Luke 8:22 informs us, “One day Jesus said to his disciples, Let’s go to the other side of the lake.”   So, they set off, and Jesus took a nap in the boat, and the little boat immediately ran into a storm.  The boat was getting swamped, and the disciples panicked and woke Jesus.  They cried, “Master, Master, we’re going to drown.”  Jesus awoke, rebuked the storm, and the waters calmed.  Jesus then turned to his disciples and asked, “Where is your faith?”  The disciples didn’t answer; they just sat there amazed and asked, “Who is this?  He commands the winds and the waters, and they obey him!”

Possession and Addiction

When they reached the other side of the lake and Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town.  The man was homeless, naked, and ranting.  He caused so much trouble around the town that the respectable citizens bound him in chains and tried to keep him under constant guard, but his raving madness gave him superhuman strength.  Sort of like those accounts of people today high on drugs who fight off teams of police officers who try to hold them down.  The man was probably not unlike the people we see on a street corner, ranting at a trash can or yelling into the air at seemingly no one.  These ravings can seem like demon possession; in a sense, it is possession by continuous drug use, alcoholism, or mental illness.

Legion

When Jesus calmly asked the man his name, he replied, “Legion.”  A legion of Roman soldiers was 600 men, so the man must have been under the control of countless dark spirits.  His actions upset the order of his town, and he was cast out.  Jesus, it seems, crossed the lake with his disciples just to heal this man: a man abandoned and cut off from home and meaningful life.  Jesus’s own disciples were still working out Jesus’s identity, but this man, driven to insanity by the demons in his head, knew who Jesus was.  When he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet and cried out, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?  I beg you, do not torment me.’  These demons cried out because they knew Jesus had the power to free this man, but the man desperately threw himself at Jesus’s feet.

Demon Pigs

Jesus then cast out the demons that had driven this man to insanity.  I don’t know why the demons asked to be placed into the pigs or why Jesus gave them their wish.  The text does not explain it, but pigs were considered unclean animals by the Jewish converts who probably first read this story.  The pigs also represented the livelihood of the people in the village.  Perhaps this was the just impact on their community for casting this man from their care?  The story does mention that when the people came out of the village to see what Jesus had done and saw the formerly possessed young man sitting at Jesus’s feet, clothed and in his right mind, they gathered the people from the surrounding area to ask Jesus to leave for they were afraid.  Slide 1

Writer Flannery O’Conner, once noted in one of her letters, “all human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us, and the change is painful.”  The people asked Jesus to leave for the same reason they expelled the possessed man into the wilderness; they were afraid.

Tell How Much God Has Done for You

The formerly possessed man, however, lost all fear when Jesus set him free.  He wanted to follow Jesus, but Jesus told him to “Return home and tell how much God has done for you.” So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.”

Chaos and evil are indeed prevalent in the world, but often evil is committed because of fear and sometimes in the name of personal or tribal security.  The foreigner and the refugees are barred from the neighborhood.  The poor are forgotten.  Resources are hoarded, and empires are built as a tribe, caste, or class gains power and enforces that power with violence.  Hardship begets hardship until they can seem like legions.  To see this dynamic in action, we need look no further than our own Lahaina town.

The Maui News featured a story this week about the recent purchase of the Crossroads Apartments in Lahaina by new investors who plan to force out existing tenants (some of whom have lived in their apartments for decades) to renovate the apartments and charge double the rent.  The new investors cannot be reached for comment, but I am sure they would argue that they have a right to make a good profit on their investment.  But, given the scarcity of affordable housing in our community, is it responsible to suddenly force out long-term tenants when there is no place for them to go, all to obtain a profit?  We seem to have moved from an era when communities organized to establish orderly communities into an era when everyone is out for themselves to get what they can.  The myth of redemptive violence has failed to inspire order, but the church has an alternate narrative, the Kingdom of God.

Stanley Hauerwas

Jesus instructed his disciples to make disciples and form the church to counter the chaos with love and truth.  Theologian Stanley Hauerwas noted that “the truthfulness of Christian convictions resides in their power to form a people sufficient to acknowledge the divided character of the world and thus necessarily ready to offer hospitality to the stranger.”

We may not change the world, but through our efforts, we can stand for those who were abandoned by their community.

 The Church

 The church is not the United Methodist Church, the Protestant Church, or the Catholic Church; the church is where people faithfully carry out the task of being witnesses to the reality of God’s Kingdom.  God promised to send the Holy Spirit to the church.  If we allow that Spirit to help us establish order amid the chaos of this world through the story of grace rather than the myth of redemptive violence, we can exorcise this world’s demons in Jesus’s name.  Amen.

John 16:12-15: “God So Loves the World”

Don’t Preach the Entire Gospel in One Sermon

My preaching professor, Lincoln Gallaway, once advised me, when my class sermon was too long, that I should not try to preach the entire gospel in a single sermon, and perhaps I should save some of it for the following week.  Some of you may be thinking that I should have followed that advice more often.  I am in jeopardy of shifting into my old ways again because I will be talking about the Trinity this week.  It is a huge topic that really cannot be fully explained in a volume of books, let alone a sermon, but here we go.

The Trinity is Unique

We Christians have a unique understanding of God.  While there are some popular spiritual teachers out there who like to say that all religions are essentially talking about the same God and gloss over the differences, we know that there is no other religion that describes God as one being who is actually a relationship between three equal, distinct persons: Father, Son, and Spirit.

Keeping it Simple

It isn’t easy to describe this in detail without drifting into some heretical (or unorthodox) ideas.  There is infinitely more about God we don’t know than what little we know.  We can carefully use handy illustrations that give us glimpses of what we mean by a God who is three in one, but they are woefully inadequate. 

Therefore, the most important idea to take away from our concept of the Trinity is that God is all about relationships.  God is in relationship with Father, Son, and Spirit; God is in relationship with us, and we with God and each other.  GOD IS LOVE.  1 John 4:8 states, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

God is love. 

When we say that “God is love,” what does this mean?  In English, the word love can have many meanings:  you may love ice cream, your spouse, and your children, and these loves are obviously different.  We also love our spouses differently throughout our relationship.  At the beginning of our relationship, we are filled with romantic feelings that are mostly based on ideal notions of our beloved.  Over time, as we get to know the person we marry, we begin to sacrifice little bits of ourselves (our selfish wills, our annoying habits) and offer them to draw closer to each other.  Our romantic love becomes friendship and then agape – a love without conditions that freely gives to our beloved and holds nothing back. 

We become lifelong companions.

Lover, Beloved, Love

We need three things in a relationship for love:

1)                a lover, the originator of love

2)                the beloved, the person who will receive the gift.

3)                And love, or rather, the act of love.

St. Augustine uses these concepts to define the Trinity.  The Father is the origin of love.  The Son is the object of the love, and the Holy Spirit is the gift of love shared between them.

God is Loving Relationship

God is this loving relationship, and we experience this love through Jesus: the Son in the divine relationship who came to live among us and love us.  When we look at Jesus, we see who God is.  Jesus, the incarnate Son, the object of God’s love in the divine trinity relationship, shared that love with humanity during his life among us, and He continues to share that love through the Holy Spirit.

Love is Needed for Wellbeing Slide 2

Theologian Thomas Jay Oord explains:  To love is to act intentionally, in response to God and others, to promote overall wellbeing.  Therefore, the Holy Trinity reminds us that we are all interrelated, that no individual is an island, and that, as followers of the Christian faith, we believe that we can lead the way in repairing the damage in our society.  This last week, I believe that I saw someone model how God’s love could help us heal after a tragedy like the shooting in Uvalde, TX.

Matthew McConaughey

Last week, actor Matthew McConaughey gave a moving testimony at a presidential press briefing.  You have probably seen it, but if you haven’t, I highly recommend that you watch a video of his complete comments.  In his speech, McConaughey emphasized the humanity of the victims.  He and his wife, Camila, had spent the previous week consoling and talking with family members of the victims of the senseless shooting in Uvalde last week.  McConaughey felt moved to do this because he was a native son of Uvalde, TX, and he felt connected to these people, and they welcomed his affection.  He chose not to talk about the horrible deeds of that deranged young man who burst into that classroom armed for war.  McConaughey alluded to the devasting impact of that attack by discussing the trauma the funeral home workers experienced as they prepared these young victims for burial.  But he spent most of his time sharing the stories he obtained from the devastated families: stories about the lives, dreams, and aspirations of their loved ones, the wonderful children and teachers whose lives were snuffed out too soon. 

Alithia

He shared how 10-year-old Alithia wanted to be an artist.  McConaughey held up one of her drawings given to him by her family to share at the press conference, and he explained that the drawing was of the artist and her friend who had passed away earlier from illness: her friend was pictured in heaven, and Alithia was on Earth drawing a picture of her friend in heaven.  Sort of like Rembrandt painting himself into painting, or Velazquez who painited himself painting the 17th Century Spanish Royal Family.  Alithia’s parents explained to McConaughey that they had never spoken to Alithia about heaven before, yet Alithia knew that heaven is a place of grace and fulfilled relationships.

Ellen

Ten-year-old Ellen had been practicing a Bible verse she was supposed to recite the following evening in the Wednesday night church service at her Baptist church. 

The passage was Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all our soul, and with all your strength.”  She never got to share that verse at her church.

Finding Meaning in the Tragedy

The families wanted their loved one’s dreams to remain alive in our responses to their tragic deaths.  In the end, McConaughey called for some common-sense solutions that people from both sides of the political divide can agree to support: gun laws that keep powerful weapons out of the hands of bad or disturbed individuals: raising the age of gun ownership to 21, waiting periods until criminal background checks are performed, red-flag laws, enhanced school safety, policies that promote strong families, but he also called for measures that address the spiritual crisis in this country.  He called for our leaders to step forward to finally do what is right.  McConaughey urged all people to stop seeing everything from partisan lenses.  He did not vilify anyone but called on everyone to do what is right for our community.

McConaughey said that we are not as divided as we are told we are.  We need to envision a more hopeful future for children like those killed in Uvalde by living the values that not only provide the basis for our democratic political system but give us the ability to live together in peace and prosperity.

Our Responsibilities to these Victims

In his talk, McConaughey did not reveal a political preference.  He also did not speak directly about religion, but his talk was infused with religion and a Christian understanding of our connection to one another as God’s children.  Together we are more powerful than those bent on doing evil, and the dreams of these victims will live on through our response to the suffering they endured.

God is Relational

On Trinity Sunday, we celebrate a God that is not distant.  God is near us, as near as our next breath.  All three persons of the Godhead, Father, Son, and Spirit, relate with us, and we respond by remaining connected in a sacred circle of love: love among the three members of the Godhead is shared with us and returned by us.

Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer

The concept of the Trinity is our best attempt to describe a God who is at once: creator of the universe, redeemer of a world lost in sin, and a sustainer of our broken, precious lives.  It is impossible to define this God with words, but deep in our hearts, we long to find how our lives and souls connect to the ultimate meaning of the universe.  We want to be loved completely and unreservedly.  Psalm 8, part of which we recited in our Call to Worship, probes this question, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?  Yet you have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor.” (Psalm 8:4-5)

The Spirit Guides Us in Love

We love because God first loved us.  Jesus modeled this love for us, and he instructed us to, “love our neighbor as ourself.”  (Matthew 22:39)   It is impossible to do this alone; we live out this love in the church, and God left us with the Holy Spirit, who will guide and help us. 

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus said, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”

The Greatest Commandment  Slide 6

Jesus fused Deuteronomy 6:5, the scripture passage that little Ellen never got a chance to read at her church, with part of Leviticus 19:18 to come up with the greatest commandment:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”’ (Matthew 22:37-40)

The Bell Tolls for Thee

In our cynical times, these powerful words of love seem obscured by the nihilism,  violence, exploitation, and immorality that are saturating our culture.  It takes someone like Matthew McConaughey, or you, or me, to step forward and declare that the suffering of any person moves us because God is moved by their suffering. 

The Trinity describes a God that created, redeemed, and sustains all things, and we who were created in God’s image are called to respond in kind.  Rev. John Donne, wrote the poem, No Man Is an Island, 400 years ago, while he was home convalescing from a long illness and heard the toll of a funeral bell while he was lying in bed.  He finished his poem with this stanza.

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee. 

Let us all remember this Trinity Sunday that our God who is one being in a relationship between three persons extends that relationship to us, and therefore each death, each broken heart, diminishes us, and each act of love empowers us.  Amen.