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Back to Sermon ArchivesJune 7,
2009
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Isaiah 6:1-8,
Romans 8:14-17, John 3:1-10, 12, 16-17
“Infinitely Renewable: Creation, Covenant, Call,
Communion . . .”
You know how one of my favorite theologians
Buzz Lightyear expresses his ecclesial mandate for this day – “To the Trinity –
and Beyond!” There is an infinite creativity and diversity to our God – just as
there is to us! Each one of us finds so many differing ways of being and doing
throughout our lives – ways of God’s grace, ways of God’s love. God acts to
make all creation in the beginning – and anew every day of our lives. Plants,
animals, human beings, waters, mountains, stars and skies – all seem infinitely
renewable. No more important lifetime task lies before graduates of these days
than to be co-creators with God.
God makes infinitely renewable covenant to be our God while we are yet no
people but slaves in Egypt. God says nothing we do, or do not do, can make
God stop being our God. And through one particular people, God offers
covenant, personal relationship and corporate responsibility, with all the
peoples of earth. Jesus is a sure sign and for us a certain seal to God’s
covenant with us. If nothing on earth can separate us from God’s love
through Jesus Christ, nothing can keep us from becoming all we can be – the best
of who we are!
God also calls us to many ways of expressing who we are – through life
itself, through religion, through sports, through arts, through school, through
work, through family, through marriage and partnership. Our whole lives
are spent responding to the specific invitation and the general mission of God.
Finally, God offers us constant communion – with God and with one another –
through the body of Christ which is given and offered for all. No matter
how far we wander, how lost we get, there is always a place at God’s table for
us. Come on home!
Behind and before everything else about God
lie the infinite sources of God’s love and care, God’s mercy and grace. “Grace”
is as close as we come to a “Methodist” word for God. Just look at our hymnals,
the 2nd Methodist Bible. There is a “trinity of grace” itself.
Hymns 337-360 are all about prevenient grace – grace that goes before us,
making a way for us, often where we see no way, and doing so even before we know
grace is there! Hymns 361-381 have to do with justifying grace – grace
that goes more behind than before us, taking care of the messes we make,
forgiving the sins of our lives, bearing us up when we fall.
Then come hymns 382-536 – by far the longest
section in all the Hymnal! These hymns go by the heading sanctifying and
perfecting grace. We struggle gamely in John Wesley’s words to “go on to
perfection!” God never is done with us yet! We are works in progress, works of
hope. Yet even as we struggle and strive, all that we need lies at hand! We
are sustained in all ways by the goodness of God and of earth. The time is
always right for us to do the right and life-giving thing.
Isaiah learns in confronting God’s call this
morning, no one looks upon absolute “holiness” and lives! In the face and the
light of such “holiness” of God, our lives may feel less like a “holiness” and
more like a “holy mess!” Can we identify with Isaiah’s response? Are we people
of unclean lips – whatever that means? Does nothing come into us or go out from
us just as we want it to do? Are we as Paul says here always falling back into
fear? As Paul says elsewhere, always doing what we do not intend to do? And
not doing what we intend to do? Are we impure and unjust? Unhealed and
unwhole? Surrounded by others of unclean lips – everyone else in just as much
fear and need as we are? Get a witness?
Look around. There are no superhuman heroes
here – are there? No solo singular Christ-figures here – no messiahs trying to
make all things “right” -- with our lives, with the church, with the world?
There are only you, and I, and such messy and messed-up persons as us all – is
that right? Lucky at best that God might adopt us? Might take us in with no
place else to go? And if our “holiness” cannot also be “holy mess,” then even
the grandest of visions of sanctuaries and thrones – like Isaiah’s – will not
reach us, or touch us, or move us, or change us – at all! For the question is
never, how big is our church, or our congregation?
The question is rather, always and only, how
big is our God?! How infinitely renewable are the creation, the covenant, the
call, the communion of our lives? How compassionate, how embracing, how
gracious, how engaging, how trustworthy, how enduring is the Source of all
freedom and power to love and be loved -- in our lives, in our life together?
How much hope is there for us all, really – even in spite of so much of the
evidence to the contrary? For it has been said that faith is hoping in spite of
the evidence – and watching the evidence change!
On Trinity Sunday we celebrate that even our
God, even the Source of our very being, does not stand alone! As mighty,
majestic, mysterious, miraculous as God is, God chooses to be in communion, in
community – To the Trinity, and beyond! In the infinite names and faces of
God! Always 99 names and counting, say the Muslims. No name at all can contain
God or control God, say the Jews. Our own hymn 111 asks, “How can we name a Love
that wakens heart and mind?” For all our growth in faith and in trust of God,
we never quite “graduate” from God. We know the absolute “otherness” of the one
we call by God’s name.
And God seems to know as well how impossible
for “God” to be given vision and voice in any one way alone. In the tradition
we call God in communion, in community, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Hymn
111 goes on to say, “We can, with parents’ names, describe, and thus adore, Love
unconfined, a Father kind, a mother strong and sure.” Parent, Child, and Holy
Freedom and Power – to love and be loved. Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier and
Sustainer of all life and living.
Prevenient, Justifying, Sanctifying and
Perfecting Grace. Like parts of the body (as we said last week), God as the
Head – passing through Jesus as the Heart – taking on the Hands of the Holy
Spirit at work in each and in all of our lives.
Today we join in the whole Holy Mess! In
tensions of truest community! Where all that could possibly bring us together,
all that could possible piece us and keep us together, is the pure Grace of God
– one in three, three in one – and counting! Asking us even now, Whom shall
I send and who will go for us? And still we dare respond, Here I am,
Lord! Send me! Will you help me say it now – for all the graduates, and
for ourselves – Here I am, Lord! Send me! All together now, as a
congregation – HERE WE ARE, LORD! SEND US! And the people said, Amen!
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