Holy Trinity - "I Am"

Pastor Robarge’s Sermon

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Richard Dawkins, a prominent atheist in our world, comments about faith and this is what he says, “Faith is the great copout, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of or even perhaps because of the lack of evidence.”

So is he right? Does he have it all right when he talks about faith? Is faith just the switch that we turn off our own intellect? Is faith the idea that there is no evidence to support what we believe? Is it just like Karl Marx once said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” Are we merely here because it just makes us feel good?

When we start to think about these issues of faith, we start to understand that there is something that has to be deeper. We look at the subject of the Trinity this week. Maybe you’ve wrestled with it in the past. Maybe you’ve said, “I need to understand a little bit more.” And maybe you’ve gone to somebody and said, “Well, how do you wrestle with this?” and they just said, “I don’t.” And, “You just need to have faith.” Have you ever been told that?

And yet, I was thinking this whole idea that Richard Dawkins was talking about that it’s a switch that gets turned off, that there’s an avoidance of evidence, that it was just going to be found in these people outside the Christian community. But I started to look around more and more, right here in the Christian community, we find that people look at verses such as this, Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, for the convictions of things not seen.” You see, we’re supposed to blindly accept everything. That’s faith.

And I kept thinking that the Christian community is feeding into what Richard Dawkins is talking about. We’re avoiding evidence. We’re avoiding truth. You see, when we get into this subject, we say that faith is filled with evidence and yet, faith is also filled with mystery.

Let me give you an idea of what we’re going to be talking about as we look at Paul’s letter and he talks about one very important issue. He said, “If Jesus has not been resurrected, our faith is in vain. There’s no need for us to be here.” And so today, we have evidence that Jesus was a real person, that He really lived, that He really died and that He really rose again. There’s evidence and yet, to us, we’re almost 2,000 years removed from the very time that He rose again and so we start to think, “Well, should I believe it? Is it really true?” You see, what happens when we find this gap of almost 2,000 years and we say that faith fills that?

We have evidence to say that He was real and that He really rose again but when we start to think about it, we start to say, “I don’t know if I can believe it,” we have those doubts that are placed in front of us. That’s when we’d say that faith also has some mystery and wonder to it. But maybe you’ve struggled in the past, but here today what we need to understand is that faith does have evidence. We turn to our passage today that you heard just a little while ago, John 8. Jesus is in this argument with Jews and they’re trying to tell Him that 1) They put Him down twice right in the beginning. They say you’re a Samaritan which to us, we’re thinking who cares? But to a Jew, that’s almost the greatest insult you could have. The Jews and the Samaritans hate each other. And to be called a Samaritan is a great insult. So they drop an insult on Jesus and they call Him as Samaritan, but then next, 2) They also try to discount His words. They say you’re demon-possessed. “Well, everybody knows that you can’t trust a guy who’s demon-possessed. So how can we get people to not trust in Jesus? We’ll just tell them He is demon-possessed.”

Jesus is already not going to let those things go. He says, “First of all, I’m not demon-possessed. And if I do this all for my own glory, then it’s pointless.” But this is how He then gets into the story. “I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me of whom you say He is our God, but you’ve not known Him. I know Him. If I were to say that I did not know Him, I would be a liar like you. But I do know Him and I keep His word. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see me in my day. He saw it and was glad and the Jews said to Him, “You’re not even 50 years old. How have you seen Abraham?” And Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly I say to you before Abraham was, I am.”

At first glance, we start thinking that maybe Jesus is just a bad grammarian. He doesn’t really speak too well. That doesn’t make sense. “Before Abraham was, I am?” We’re looking at this construction and we’re starting to say, “No, He’s piecing it wrong. It should be something like ‘Before Abraham was I was doing. . .’ or whatever it might be. It doesn’t make sense that’s the sentence and it’s complete.

But see, the Jews knew there was a connection and that connection goes back to our Old Testament lesson today as we see in Exodus. You see, Moses was talking with God about how He was going to tell the people of Israel that God had sent Him to free them from the Egyptian slavery and so Moses asked God, “What’s your name? What should I tell them?” And God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And He said, “Say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you.”

We have a connection here. We have a connection that Jesus is speaking about that comes from the Old Testament. “I am who I am.” What happens here with Moses is that God is trying to not let Moses do something. The ancient near Eastern cultures, what they really liked to do was name their god. They liked to put a name on him so they could attach a story to him so they could put him in a box and say, “This is what this god does.”

So they had the god of fertility. We look at Egyptians and we look at ancient Mesopotamians. They had these separate gods. So when we look at the god of fertility, this god did this and in order to please this god, this is what you have to do: this, this and this. And once you do these things over here, this is what you get out of it. God identified Moses trying to entice Him into giving him a name because Moses would then have the authority to try to put a story on Him, to try to put Him in a box. And God said, “I’m not going to allow you to do that, Moses.” Why? Because He says, “I am who I am. I’m the God of creation. I am the God of eternal, the never beginning and never ending. I’m not going to allow you to take something like this who I am and put it and contain it in a box.”

And this is the name “I am” that was spoken about over 3,000 times in the Old Testament. It’s no coincidence that Jesus then speaks about it in the gospel of John to these people here and now to these Jews. They knew what He was doing. It’s no coincidence that right after He spoke those very words, it says that the Jews picked up stones to kill Him. Why? Because He was saying He is God.

Many religions today look at this person of Jesus Christ and they say He’s not God. They say, “Jesus never claimed to be God.” And I’d say, “Really? Look at what’s He’s doing in the text today. He’s not just passing this up. He’s not just saying, ‘I’m going to create something over here and I’m going to create who I am.’ No, He’s giving His identity away. He’s saying, ‘I am God.’”

And it’s not an isolated incident. We see in the gospel of John many places over time, He says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” “I am the bread of life. I am the vine.” It’s no coincidence what Jesus is doing here. He’s identifying Himself. Why? Because faith today has evidence. We have evidence for the very sake of the Trinity, the pieces, the persons. We have the Father in the Old Testament, the creator. He speaks a word in creation and Jesus, the creator, makes it happen. The Holy Spirit working in the midst of that Trinity, doing the work of creation, sustaining.

And we turn to look at the Holy Spirit now because we’ve seen that the Father, in creation, we see Him in the Old Testament when He’s talking to Moses and identifying Himself. We see Jesus and He says, “I am God.” There’s no claim outside of that. But often what we do is we somewhat ignore the Holy Spirit. We’d say, “Well, maybe He’s just some kind of impersonal force of God.” But that’s not how they identify Him in scripture.

Here’s one place in Acts and we heard this story a couple of weeks ago. We’re not going to identify it again but Peter is talking with Ananias and Sapphira and they have sold some property and they were going to give some money back to the church but they withheld some of it and that we can look at later. But he tells Ananias this, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?” You see, he doesn’t identify anything. He says, “Why did you lie to the Holy Spirit?” But see, he then connects it with something later on. This is what he says, “Why is it you’ve contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.” He attaches the Holy Spirit to God. He easily could have just said “the Father.” He easily could have said just “The Son, Jesus Christ,” but he doesn’t. He says, “You lied to the Holy Spirit and you lied to God.”

So we have evidence today that faith has evidence. We see Jesus is God, the Holy Spirit is God, the Father is God. But now sometimes what we do is we try to make a move and we try to figure out exactly how God is working in the Trinity. We say, “What is the relationship between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit? Does the Father proceed or does the Son proceed? How does it work?” And these are the questions we start to figure out. We do have some evidence, though. We start to say, “Jesus identifies the relationship with His Father.” What does He say? He says, “I do the work of the Father. I only do the things that He’s asked. We work in unison. We work together.” There’s a relationship. And He says, “We are one.”

But sometimes that doesn’t make sense. How can three persons be one God? It doesn’t make a lot of sense. What we’ve tried to do is come up with all kinds of analogies. Maybe you’ve heard a couple of these. We have the apple. We have the skin of the apple, the flesh of the apple and the core of the apple. It’s all one apple but three parts. Okay. Maybe you’ve heard this one. It’s the triangle. The Trinity is represented in the triangle. You have three pieces of a triangle, each one representing a piece of the Trinity but yet one triangle. Maybe you heard the one where there’s water and there’s ice and there’s steam. You see, it’s all forms of water but yet in different ways. I’ve also heard some pretty imaginative ones. There was one that God the Trinity was compared to a Twinkie. No joke. And another I heard was the Trinity was referred to as a peanut M&M. You have the shell and the chocolate and the peanut but it’s all one M&M. I started to think about it, “I guess they’re kind of creative.” But then I started thinking, “Do we really want God eternal, the creator of the heavens and the earth to be compared to a delicious treat?” Cream filled? Something that melts in your mouth and not in your hands? Do we really want to make that connection?

And we start to see that any of these analogies start to break down when we start to look at them. We look at the triangle. If we see the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit in this triangle, how do they still relate? Does the Father still relate to the Holy Spirit or is there some kind of connection that’s in reverse? All these things are going to start breaking down. Do we see God as fresh produce, as an apple?

Any of these analogies aren’t going to work. We’ve tried to figure it out. We’ve tried to see a relationship. But we have evidence. We have evidence that God is in three-person, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But then when we try to take the next step to figure out the relationship, we see that we can’t. God hasn’t revealed that. And that’s why we say today that faith is also filled with a certain amount of mystery and wonder and awe.

We have gone through some forms of thinking in the past and during Martin Luther’s era and the reformation era, what they found was they were using this Latin text of the bible and they’d say, “Well, we go back to the Latin text.” Well, Luther started to think about, “Why don’t we go back to an original source? Did we miss something? Is there a link that we missed?” And so they would go back to the original Greek. They’d go back to the original Hebrew and they’d start to say, “There’s some nuances here that we didn’t quite bring out.” They said there was something we missed. Go back to the original source. Well, how this played into the modern era was they started to look at these questions over time. They said, “Look at creation. How did it happen? Let’s put some people on it because we have great minds and we’re going to come to the conclusion and maybe, maybe, just maybe we might be able to even create life.” We made huge medical and technological advances but what came out of the modern era was this whole idea that anything could be solved but yet, the more they looked at it, the more they continued to search and tried to create, the more questions that came up.

I see how that’s played into what we believe and might think today, as we start to see that there can be wonder. There can be mystery found in who God is. God when He was telling Moses, “I am who I am,” He tells us the same thing today. He’s like, “I’m not going to allow you to look into me any more than what I’ve allowed. I’ve revealed a certain amount to you. You’ve seen me as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” But He maintains a certain sense of wonder and mystery about Him.

What would God be if He was everything that we knew? What would God be if we were able to say, “I know who He is and this is exactly how He behaves and this is what He does?” What would God be? It would be our own imagination. We would be able to find Him, to look at Him and say, “I know exactly who He is.” But today, God is saying, “I have a sense of wonder, a sense of mystery about me that you don’t even know about yet.”

Our faith is filled with mystery. And yet, sometimes that mystery, we continue to still delve into it. We want to figure out things which leads us with some doubt. But what do we do with our doubt? That’s the question. Do we say to our doubt, “You know what? I’m just going to believe. I’m just going to have faith.” And sometimes that’s just the easiest way but is it just like Dawkins is saying? Are we saying, “I’m just going to have faith so I can avoid the evidence, so I can avoid the arguments?”

If we let doubt remain alive, it can defeat the lot. A life void of doubt is like a human life void of antibodies. There’s nothing in us to defeat what’s happening, the disease that’s happening and that’s trying to take over. We have doubts and what we have to say is, “I need to look at it face to face.” I have to figure out the questions to understand that this faith is filled with evidence and with facts but also understand where the mystery is. It’s a tension that we live in.

This is something I saw a number of years ago with Dan Brown and the DaVinci Code. I’m not going to get into the elements of it. It’s an old understanding or illustration but what I saw happening during that time was somebody like Dan Brown bringing up these things about Jesus. And then I talked to people and they said, “I can’t believe that this is who Jesus was.” And I saw their face slowly crumble. And I said, “What happened to your faith? Were you going to allow some guy here to take a part of history to reword it, to redefine it, to make up some things about history and then have that crush your faith?”

We have a faith that’s filled with facts. We have a faith that’s filled with mystery. But if we take that doubt and we allow it to live another day, then we’re going to find that it can crush, kill and destroy. Satan, our enemy, is always out there trying to put doubt in our hearts. Doubt in Jesus, doubt in this very idea of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He wants you to doubt. That’s what Satan does. He’s the father of all lies.

And yet, if we feed into that doubt, if we just say, “Ah, I’m going to ignore it and it’s going to go away,” then that’s precisely when the time it’s going to come back and beat us down.

So what I challenge you today is when we start to think about this issue of faith, when we start to see that faith is something that’s filled with facts but we also see that faith is filled with mystery, you attack your doubt. You see what other people are bringing up and you don’t just say, “I’m going to ignore it,” but you face it. With God and with faith being a mystery, it makes the impossible possible. Things that people say, “No, it’s completely beyond the realm of imagination,” that’s where God is. If God were only the things that we could conceive, then we would have a shallow God. But God is in the realm of the impossible. He’s in the realm of doing the things that are impossible.

We see it happening right here in our own church. The impossible things becoming possible. We hear stories every day about people who were saying, “You know what, the doctors can’t explain why my cancer is gone.” “The doctors can’t explain why I’m feeling so good.” It’s beyond the realm of imagination. It’s in the realm of mystery for our human thinking. But see, our faith is filled with mystery.

And I pray that you look at the mystery of what we worship in our God and you start to celebrate the mystery but also embrace the evidence. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Copyright 2010 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church