Pentecost 1 (Trinity Sunday) - Year B (2018)

Isaiah 6: 1–8; Psalm 29; Romans 8: 12–17; John 3: 1–17

This is the homily given at St. John’s Church; Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, May 27, 2018.

“OF THE HOLY TRINITY”

“God in three persons, blessed Trinity.”[1]

This, of course, is a line from the famous hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy”, which will be sung in churches all around the world today.[2]

Standing on this side of heaven, it is difficult for us to grasp the mystery of who God is, a God who is One God, in three Persons.[3] “How can that be?”, we ask ourselves.

Offering a homily or sermon on this day, Trinity Sunday, in the Church’s calendar can be a very daunting task. (In fact, let me say here that the thoughts which follow don’t presume to be an exhaustive consideration of everything there is to know about the Trinity. The best we can do here is to offer an introduction to what can be a very demanding subject.) Though it is a challenging assignment, yet it would be good for us to embark on a brief voyage of discovery to see what we can learn about God’s nature. We will all be the better for it, I think.

We should begin with the understanding that there is but one God. That is our inheritance from Judaism, whose declaration from ancient times is this: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4) That understanding, of course, is the one which informed all the original disciples who were destined to become apostles.

But then, God mixes things up a bit. He does so by sending Jesus, the Christ, to take up our humanity.

As those who lived and moved with Jesus reflected on everything He did (that string of deeds culminates in His rising to new life again on Easter Sunday morning), they came to understand that Jesus, the Christ, was God Himself, God with us, or – in Hebrew – Emmanuel.

(It is important that we remind ourselves that the reflection of the early Church on the mighty things that God had done took many years to come into a full and firm understanding of God’s nature. What we have come to affirm as being true about God’s nature as God in three persons took centuries of reflection and debate to become the basis for our Christian faith.)

So, to borrow some language from biblical scholars, what we are talking about is the Christ Event, a term which describes everything that Jesus Christ did, from His teachings, to the miracles, to the victory over death on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, everything.

If we understand that everything we know about God is due to God’s revealing His nature to us Himself, then, in Christ, God’s revelation is complete. The Scriptures affirm this truth when we read the statement, that Christ is “the image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15) Jesus Himself confirms the relationship with His Father, saying, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” (John 14:9b)

So the Christ Event is the starting point for a wider understanding of who God is. The Christ Event, as we’ve just mentioned, looks backward into the nature of God as Father. But the Christ Event also looks forward into the coming of the Holy Spirit.

It is to the subject of the third person of the Holy Trinity that we now turn.

The things that Jesus Christ said about the sending of the Holy Spirit sparked the same sort of reflection among the early disciples-become-apostles as had gone on with the reflection on the nature of the relationship between Jesus Christ as Son and God as Father..

Early on, in Judaism, the understanding about God’s Spirit was quite different than the understanding that developed among Christians: In Judaism, there was an understanding that God’s nature involved a Spirit, but that Spirit was seen as something that simply emanated from God. With the sending of the Holy Spirit on the Feast of Pentecost (an event we celebrated last Sunday), God chose to reveal Himself in a more specific way. Jesus had predicted this revelation prior to His death and resurrection.

Once again, with regard to the subject of the Holy Spirit’s identity, power and relationship to the Father and to the Son, we are dealing with God’s revelation of Himself. Jesus Christ is the starting point for the reflection of those early Christians on the nature of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.

Now, we would do well to make some specific comments about the nature of the Holy Trinity:

Capturing a sense of the whole:  The human mind, though we are created in the image and likeness of God (see Genesis 1:26–27), has trouble grasping the idea of a God who can be One God in three Persons. We human beings can wrap our minds around part of this concept, though not all of it. And so, we often lapse into a focus on one Person of the Trinity, often to the point of ignoring the other two Persons. It’s important for us to remember that, whenever we are focusing on one Person of the Trinity, the other two are always present, as well.

Modalism: The next thing we ought to talk about is something called Modalism. It is the idea that God exists in three ways of presentation, or modes. An example might help to explain how this works: Speaking personally, I am a father to my children, I am a grandfather to my grandchildren, and I am a priest (sometimes called Father by my parishioners) to my parish church. Who I am to each of these three different constituencies depends on what the relationship between us is. We can characterize that relationship by saying that I am operating in different modes when I am dealing with my children, my grandchildren or my parishioners. So, too, with regard to God, we often think of God as being presented to us in different ways, or modes. Using this way of understanding the nature of God can be of some assistance, it seems to me. But ultimately, its use is quite limited.

Is there a precedence of Persons in the Trinity?:  Part of the mystery of God’s nature is that all three Persons of the Holy Trinity are so unified in their relationship to one another that it is virtually impossible for us – this side of heaven – to distinguish where one Person’s identity leaves off and the next one begins.[4] There seems to be an equality among the three Persons of the Trinity. So we could correctly refer to the Trinity in the most common way, saying, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But we could also say put the Son first, saying Son, Father and Holy Spirit, or Holy Spirit, Father and Son. You get the idea. Now, having said so, there does seem to be some precedence given to the Father. Jesus Christ offers this precedence by saying that He had been sent by the Father. This and similar statements appear often in John’s Gospel account. Welcome to the mystery of God as One God in three Persons!

Understanding God for His deeds, or for His nature?:  It is becoming more and more common today to refer to God as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. These terms are used in place of the traditional terms of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But here a problem arises:  Using the terms Creator, Redeemer and Sustained describes things that God does, but they do not describe God by the biblical names with which He is identified. Personally, whether the use of Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer are attempts to avoid patriarchal language, or are used for some other reasons, avoidance of the traditional terms neglects the witness of Holy Scripture and the language our Lord Jesus Christ used with reference to God as His Father.

Welcome, then, to the mystery of God’s nature, that God whom we worship who is One God, in three Persons, the blessed Trinity.

AMEN.

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[1]    The term “Trinity” does not appear in the New Testament. The term itself is the combination of two words:  “Tri” = three and “Unity” = one. The New Testament does have references to the three Persons of the Trinity…they are Matthew 28:19 and II Corinthians 13:14.

[2]   The text of this hymn was written by Reginald Hebe (1783 – 1826)r, who was an Anglican bishop who served in India.

[3]   The terminology that is used when we consider the mystery of the Holy Trinity owes a debt to the third century theologian, Tertullian, who is credited with the origination of the use of the term “Persons”.

[4]   The technical term for this interpenetration of one Person of the Trinity with the others is perichoresis (coming from the Greek).

The Feast of Pentecost, Year B (2018)

Acts 2: 1–21; Psalm 104: 25–35, 37; Romans 8: 22–27; John 15: 26-27; 16: 4b-15

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, May 20, 2018.

“WHEN THE FIRE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT ACTS ON THE WATER OF BAPTISM”

(Homily text: Acts 2: 1-21)

Fire and water interact with one another in specific ways.

For example, water can be used to douse a fire. But fire can be used to heat water, turning it into steam. Steam has the power to do enormous amounts of work. For example, ships can be driven by the power of steam (even if the fire consists of a nuclear reactor which supplies the heat). Railroad locomotives were powered by it, and even today, stationary boilers are used to heat buildings.

Fire and water are two of the oldest things known to human beings. We’ve long known that water can put out a fire. We’ve known that fire can create steam for a smaller portion of human history, although the historical record seems to indicate that the ancient Greeks did some experimenting with that idea.

Let’s take the interaction of the heat of a fire, acting on water to produce steam, and apply it to our Christian life. It is particularly appropriate, I think, to do this on the feast of Pentecost, for, today, we read in Acts, chapter two, about the coming of the Holy Spirit, whose arrival was marked with something like tongues of fire which appeared above the heads of each of the disciples who were gathered together to celebrate that occasion.

The Spirit’s arrival did something: It gave each one gathered that day the ability to speak in a different foreign language. (A side note is worth mentioning here:  There are two kinds of divine speech mentioned in the Bible:  One is the ability to speak a foreign language unknown to the speaker previously, and the other is speech which offers praise to God, often a sort of speech which is unknown to humankind generally, and which requires someone to interpret what is being said.[1] The technical term for such speech is glossolalia. It is the first form of this gift that we are talking about when we read the second chapter of Acts.)

As we make our way through the Book of Acts, we read again and again that one of the manifestations of the presence of the Holy Spirit is the gift of tongues, or glossolalia. Luke, the author of the Book of Acts, includes several accounts of this phenomenon in his record of the early Church’s history.[2]

The Spirit’s power is evident in other ways in the accounts we read in Acts. For example, St. Peter is transformed by the indwelling of the Spirit to be an eloquent and powerful spokesman for the Lord and for the Church. Peter’s speeches in Acts make for enlightening reading, and they remind us that the Spirit has the power to transform someone like Peter, who – before the Lord’s resurrection – was a fearful bumbler who often opened his mouth to say something before his brain was engaged to guide what he said. But with the coming of the Spirit, Peter speaks fearlessly, even in circumstances where his bold speech would put him in danger of meeting the same fate that the Lord did. (See Acts 4: 1–22 for an example of Peter’s boldness.)

The Holy Spirit’s fire energizes the water of Baptism, through which we have passed from our former life into our new life in Christ. The Spirit’s fire gets the molecules of our faith moving, expanding their activity and driving us to proclaim the Good News of God in Christ to those around us. The Spirit’s activity is the beginning point, the origin, of all that we are called to do for God in the world. Without the Spirit’s fire, all that we do will be without the essential energizing force that makes living the Christian life possible in the first place.

At this point, three comments about the relationship of the Holy Spirit’s fire and its interaction with the water of Baptism seem appropriate:

The first comment has to do with the way in which the two relate to one another.  In a tea kettle, it is the bottom of the kettle that separates the water from the heat source. In a railroad steam locomotive, it is the steel of the firebox which does the same thing. Now, that separation does something else: It allow the heat of the fire to heat the water, causing it to turn into steam. The metal separating the two becomes the means of transmission of the heat from one to the other. In our faith walk, the means of transmission of the Holy Spirit’s fire comes in the form of hearing and reading the Bible, in the form of hearing a homily or sermon, in the liturgy of the Church, in the mysteries of the Holy Eucharist, and in other ways.

Now, two notes of caution are in order:

The first caution is the temptation to just get a little close to the Spirit:  In the interaction of the Spirit with all the baptized, it won’t do to get close enough to the Spirit’s heat to just get thawed out a little. No, what we need to do is to allow ourselves to be fully energized by a close and ongoing proximity to that fire. Only then will the Spirit’s power to enliven, to enlighten and to drive us to be witnesses (along with that first group of apostles) to the Lord’s resurrection and power over death.

The second caution has to do with trying to live the Christian life without the Spirit’s power and presence:  We would do well to heed the experiences of the early Church in Corinth, who seemed to being along their way without the guidance of the Holy Spirit. No wonder they got into factional fighting among themselves, no wonder they misused the gift of tongues as a way to try to prove their spiritual superiority.

The evil one loves things like this to happen to the Church, for factionalism and self-promotion undercut the Church’s witness that it is a community which has been transformed from the default behaviors of unredeemed humanity into a new, better and living way of being. All such transformations begin with the coming and the indwelling of the Spirit.

So we sing with Christians down through the ages

                “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, 

and lighten with celestial fire.”

Thanks be to God.   AMEN.

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[1]   The early Church in Corinth had problems with the misuse of the gift of tongues. Apparently, some in Corinth were using their ability to display this gift as a way of showing others that they were spiritually superior to those who did not possess the gift. St. Paul deals directly with this problem, telling the Corinthian Christians that they are not to misuse this gift. He also puts limits on its display during worship, telling the Corinthian Church that if someone is prompted to speak in tongues, then there must be someone to interpret what is being said. See I Corinthians 14: 1–26. The misuse of the gift of tongues remains a problem for Christians, even today.

[2]   Luke’s focus on the presence and the working of the Spirit has prompted some biblical scholars to apply an informal title to the Book of Acts, calling it the “Gospel of the Holy Spirit.”

Easter 7, Year B (2018)

Acts 1: 15–17, 21–26; Psalm 1; I John 5: 9–13; John 17: 6–19

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, May 13, 2018.

“TO KNOW GOD AND TO MAKE GOD KNOWN”

(Homily texts:  Acts 1: 15–17, 21–26 & John 17: 6-19)

To know God and to make God known…..

This statement would encompass everything we are doing here during service this morning, and it would also encompass everything that we set ourselves to doing in the everyday world in which we move, day in and day out.

To know God…..Two of our Scripture texts for this morning make clear just how important it is to come to know God, and to know God personally as God is revealed in the person, work, teachings, life, death and resurrection of God’s only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ.

Our reading from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles relates to us the choosing of a replacement for Judas Iscariot after Judas had committed suicide in the wake of his having betrayed the Lord, Luke, the writer of the Gospel text which bears his name as well as the Book of Acts, relates to us the process for the choosing of Judas’ replacement. But the text also tells us about the qualifications for the two persons who were nominated: The main qualification was that Justus (who was also known as Barsabbas or Joseph) and Matthias were both disciples of the Lord throughout the Lord’s earthly ministry. St. Peter states this qualification by saying, “….one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day he was taken up from us….”

So the important point here is that these two men had had the virtually the same training and exposure as the inner circle of the twelve Disciples (who would soon become Apostles) had had.

By this process, both Justus and Matthias had come to know God through their witnessing of all the things that Jesus did and taught.

By the same measure, the original twelve Disciples had come to know God through their interaction and discipleship of the Lord. In our Gospel text for this morning, we hear the Lord’s prayer (often known as Jesus’ “High Priestly Prayer”) that they will remember, as they go out into the world, that He has made known to them everything that the Father has given Him. Furthermore, the Lord prays that these twelve (minus Judas eventually, but then with Matthias) will be convicted of the truth that He, Jesus, has come from the Father, and that the choosing of these original twelve is the act of the Father in giving them to the Son.

To know God, and to make God known…..

The process of coming to know God ourselves is designed in such a way that we are called to make God known to the world.

Again, we turn to our texts which are appointed for this morning.

Peter states that the reason for the choosing of a replacement for Judas is so that the one chosen will be “a witness with us to his (the Lord’s) resurrection.” This “witness” of which Peter talks will involve, eventually, martyrdom for each of the Apostles (except one, tradition tells us). The word “martyr” comes to us from the Greek, where it means “witness.” The members of this original band of the Lord’s followers were committed to spreading the Good News so fervently that it eventually cost them their lives.

The Lord’s charge to His disciples carries with it the mandate to go out and make God known to the wider world. In His prayer, Jesus prays, “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world….”

The charge given to that original group of followers now comes to us.

One of the main things we are doing here in church this morning is to come to know God more and more deeply and more and more fully. After all, how can we share the Good News of God in Christ if we, ourselves, don’t know that Good News in all its fullness and in all its truth?

So we hear Holy Scripture read. We reflect on the readings that are put before us in this service in the homily (hopefully, that homily is worth listening to at least a little bit!). We affirm our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed. We receive the Lord in the Sacrament of Holy Eucharist, under the elements of bread and wine. We commune with (become one with) the Lord in this holy feast.

Then, we are sent out into the world to change the world into God’s image, making God known so that the kingdom of God might be advanced. Little bit by little bit, each one of us, doing our part to transform the world into the reality that God will bring about totally and completely someday, advances God’s cause and God’s will.

So our charge is to “know God and to make God known.” May the Holy Spirit enable us in this sacred work.

AMEN.

Easter 6, Year B (2018)

This is the homily that was given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, May 6, 2018.

“AN ENTIRELY NEW PARADIGM”

(Homily texts:  Acts 10: 44–48, I John 5: 1–6 & John 15: 9–17)

Jesus Christ’s bursting onto the world scene is the singular event which creates for all humanity an entirely new way of understanding our relationship with God. With Christ, a new paradigm is brought into being.

Our three appointed readings for this morning bear out this idea. Let’s do some exploring together.

A relationship with God which is offered to all people everywhere:  Our first reading this morning is a portion of the incident in which Peter is directed by the Holy Spirit to go to a city called Joppa to meet with a Roman army centurion named Cornelius. The earlier portion of the tenth chapter of the Book of Acts makes clear that Peter harbors some reservations about going to meet with a Gentile. But the Spirit enables him to overcome those concerns, and so he goes to the meeting. Peter, along with the other Jewish believers, are astonished to see evidence that God has poured out His Holy Spirit even on the Gentiles. But Peter and the others shouldn’t have been surprised at this development, for the Lord Himself had told them at the time of His ascension that Peter and the others would be His “witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. (Acts 1: 8) What the Lord had indicated by way of direction and prediction now comes into being with the encounter with Cornelius.

The question then arises: How is this understanding a new way of seeing people’s relationship with God? Perhaps the answer is that, in Christ, all people everywhere are offered the avenue by which they may establish a relationship with God. In the world of Judaism, that relationship existed by way of being a blood descendant of Abraham. Those within Judaism were willing to accept non-Jewish persons into an understanding of God, but the evidence might suggest that the relationship of these Gentiles to God was of a lesser and more remote variety. Such persons who had come to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were known as “God-fearers”

A God of love who loves us and who desires that we love in return:  Both the Gospel text for this morning and the reading from the First Letter of John emphasize the word “love”. We could summarize the writer’s intent by saying that he wants us to know that God’s essential nature is one of love, and that that divine love is the sort of love that invites us into the very innermost reaches of God’s love. The Lord says, in our Gospel text for this morning, that we have been invited into the relationship that the Father has with the Son (and vice versa), for now, we who have come to faith, have had revealed to us the nature of God’s inner life. We are no longer servants of slaves who do not know what the master is doing, but now, the Lord, says, we are called “friends”.

The idea that those who come to faith in God through the revelation of Jesus Christ could be intimately folded into God’s life and love was foreign to the understandings of Judaism and also of the Gentile, pagan world. Consider first the understanding of Judaism: For the Judaism of 2,000 years ago, God was remote, removed from the everyday world that we human navigate. God’s name was so holy that it could not be spoken. God was related to, in the Judaism of that time and place, by the keeping of God’s commandments, which carried with them the threat of punishment if those commandments were violated.

For the pagan world, the gods were also remote from everyday life. Moreover, those pagan gods required appeasement in order that their evil intents toward humanity could be nullified. There is no element of love involved in relating to such deities.

Keeping the commandments: “Keep the commandments, or else,” That might be a good way to summarize both the Jewish and pagan understandings of God’s will for humankind. For the ancient children of Abraham, the endurance of the covenant that God had made in the giving of the Law of Moses, the Torah, was dependent on the faithfulness of God’s people in being able to hold up their end of the bargain. A basic way of understanding such a covenant is with the phrase which says, “If you (God’s people) will do so-and-so, then I (God) will do such-and-such”. The nature of such a covenant is one which is conditional. (There are other, non-conditional covenants in the Old Testament: God’s covenant with Noah which states that God will never again destroy the earth by a flood is an example. See Genesis 9: 8–17.)

We have alluded to a similar understanding among the pagan peoples of the ancient world, for they sought to stay in the pagan gods’ favor by doing things that would please those deities.

God’s revelation of Himself, made perfect in the Christ-event, establishes a new motivation for keeping the commandments: The motivation is now one of love for God, not the fear of punishment. We want to do all that we can to please God out of our love for Him. By so doing, the depth and the intensity of God’s love for us and our love for God is enhanced.

In the fullness of time, God sent His only begotten Son to take up our humanity, and by such immersion in our human condition, God has established with us a new relationship and a new way of relationship with God, one which is offered to all people everywhere, one which is based on love, not on the fear of punishment and estrangement, and one which motivates us to keep God’s way as our response of love.

AMEN.