Happy Mother's Day!
Worship
Service for May 14, 2023
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Lord be gracious to us and make Your face
shine upon us.
P: Let us praise the name of the Lord; let
every voice be lifted up.
L: God is good and has given us every good gift.
P: May God continue to bless us and may every
heart give honor to the name of the Lord.
Opening
Hymn – Holy, Holy, Holy Hymn #138/3
Prayer of Confession
Forgive us, O Lord our God,
for all the ways we accept less than Your best for us. We choose those things that do not lead to
life and we wander away from Your light because we do not attend to Your Holy
Word. Give us grace today to fully
embrace Your word and choose that which leads to fullness of life. Renew us by the power of Your Holy Spirit and
give us hearts to love You above all things.
(Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Friends, the scriptures promise that if we
turn to the Lord in humility and true repentance, our sins will be removed from
us as far as the East is from the West.
Believe the Good News that in Jesus Christ we are forgiven.
P: Thanks be to God! AMEN
Gloria Patri
Affirmation of Faith/Apostles’
Creed
I believe in God the Father
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under
Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the
third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on
the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge
the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins; the
resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. AMEN
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s
Prayer
God of all creation, we
bless you for calling the world and all its peoples to come and share your
love, blessing, forgiveness, and healing.
We praise you for the gift of your Son, Jesus Christ, for his ministry
and passion, for his dying and rising to free us from sin, and for the gift of
your holy church that lives to tell the whole world this good news.
We
give thanks, O Lord, for women everywhere, who look to you for guidance and
strength, or have fashioned their very lives after that of a compassionate
savior. We especially pray today for
women everywhere, those who have been mothers to their own children as well as
those who have played a motherly role in the lives of boys and girls who are
not their own. We pray for women who
have taught us the meaning of love, and have shared with us the lessons of
wisdom and grace.
We
pray for the gift of peace with liberty and justice for all people
everywhere. On this Mother’s Day, as we
celebrate our own mothers and honor all moms around the world, we also pray for
the children of the world who have been victimized by war, trapped in many
kinds of slavery, orphaned and left motherless and homeless, who need your
loving care. We pray for refugee
families struggling for food and housing, for the sick, the helpless, and the
lonely. Remember them and deliver
them.
We
pray for those who are ill in body, mind, or spirit. Be with all who fight chronic disease or
crippling disability. Ease suffering
from pain, stress, and isolation.
Comfort the despairing. Renew caregivers
so they may continue their healing ministries to those under their care.
We
especially lift up to you in prayer….
In the
following moments of silence hear our inner groanings, listen carefully to our
heartfelt wishes and prayers O Lord and heal us, as well…
All
these things we ask in the name of Jesus Christ, your Son, our Savior, who
taught us to prayer together saying….…Our Father who art in
heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy
kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our
debtors. And lead us not into
temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. AMEN.
Hymn – How Firm a Foundation Hymn #361/408
4
vs.
Scripture Reading(s):
Ezekiel
34:1-16
John
14:15-21
Sermon – Invitation to
the Trinity
(based on John 14:15-21)
Saint
Augustine, who lived between 354 AD - 430 AD, spent a lot of time thinking
about the Trinity and trying to explain it. There is a story about Augustine walking along
the ocean’s shore, greatly perplexed about the doctrine of the Trinity. As he meditated, he observed a little boy with
a seashell, running to the water, filling his shell, and then pouring it into a
hole which he had made in the sand. “What
are you doing, my little man?” asked Augustine. “Oh,” replied the boy, “I am trying to put the
ocean in this hole.” Then it suddenly
struck him that, when it came to God, he was guilty of exactly the same thing. “That is what I am trying to do with God,” he
later confessed. “I see it now. Standing on the shores of time, I am trying to
get into this little finite mind things which are infinite.”
So,
bear with me this morning as I attempt to fill our own finite minds with a glimpse
of the infinite when we talk about the Trinity today and even try to explain
what Jesus was referring to in this passage from John.
The
Westminster Confession is the summary of the theology adopted by our
denomination. It was formulated all the
way back in 1646 and it describes the Trinity this way:
In the
unity of the Godhead there are three persons, having one substance, power, and
eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost: The Father
exists. He is not generated and does not
come from any source. The Son is
eternally generated (or begotten) from the Father, and the Holy Spirit
eternally comes from the Father and the Son.
Now, that’s perfectly clear, right?
If we
unpack this a little bit, we would describe the Trinity as follows:
·
There is one and only One God – one substance –
one power
·
God eternally exists in three distinct persons.
Although scripture talks of the Son
being begotten and that the Holy Spirit comes from the Father, notice how Westminster
states that each exist eternally. So, in
those terms, there was never a time when the Son or the Spirit didn’t exist. Having said that, it’s difficult to conceive
in our minds how then something is generated/begotten or proceeds from
something if there wasn’t a beginning time for that to happen. It’s a mystery.
·
But, the Father is God/the Son is God/the Holy
Spirit is God but, (and here is one of the confusing parts)
·
The Father is not the Son or the Holy Spirit,
the Son is not the Spirit or the Father, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father
nor the Son.
And
somehow over time, through the reading of the scriptures, we get to this idea
that there is the Trinity in God, but that God is not Three Gods. It’s not easy to understand.
The first
challenge to God being singular or a Unitarian God came from the ultimate claim
of Jesus as divine. If Jesus was divine,
then Jesus was also God. The New Testament
provides many texts to prove that Jesus was divine and was, in fact, God. He revealed this about himself more and more
as the reality of the cross came closer, but Jesus’ early hidden
divinity was part of the Master plan of unveiling a very complicated and mysterious
part of God’s Trinitarian nature.
As I
read some of the early church writers, I learned that they fully accepted the
divinity of Jesus. The problem was that
the divinity of Jesus challenged them to come up with a way to articulate the true
nature of God. What they couldn’t articulate
was how the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit all fit together. They knew that there was just one God. And they knew that the Father was God and they
knew that Jesus admitted progressively that he was God. And then there was the issue of the Holy Spirit,
who was also from the beginning, as mentioned all the way back in Genesis, when
the breath of God or the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the
waters. That Holy Spirit was then given
to us as an Advocate to continue the work of Christ after Jesus was no longer
here. But how do they all fit together?
As
early as 110 AD, Ignatius of Antioch wrote using Trinitarian language. Then late in the 2nd Century the word Trinity first
appears in the works of Theopholus of Antioch. By early in the 3rd Century, Tertullian,
defended the doctrine of the Trinity which meant that it was already part of
the doctrine of the church. Therefore,
the concept of the Trinity did not burst on the scene in the late 4th century
with the council of Nicaea, when they voted to adopt the belief in the Trinity,
but rather it was a natural progression coming from this revolutionary idea
that God became human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.
Certainly,
one of the arguments made against the Trinity is that the word doesn’t ever appear
in and of itself in the Bible. But it
isn’t just the lack of the word, the Trinity is not even described. That’s because the doctrine of the Trinity is
not so much heard in the New Testament as overheard. I think this is part of the Master plan of
God’s to reveal to us this incredible picture of who God is.
Let’s
highlight what we find in the Bible.
Is
there just one God? Well, nowhere in our
holy Scriptures does it talk about three separate Gods. Monotheism is the by-word for the Jews. It is not only strongly affirmed, the opposite
is strongly opposed. Even Jesus and Paul
who affirm the deity of Jesus strongly affirm that God is one. So, no biblical scholar debates the divinity
of the Father. The divinity of Christ is
strongly attested to when we really understand Jesus’ words and actions from
the perspective of a 1st Century Jew as revealed to us in the writings of the
gospels.
The
divinity of the Holy Spirit has less evidence. But again, Jesus, Paul and Peter have very
strong words affirming both the deity of the Holy Spirit as well as the
distinctiveness of this entity of the Trinity.
The evidence is pretty clear in scripture that there are three persons
of the Godhead distinct in function yet all part of one God, even if the word
Trinity doesn’t exist in the text.
God is
one, yet exists in three persons. Our
text last week and today from John, and is in fact woven throughout much of the
gospel of John, which highlights that God is already an intimate loving
community with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus said, “I am in the Father and the Father
is in me.” “The Father will give you
another Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to be with you forever.” “You will know him because he abides with
you, and he will be in you.”
But
then in our text today, Jesus does something that is very strange, because he
invites us to join and be part of that intimate community. In verse 20 it says, “On that day you will
know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” Which harkens back to the very beginning of
creation when in Chapter 1 verse 26 of Genesis, God decides to create us and
says, “Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness…”
Does
it matter that our life was created by a being who pulses with love and
community and honor? Let me offer you
two visions of life. Bertrand Russell
was the great mathematician of the 20th century
You are the product of
causes that have no purpose or meaning. Your
origin, your growth, your hopes, fears, loves, beliefs are the outcome of accidental
collections of atoms. No fire, heroism,
or intensity of thought or feeling can preserve your life from beyond the
grave. All the devotion, all the
inspiration, all the labor of all the ages are destined to extinction in the
vast death of the solar system. The whole temple of human achievement must
inevitably be buried in the debris of a universe in ruins. That’s what we’re all headed for.
Or
consider this from Dallas Willard, American Christian Philosopher, professor at
University of Southern California until his death in 2013:
You are the uniquely
designed creation of a thoroughly good and unspeakably creative God. You are made in His image, with a capacity to
reason, choose, and love that sets you above all other life forms. God’s aim in human history is the creation of
an all-inclusive community of loving persons with Himself included as its
primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant. He is even now at work to bring this about. You have been invited, at great cost to God
Himself, to be part of this radiant community.
So,
you have a choice, trajectory #1 described by Bertrand Russell or or trajectory
#2 described by Dallas Willard.
Willard
tells us that God is inviting us into an already existing community of love
because of the Trinitarian nature of God. The Trinity is essential for the essence of
God to be love.
C.S.
Lewis wrote:
All sorts of people are
fond of repeating the Christian statement that 'God is love.' But they seem not to notice that the words
'God is love' have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for
another person. If God was a single
person, then before the world was made, He was not love.
If love
is part of the very fabric of God’s essence, who or what did God love for all
of eternity before the world was created? A Unitarian God whose essence was love would require
an object for that love – because that is the nature of love. A lover needs a beloved.
There
was a divine love / a divine dance that was going on for all of eternity long
before the creation of the world. Jesus
says this in his prayer at the Garden of Gethsemane. “You loved me before the foundation of the
world.“ The life of the Trinity is a
great dance of unchained communion and intimacy, fired by passionate,
self-giving and other-centered love, and mutual delight.
The
whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out
in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to
enter that pattern, take your place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for
which we were made.
We
have an earthly example of this in our own parents, as we celebrate Mother’s Day
today. They are part of us. We are part of them. They are in us and we are in them. The same is true of any of our loved ones. We were created to be in community with one
another, as the Trinity was in community with itself from eternity. We are part of them and they are part of
us.
If you
want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must
get into the water. If you want joy,
power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that
has them. If we want love and we want
community, we are called to get close to the community of love that exists in
the Trinity. For in the Holy Trinity we
are invited to join and become part of the intimate relationship of love.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Giver
of life and all the gifts of our lives, receive now these tokens of our
appreciation which we set before you as signs of our love and
thanksgiving. We rejoice with thankful
hearts for all your blessings. Help us
to live our lives in service to you as our continuing gift of thanks. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ. AMEN.
Closing Hymn – Seek Ye First Hymn
#333/713
Benediction –
Being washed in the love of Christ, now go into this world
with the healing love of God to be given generously in peace and hope. God’s peace will always be with those who live
in God’s love. AMEN
Postlude
No comments:
Post a Comment