One of my side jobs is working as a hospital chaplain. I’ve been doing this about once a month at Meriter Hospital this year, staying overnight to make visits and to be with people in need. I picked up an extra shift late last month, and the moment I came on duty I was working with a family in great need.

Here’s the long and the short of it: this fellow, we’ll call him “Bob,” got sick the evening of Thanksgiving, and was hospitalized that night. When my shift started at 5pm the following Monday, I was informed by the day chaplain that Bob had coded (which meant that his heart had stopped) and the doctors were working to resuscitate him. They were finally successful, but over the course of the night, it became obvious first to the doctors and then to his family that Bob was not going to make it. His heart had been stopped for too long and there was too much brain damage. Even if he survived, he would probably never wake up. By 4 am, the

family was asking for a priest to administer last rites before they turned off Bob’s ventilator.
I stayed with the family for the rest of the morning. I was there with them when Bob’s wife and two sons made the decision to cease life support, when they talked to the doctor about their decision, and when the nurse disconnected the machine. Bob’s extended family had been there the whole night as well, milling around, trying to comfort one another and take in everything that had happened so fast. Now they all gathered around his bed. From the moment the machine was off, everyone waited with him, silently watching the monitor and saying goodbye.

In our cultural mythology, we have many different stories about what happens when a person dies. Some people believe that angels appear to bring people into the hereafter, or that one sees a bright light, often with a voice or a presence that beckons them. Then there’s the image of the grim reaper, that morose personification of death as a tall being shrouded in black and carrying a scythe as it comes to collect souls. Whatever Bob’s family thought he might be experiencing, they wanted to make sure that they were there with Bob when his moment came.

We hate to think of people dying alone. We want to believe that when we die, there is somebody or something—an angel, a voice, even a creepy skeleton in a robe with a giant sickle—that comes to be with us, to accompany us to whatever comes next. Even though Bob was unconscious, even though it was unlikely that he was unaware of anybody’s presence in that room, once the decision had been made to remove the life support, everyone crowded into his room and waited there with him, unwilling to let him die alone.

For that matter, I could hardly bear to let his family be alone. Even though they had one another, they were faced with one of those moments in life when the darkness seems to engulf everything, and they were suddenly adrift in a life raft in the middle of a vast, dark and unknown ocean. So, even though they didn’t pay much attention to me, even though there was nothing I could really say to make anything better, I stuck around, just so they wouldn’t be alone. When nothing else helps, when nothing else matters, it sometimes becomes very important to us to have somebody is there.

By now you are probably asking what all this sad talk has to do with a celebration like Christmas. As Christians, we believe that the God who created the universe took on human form in Jesus Christ. God did this in order to be present with us in a way that God’s infinite nature did not otherwise allow for. In other words, God became human so that we wouldn’t be alone. It’s something that both Christians and non-Christians alike fail to fully appreciate, I think. When we think about God, we often focus on what we get from it, what God does for us, how faith in God makes our lives better. Mere presence just doesn’t seem enough. It doesn’t end our suffering, it doesn’t make us happy, it doesn’t enable us to do anything we can’t do by ourselves. And yet, when it comes down right to it, when we find ourselves completely helpless and powerless, the one thing we truly want more than anything is not to be alone.

The prophet Isaiah writes of a child named Immanuel (Isa 7.14), a name which literally means “God-(is)-with-us.” For Christians, we celebrate the holiday of Christmas as the day when the Creator of the universe put off heaven to put on skin and bone, suffering and heartache; to be Immanuel. In our evangelism, we too often forget this significant fact, or when we don’t, it’s received with ambivalence: “So God became human to ‘be’ with us, so what?”

Somewhere deep inside each of us is the need for companionship. It may not be essential to our survival, but it is essential to our well-being. We can’t bear to think of a loved one dying alone because somewhere inside ourselves that aloneness is what we fear most. With all the good and bad that life throws our way, we need to be loved. Having somebody with you doesn’t make any of that go away, but somehow it does make it more bearable.

God understands this about us, even if we don’t always get it ourselves. It’s a jungle out there, full of pain and sadness, but even our joys and celebrations seem somehow hollow if there’s nobody with whom we can share them. Even with the blessings of friends, family, community and spouse, sometimes our circumstances change. People come into and leave from our lives. Friends move away. Our lives are shaken by hardship, our relationships are torn by conflict. We are separated from loved ones by death. Though we almost always have the comfort of having people around us, there are times in everyone’s life where we feel undeniably and inescapably alone. It is for those times, the times when we are hardest pressed and backed into the tightest corners, the times when we are at our most vulnerable, that God has become Immanuel.

John’s gospel tells us that in Jesus, “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” In Greek, it literally says that he “pitched his tent among us.” John tells us that God has made camp with us, always ready to pull up stakes and follow us so that wherever we go and whatever we do, we will never be far from God’s presence. On this Christmas morning we celebrate the promise of God’s love and strength taking on flesh to be with us, to be one of us. God has come to be with us like a chaplain comes into a hospital room. God’s presence may not mean the end to life’s woes or the answer to its problems, but the good news of Christmas is that God is forever Immanuel: no one has to die alone, and no one has to live alone.

One question I continually come up against as I prepare sermons is “So what?” God is alive. God is with us. God loves us. So what? What difference does this information make in our lives or in the world around us? I know I’m not the only one who wrestles with this question. There is a growing number of people who view religion as irrelevant. To them, the church has nothing to offer the world except simplistic answers to complex questions and a reason to be arrogant and preachy.

Even churchgoers sometimes end up relegating God and God’s effect on us to the realm of the spiritual, of the immortal. We trust that God will collect our souls when we die, but until then, God seldom enters the picture except for “church time.” The time we spend dealing with clients at work, facing the loss of a job, preparing for tests at school, celebrating birthdays, and searching for our car keys seems either too distant or too insignificant for God to matter or take notice. Today, however, God answers our question of “so what?” with the announcement of a child.

Nothing changes one’s life like the arrival of a new baby. Anybody who has ever had children of their own can imagine what thoughts must have been running though Mary’s head as the angel told her what was about to happen. As the angel went on about David and his kingdom, Mary was probably thinking about how this little tiny life would develop inside her and would eventually grow from an infant to a child to a man, and that in spite of the hardships she would face, this pregnancy was a sign of God’s favor and the means by which God would bless the world.

The Son of God could have come to earth in a grand display of majesty and power, tearing open the sky like a moldy curtain and descending in glory surrounded by angels. Instead, God became human, and did it in a remarkably usual way. He could have been born to the emperor of Rome, had the entire known world bowing at his cradle. Instead, the Son of God was born to a nobody girl in a backwater town.

God chose this extraordinarily ordinary to break into our world because  God is not only the subject of religion or church. Our God has entered fully into this world of ours in all its imperfection and monotony precisely to be Immanuel.
You have heard me talk a lot about “Immanuel.” It is a Hebrew word that means “God-[is]-with-us.” God seeks us out and chooses us to be a part of God’s work of redeeming the world, just as he chose Mary. God looks for us and meets us in those mundane moments of our lives—as we walk across the parking lot, as we watch television, as we wait in line at the post office.

This in-breaking presence of God can sometimes pull us away from our own desires and comforts. We are predisposed to live our lives looking out for ourselves and our families and friends. However, God-with-us binds us all together. We no longer see strangers or enemies or even neighbors and friends, but fellow children of God. Immanuel shows us how we are interconnected with each other and the world.

This radical presence, like the child which the angel proclaimed to Mary, is a gift that comes unasked for and undeserved. Unlike her relative Elizabeth, Mary was not praying for a child—that was the last thing she was expecting. Yet, God chose her anyway. No matter how she responded to the angel’s words, she was going to become pregnant with that baby. Likewise, whether we respond to Immanuel with indifference and hostility or with joy and anticipation, the gift is ours. However, our response to this gift is still important.

When the angel finished talking, Mary could have responded with denial or resignation. As she was imagining all the joys of motherhood, she must also have been thinking about how she would be shamed and rejected by her own family and friends for being a “loose woman,” how her fiancé Joseph might easily abandon her at the news of this unwanted child and abandon her with a hungry mouth to feed. What she didn’t think of, but what we know, is how she would one day see that child’s face contorted in pain as he died on a cross.

She could have fought God tooth and nail and demanded to know why God was ruining her life. Instead, in spite of her fear and uncertainty, she answered God with words of trust, hope, and excitement: “Behold your servant! Do as you have said, and let’s see where this goes!” When Immanuel invites us to participate in God’s action in this world we, too, can respond out of cynicism and say, “it will never work! The world is the way it is, and nobody can change it,” or we can hold on tight and see where God leads us.

I have some experience with this myself. As my wife and I prepare to leave for Minnesota, I am preparing once again for unemployment and uncertainty about my future. As badly as I want to serve in a congregation, there is nothing available for me right now. This is not what I had hoped for, and God and I have exchanged words many times about this subject, sometimes very heated words. But, at the end of the day, like Mary, I trust that God is leading me, and even if it is not what I had wanted for myself, I trust that it will be good. Just like when I first came to Watertown, I was in much the same position, waiting with nothing to do, and the Spirit moved and brought me here, to you.

Mary’s willingness to trust the will of God in spite of all her misgivings and the hardship she faced is why she has been honored for thousands of years. When God told her that she would bear a child, instead of rejecting God or focusing only on her own fears, she accepted the Almighty’s invitation to change the world. Immanuel offers us that same invitation. Immanuel shows us the faces of poverty and oppression and violence around the world and in our backyard and invites us to change lives. Whether or not we accept, God claims us and will use us for the work of the kingdom, just as God has already been using us. In my time here I have seen God touch the world through the ministries of this congregation: through the Agape preschool, the food pantry, the clothes closet, our GIFT programs. If we can say with Mary, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your will,” then we will enjoy the ride a whole lot more, we need not fear threats to our wealth, our comfort, our safety or even our lives, because we know that God is good.

This is our final week of Advent. Next weekend, we will be singing “Silent Night” and thinking about a newborn baby laying asleep in a manger. This tiny child is nothing less than the radical, impossible, unstoppable love of God made flesh to walk and live among us. The world may think that we are irrelevant, that the Church is just another cult that imposes moral boundaries and requires blind obedience, but this child says otherwise.

This child says that we have each been called in all our ordinariness, like Mary, to bear the earth-shattering promise of God’s justice and mercy to the world. This child says that each of us has been offered the chance to make this world a better place with the power of Almighty God behind us. This child says that all of us—whether rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight, citizen or illegal alien, no matter where we are from or the color of our skin or what we do for a living—all of us are one, because God is with us.

This child is coming. In preparation for his arrival, the earth is groaning with anticipation. The angel comes now to us with good tidings of great joy, tidings of Immanuel, tidings that will shake our world to its foundations. Immanuel offers us the invitation to change the world. Let us join together with Mary in saying, “Behold, the servants of the Lord. Let it be with us according to your word.”

Advent is a season of waiting. We don’t like to talk or even think about about waiting very much; we like to skip the waiting and get straight to the good part. We don’t talk about going out this weekend to wait in line, we talk about going to a movie or eating at a restaurant. Yet, every year, for four weeks leading up to Christmas, we don’t just observe, but celebrate this season of waiting. Why bother? What are we waiting for?

The textbook answer, of course, is that we celebrate Advent as a reminder that we wait for the second coming of Jesus Christ, a time when he will return to earth to bring completion and fullness to creation. During that time, we read in Scripture, swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks (Isa 2.4), the wolf and the lamb will live together, and the leopard will lie down with the kid (Isa 11.6), God will dwell among the people and wipe away every tear from their eyes (Rev 21.3-4). We’re waiting for a time when all the brokenness of this world will be healed and the violence and injustice and hatred the plagues us as a people will be abolished. In short, we’re waiting for salvation.

Now, ‘salvation’ is kind of a buzz-word. When Christians use it, most often we’re talking about being ‘saved from death’ and ‘inheriting eternal life.’ But salvation means more than that. When the prophets and poets write about salvation, they aren’t using some theological jargon that refers to something that happens when you die. They are writing about the very real, very present help in time of trouble, of rescue from one’s enemies, of deliverance from disaster, of companionship during isolation. ‘Salvation’ is a life raft in the midst of turbulent waters. In our reading from Isaiah, the prophet longs for salvation for a people whose homes and lives have been destroyed.

So, during Advent, we are looking forward to the salvation of the world, we are waiting to be rescued from the mess we’re in. Isaiah has it pegged, doesn’t he? We look at the brokenness and in the world around us and sometimes we feel just like a leaf in the wind, swept away by sin and powerless to do anything to change our course. Like Isaiah, we are waiting for God to tear open the heavens and come down in glory and power to make the mountains tremble. We expect that God will come because this world is not how God intended it to be. We wait for the salvation of the kingdom of God, a time and a place where all wrongs will be righted, all faults corrected, all sins forgiven.

The ‘kingdom of God’ conjures in us a vision of a far of place in a distant future, or perhaps that kingdom in the clouds where we awake when we die. However, this is not the vision Jesus came to bring. Jesus’ ministry in Judea begins with the words, “The kingdom of God has come near! Repent!” (Mk 1.15) We look at our world and we see it’s brokenness and how it is fallen, and because of that we wait for God to come fix it. Jesus, on the other hand, saw not a broken world, but a world in progress, a world on its way to being what God intends.

I’m going to test your Biblical knowledge here: does everybody remember Genesis 1:1? “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Well, in Hebrew, the phrasing is different, it’s ambiguous. It can be read that way, but it can also be read, “When God began creating the heavens and the earth…” If we understand it this way, creation is not yet complete: the six days of Genesis was only the beginning. We read that on the seventh day, God rested, but did not stop. What happened on the eighth day? God has been active ever since; everything since then—the flood, the exodus from Egypt, the exile in Babylon, Jesus’ ministry, the Roman Empire, Martin Luther, the Enlightenment, Charles Darwin, Richard Nixon, the Space Program—everything is part of the continuing work of creation. Not only that, but we have been invited to participate in that ongoing act of creating with God. In Eden, God created adam, which literally means ‘earthling’—that’s all of us—and invited adam to help create this world with God by naming the animals. That invitation still stands.

When Jesus says, “the kingdom of God is near,” this is not an announcement of some thing to come in the future, but the introduction of a new way of being part of God’s creating action here and now. Isaiah prays, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” and that is precisely what God did! At the baptism of Jesus, ‘he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.’ (Mk 1.10) Isaiah’s prayer has been answered in Christ Jesus.

We find ourselves waiting for salvation to come from God, but the truth is that the kingdom of God is here, God’s salvation is now. We find ourselves waiting for a God to come and overpower us, to take the world away from us and fix what we broke, but as we have already seen, that is not how God works. The Jews in Israel were waiting for God to send a Messiah, a mighty warrior king to come in glory and free them from the Romans, but what they got was the son of a carpenter, an itinerant rabbi who died in shame on a cross. If we are here waiting for a God who will come to overpower our sin, we are waiting for the wrong God. Our God comes not to overpower us, but to empower us, to give us strength and ability beyond our own to fix this world and live the kingdom of God here and now. Our God comes to be Immanuel, “God with us.”

Listen to these words of Paul, “for in every way you have been enriched in him…so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 1.5,7) This world is still becoming what God wants it to be—a world of peace, justice and mercy—and God has invited us and equipped us to help it grow, to usher in the kingdom. This world, fallen as it is, is still God’s, and God is still actively at work redeeming it and inviting us to be a part of that redemption. Today, this first Sunday in Advent, we remember that this is what we are waiting for: to take part in the salvation of this world here and now.

During Advent, we celebrate the waiting, we sit on the edge of our seats with baited breath because every day, every hour, every minute we could come face-to-face with the living Jesus in the face of a friend, neighbor, or even a stranger. During Advent we are reminded that every moment is a God moment, a chance to meet people where they are, to be their real salvation, to rescue them from hunger, heartache, violence or loneliness, and in so doing, to be rescued ourselves from complacency and inaction. Every moment is an opportunity to do the work our master has given us. We celebrate Advent because we are always waiting for the next opportunity to turn the corner and run headlong into Jesus Christ.

Of course, this work will not see it’s completion in our lifetime, either. When we leave this life to rest with the saints, there will be much, much more left to do. And so we also celebrate Advent to remember and to hope for Christ’s promised return, to bring with him the kingdom in its fullness and to complete both what was begun in Eden and what was started in Bethlehem.

Come Lord Jesus! Break into our lives, bring the kingdom now, in us! Help us be ever ready, ever vigilant, ever alert for the coming of your kingdom around every corner and at every crossroads. For now is the Advent of our God, now the coming of Christ is around every corner. Now Jesus is Immanuel. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. So what are we waiting for?

As I listen to our text from Deuteronomy today, I cannot help but think of a painting that hangs in my parents’ house. It is a portrait that my father painted of my great-grandmother Magdalena Egstad. Scenes from her life surround her portrait in little vignettes: Born in 1890 in Vardal, Norway, she left on a steamship bound for America in 1911. That same year, she married my great-grandfather, Hans, in Buxton, ND, and in 1916 they homesteaded north of Nashua, MT, where both my grandmother and my father grew up.

As I think of this painting, I am reminded that everything I have and everything I am is thanks to people like Magdalena who came before me and paved the way for me to be what I am and do what I do. All that I am is a gift of those before me; no matter how hard I have worked or how much I have earned, I owe it all to my parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents. In the end I, and they, owe everything to God. It is God who brought Magdalena safely across the ocean, who led her to Hans who brought them to the farm. It is by God’s grace that my grandmother survived childhood, even though two older siblings died before the age of 2 before my she was born. It is God who gave me the family that brought me here today.

This is what God is reminding the Israelites. They had been slaves in Egypt, a people without hope for a future of anything but hard labor and oppression. Then, God called them out of Egypt, sustained them through forty years in the desert with miraculous manna for food and water from bare rock, sustained them with the leadership of Moses, and brought them through trial and hardship and failure to a land rich in food and drink, a land full of grain and vines, pomegranates and figs, a land welling up with springs and hills full of iron and copper.
Over the generations, as their silver and their gold multiplied, God’s people placed more and more value on their own power and their own ability. They deserved the money they earned, they earned the fruit of their labor. I made this wealth through my own hard work and merit, I worked hard for it, and it is mine! I have a right to spend it or save it however I choose. Sound familiar?

When we feel that we are entitled to what we have, it becomes harder and harder for us to appreciate it. A paycheck is always too small, a house is never big enough. We think about all the things we want or need and how we can’t afford them, and we grasp tightly onto those things we do earn. This is what we learn from the story of the lepers. While Jesus and his disciples are heading to Jerusalem, he heals ten lepers. Of the ten, nine follow his command to go show themselves to the priests. It is not that they weren’t thankful, but before they could rejoin society, before they could return to their families and their lives, they had to do this thing. They were thankful, certainly, but they were Jews who had asked a Jewish rabbi to heal them. He did, now they went and did as he commanded. It was only fair.

The tenth, on the other hand, was a Samaritan. He knew that he had no right to ask anything of Jesus, because Jews hated Samaritans. That Jesus paid him any mind at all was a gift he did not expect. It was precisely because he saw how unworthy he was of Jesus’ gift that his thankfulness compelled him to return to praise God. His Jewish companions did not return because they expected Jesus to act, and were not surprised when he did. This man expected nothing, and so he was able to see that he had been given everything.

We forget sometimes how unworthy we are. In our minds, we know that we are sinners, but we also know that we are faithful churchgoers, upstanding citizens, ready volunteers and trustworthy friends. The blessings of this life have made us quietly entitled, and that entitlement too often creates distance between us and those we perceive as not working as hard or being as decent as we are. Though we try not to, we look down our noses at immigrants, at welfare moms, at those “rough” people. I think that we are secretly afraid that they want to take what we have without earning it. We forget that all we have is a gift of God’s boundless generosity.

St. Paul compares generosity to a farmer sowing seed. “…the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully…He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.” His point is that God has given us these gifts freely, and will continue to do so. God is faithful—we need never fear that the flow of God’s generosity will dry up!

When we stop to remember how little we truly deserve and how richly we have been blessed, we cannot help but be thankful. Not just thankful enough to sing songs and hymns of praise, not just thankful enough to give up an hour every Sunday to come to worship, not even just thankful enough to put our check in the offering plate. No, God’s incomprehensible generosity is bigger than that. We have nothing of our own: all that we have and all that we are is a gift from God—the sheer magnitude of this blessing inspires in us true thankfulness, the kind of thankfulness that drives us to action, just like the Samaritan on the road to Jerusalem. Though all ten lepers were grateful, the one man returned to thank Jesus, and according to Jesus, only that one man was ‘made well.’ True thankfulness is not just gratitude; true thankfulness is grateful action.

Now, you must understand, it is not that we ‘owe’ God a ‘debt’ of thanks. Jesus did not heal the lepers on the road so that they would get him a nice bouquet of flowers and a card. Our grateful action is actually a part of God’s generous action. Consider Paul’s analogy of the harvest: when the farmer brings in the harvest, it is not only the farmer who benefits: the grain is made into bread which feeds the whole community. In the same manner, God sows blessings of wealth, prosperity, good health, love and mercy among us in order that the whole human community may benefit.

Our true thankfulness to God is as much a part of God’s gift to us as the harvest is a part of the sowing; the grain goes in, and the stalks come out. So it is with us: God sows among us generously and we respond generously to God and to God’s world.

This week, by proclamation of the sixteenth President of the United States and out of civic custom, we gather together to celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving. Yet, even as we gather to share a meal with family and settle in for an afternoon of football, we cannot help but be painfully aware of how many millions of God’s beloved people around the world and in our own backyard go without adequate food, clean water, or ample health care, how many people are not afforded the dignity and freedom that we in this country call “rights.”

As we look at these millions upon millions every day wasting away in poverty and hardship, we sometimes ask ourselves, “Why doesn’t God do something? If God is loving, how can God allow this to happen?” Friends, God is doing something: right here, right now, among us. St. Paul writes, “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.” God has blessed us richly an intends for us be a rich blessing to others. God has heaped good gifts upon us so that we might trust God’s boundless generosity and never fear for our own security as we share those gifts with the world. All that we have, all that we are is a free gift of God bestowed with love upon us, upon our parents, upon their parents and their parents’ parents. God has sowed abundantly the seeds for love, peace, and plenty within this community, and the harvest is ripe for the picking. Let us give thanks to our God.

Every Sunday at the duck pond, the ducks all gather together at duck church. Every Sunday, the duck preacher ascends the pulpit and cries out, “Ducks! You have wings! You can fly, ducks! You can soar through the heavens and break the bonds of gravity. You have the ability to take wing and float through the air! Fly, ducks! Fly, for you have wings!” After the service, the ducks file past the duck preacher and tell him how inspired and uplifted they are by his words, and they all waddle home.

It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? To spend so much time hearing about their ability to fly and the great gift of their wings, and to then waddle slowly home. But we are very much like those ducks. We come here today, and much as we do every week, we hear Christ speak these words to us: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free!” and we respond, “Yes Lord! I know the truth, and I am free. Thank you, Lord, for freeing me!” and we go home and continue our lives in captivity.

We claim this wonderful freedom in Christ, but where is it? If we are free, how does this freedom affect our lives? What difference does it make to the world that we are free? How does that freedom affect how we treat the bank teller, the woman on the street begging for change, the man who stole your wallet? What does that freedom mean to you?

Luther writes in his Treatise on Christian Liberty that “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none,” and “A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” These two contradictory statements are both true, he claims, because our faith in God and God’s promise of life and salvation frees us from fear of punishment, from obligation to the law, from the need to earn God’s grace, and from guilt and shame for our failings. God has given us wings. Of course, those wings are no good to anyone unless we fly. God’s freedom allows us to fly, allows us to serve, it gives us the power to continue in Christ’s word and truly be his disciples, to know the Truth that God’s commandments are not given to lead us to righteousness, to make us better people, or to make up for the sins we commit, but instead are an open invitation from God to take part in God’s continuing work of creation and participate in God’s redeeming this broken world.

500 years ago, the Church obscured this Truth. It held God’s promise ransom, used it to bribe and blackmail God’s free and justified children into good works and worship attendance and giving money. We observe Reformation Day in celebration of God’s work to liberate the Church and God’s promise from that captivity through the work of servants like Martin Luther. But the reason we continue to celebrate Reformation Day now, the reason we have bothered to change our paraments from green to red, is to remind ourselves that the Church is always in need of reformation. Just as God’s love invited men and women like Martin Luther to work for reformation then, God’s love continues to invite us into God’s work of reforming God’s Church.

Too often, people come to churches looking for the very freedom we proclaim, but they see the preacher exhorting the ducks to fly, and the ducks waddling home. Church to us is worship on Saturday or Sunday, giving our offering in our envelopes, singing our hymns and doing our volunteer projects around the building. The problem is that our service stops there. Too often our Christian liberty and love does not extend beyond these walls. We are afraid to go out and get our hands dirty, afraid to fly. It is that fear, fear of failure, fear of going outside our comfort zone, fear of the world that holds us captive and keeps us waddling on the ground. It is that fear that stops us from freely serving and loving God’s people.

If we are ever to explain freedom in Christ to the world, if we are to have any hope of being able to show people the magnitude of God’s promise, then we must live it. If we are to convince the ducks that they too have wings, then we must fly. This is what it means to be a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. Free from any obligation or duty, we voluntarily and joyfully go out to share this good news with the world that they too might experience God’s freeing promise. In Christ, we are free from holding grudges, free from cynicism, free from suspicion of people asking for help, free from “what will the neighbors think.” God’s promise frees us to screw up, to give generously to thieves, to hang out with outcasts, to visit the lonely and depressed, to break bread with hookers and swindlers. God frees us to love dangerously. It’s like this poem* I saw recently: “I slept, I and dreamt that life was joy; I woke and I saw that life was service; I served, and I found that service is joy!” No matter what we do or don’t do, we can’t lose. Having given us wings, God is inviting us to fly.

This is dangerous. It’s much safer on the ground. Jesus himself says that we will suffer for this. People will take advantage of us, they will harm us, they might even kill us. The world does not understand free grace; it understands, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” And so, we stand to lose everything: our dignity, our money, our time, our comfort, but in the words of the hymn†, “were they to take our house / goods, honor, child, or spouse, / though life be wrenched away, / they cannot win the day. The Kingdom’s ours forever!” Whatever we may lose, even our lives, cannot compare to what we have already gained in Christ. This is what it means to be a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

Martin Luther lost much to proclaim this good news. Though it meant excommunication from the Church, the loss of his friends, the loss of liberty, even a death sentence hanging over his head, his faith in God and his Christian liberty compelled him to preach on. Where he could have sat back, rested on his knowledge of God’s promise and kept silent, instead he spoke and wrote and preached, boldly proclaiming, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise!”

If we really trust that God is in control, then we know that God can even redeem hardship and suffering and bend it to God’s will. We know this because of how God took the shame and failure of the cross and turned it into a God’s greatest  victory. We seek joy and happiness in our own comfort and desires, but God can turn even our suffering into joy.

If we claim to believe that God has set us free, then let us exercise that freedom and rely on God’s goodness. If we claim to believe in God’s goodness, then let us exercise that goodness and rely on God’s promise. If we claim to believe that we have wings, then let us fly. I am here today to tell you, Ducks, that you have wings. You have wings, Ducks! Fly!

*Poem by Rabindranath Tagore
†Words to “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” text tr. hymnal version, Lutheran Book of Worship (1978)

Here’s one you’ve probably heard before: “how many Lutherans does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer: “Change? What’s change?” It’s good that we can poke fun at ourselves once in a while. Truth be told, it’s not just Lutherans that are allergic to change. Methodists, Presbyterians, the United Church of Christ and many others tell jokes like this about themselves, too. In fact, this could just as easily be said of those old Pharisees.

We pick up Jesus’ story the day after he has ridden into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, surrounded by crowds waving palm branches in the air. After he got to town, the first place he went was the temple. When he got there, he caused quite a stir when he fashioned a whip and drove the money-changers out the door. That was yesterday; today the Pharisees are understandably upset. They want to know who this upstart thinks he is coming in and messing up the temple. They want to know who he takes his orders from.

You have to understand the Pharisee’s point of view, here. This was the way they had always done things—we can identify with that. For years, the money changers had set up shop on the temple grounds—not even in the temple proper, just in the outer court—to help people prepare for their Passover sacrifices to God. This was a long standing custom. Sure, some of them might have been a little crooked, but by and large, the priests kept an eye on things and it brought in some good money for the temple.

The details are a little different, but this is how we still operate our churches: we have our ways of doing things, they may not be perfect, but they get the job done. We’ve got it down to a system. Every now and then somebody new comes in and tries to change things, they start offering ideas that we’ve tried before or that seem unnecessary or overly complicated, so we politely tell them, “Look, we’ve always done it this way. It works. As the old saying goes: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’”

But here’s the problem, friends: it is broke. I’m not talking about the way we make coffee, or the bylaws or even about this congregation necessarily. I’m talking about the Church—that’s the whole Church, with a capital “C.” It’s broken. People have been leaving the Church for decades. All the major denominations have been reporting declining membership for years. This is not news to us. When we think of it, when we look around at our sanctuaries or our Sunday schools and remember how full they used to be, we sigh, and shake our heads, and think about how it was in the good old days. Back when people gave money dependably—if there was a need, they dug deeper because they knew they should. They came to church every week because it was the right thing to do. They took their kids to Sunday School and brought them through confirmation, and everybody did their duty. It was a time when going to church was simply a part of good citizenship. The Church had a lot of authority back then. When the Church spoke, people listened.

Those days, however, have passed. Over the last 50 years, times have changed. People do not recognize the authority of the church in the same way any more. More and more people self-identify as “spiritual, but not religious,” because they distrust organized religion, or they don’t want somebody else telling them what to believe, or because they think religious people are a bunch of hypocrites, or idiots, or zealots, or whatever. The respect we used to have in our culture is gone.

Today, the Pharisees ask Jesus a question, one that perhaps we should ask ourselves: “Who gave you this authority?” Whose authority was it that made us so respected? Who gave us all the clout that we had in society? Contrary to what you might think, it wasn’t God. It was man. It was, in fact, a man—a man named Constantine.

The Christian Church began as a (heretical) sect of Jews. It slowly grew, and by the year 300 it was an underground group of believers, mostly in the Roman Empire, that met secretly in people’s houses, hiding from society because of persecution. Then the emperor (or the caesar) named Constantine not only legalized Christianity in the 3rd century, but made it the official religion of the Roman empire. Whereas it had once been all the rage to torture Christians and feed them to the lions, now all of a sudden it was en vogue to be Christian. We’ve been riding Constantine’s wave ever since.

But now times have changed. That respect given the Church by Constantine isn’t holding us up any more. We’ve lost our human authority, but perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps it is time for this Constantinian Church to die, because it is only when the Church dies to its need for human power and influence that God can resurrect it as something that exists for God’s glory alone. It is time for us to listen to Paul, for the same mind to be in us that was in Christ Jesus.

When Jesus posed his question to the Pharisees, they proved by their answer that their own authority was derived from human origins. They knew that if they told him what they thought, they would anger the crowd and lose face. We can’t be too hard on them for that. We all seek human authority: control, respect, honor, whatever. But Jesus is different. Jesus had all of that: he was equal with God, he had all the glory and majesty of the creator of the universe.

But, unlike us, he didn’t strive for it—he didn’t have to, it was his already—and he didn’t exploit it. Instead, he set it aside. He gave up all the power and all the magnificence of God and became not just a human, but a peasant, the lowest of the low. It is we should have been obeying and serving him, but instead it was he who obeyed God and served us, even when it lead him to the cross.

This is the mindset Paul begs us to take up: rather than working for ourselves, for our own honor or respect or influence, we should instead do as Christ did and set everything aside to serve our neighbor. For the Church, that means forgetting the “good old days,” forgetting all the sway we ever held and the all the respect we ever had, and becoming obedient to God, regardless of where that leads.

Fair warning, though: we will look crazy. The people who have radically submitted to God’s will always do. Jesus hung like a criminal on a cross, though he was innocent. John the Baptist wore camel skin and had bugs in his teeth. To the world around them, they were nutters. But not to God. Paul tells us that for his obedience, God exalted Jesus and gave him all authority, gave him “the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, in heaven, and on earth and under the earth.” The Philippians who received Paul’s letter would have recognized that “the name above every name” is Caesar: that was one of the emperor’s titles. Even though it was caesar who gave the Church all it’s authority on earth, only God can give all the authority in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth.

So yes, if we shun this human authority, we will look like nutters. The world will tell us we’re doing it wrong; we should be trying to sell ourselves and prove why the world needs us. We will look like a deluded group of losers. But to those who seek the Truth, to those who seek a relationship with the living God, they will see God among us and they will hear us proclaim not the Church, but Christ and him crucified. We don’t need the “good old days,” for in Christ Jesus, the best days are still ahead.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.” He meant that anybody who wishes to live a meaningful and full life cannot let institutions and society dictate their beliefs, behaviors or actions. Instead, Emerson believed that people should trust only themselves and set their own paths in life.

After our reading from Romans today, I think St. Paul would agree with Emerson. He writes, “Don’t be conformed to the ways of this world, but instead, be transformed by the ways of God. Look at the world through new eyes so that you can see God’s will at work.” However, he would disagree with Emerson on the point that we must trust only ourselves. He continues, “Don’t hold too high an opinion of yourselves, but instead realize that the greatness you have comes from God.”

Paul writes these words in his letter to the Romans—and we read still read them today—because we the Church are always being conformed to this world. It’s hard not to be; the rest of our lives run according to the rules of society, so we naturally try to apply them to the Church. We conform the Church to society in a million little ways, but one of the worst is when we try to run our congregations according to a business model.

In a business, investors give money, and the business supplies some goods or service to make a profit, which it then returns to the investors: this is what makes a business successful. We see that success and we try to apply it to our congregations. We work hard to balance our budgets, to increase our income and attendance while decreasing our expenses and to make sure that we are providing the services that the people expect from us. Our churches become businesses that sell Bible studies, service trips, and baptisms, and that preach a gospel people will want to consume.

When we conform the Church to our understanding of how the world works, we are ultimately putting faith in our own ability to market ourselves and manage our congregations in a way that will make them “successful.”  We are putting our faith in human rules.

This is exactly what Paul is warning us against. “Do not think too highly of yourselves!” he writes. Speaking as I am to a bunch of Lutherans, I know this is not hard. However, there are many ways we can give ourselves too much credit. We can’t believe that we are the reason the church is successful or unsuccessful. The Message translation of the Bible says it like this: “…It’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what God does for us, not by what we are and what we do for God.”

Here at ELC, we’re experiencing some tight times. Money is a little short right now. That is why we are holding the special meeting this weekend. It seems like a disconnect to many of us that at the same time we are scrounging for money, we are also adding on to our parking lot, hoping to build an expansion onto the church, and we have also hired a Pastoral Assistant with the goal of hiring an Associate Pastor. Our business sense tells us that when money is tight we need to cut our expenses. But that is conforming to the world’s view of things. Instead we need to hear Paul’s words again, “Do not be conformed to the world’s view, but instead be transformed as God shows you the world through God’s eyes.”

A successful business turns a profit. It always has a nice, big number in black ink at the bottom of its balance sheet. It grows in size and wealth. A successful church, on the other hand, does ministry. This means that truly successful churches don’t always have black ink at the bottom of the balance sheet. In fact, some of the most successful churches run in the red more often than they would like. This is because they “discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect”—and they do it. Then they find ways to support those ministries. Successful churches aren’t always popular. Sometimes they shrink instead of growing because they preach the Truth instead of what people want to hear. Sometimes, the most successful churches die. All of the signs say they are failing; what makes them successful?

Paul writes “think [about yourselves] with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned,” or as the Message puts it, “The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what God does for us, not by what we are and what we do for God.” Take Peter as an example. Peter is far from a stellar disciple. When Jesus tells him to walk on water, he sinks. When Jesus is arrested in the garden, he grabs a sword and tries to rescue him by force, and just a few hours later denies three times that he even knows Jesus. Next week, we’ll hear Jesus call him “Satan.” Yet, in spite of all that, this week we hear Jesus tell him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! … I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” The name ‘Peter,’ of course, means ‘rock.’ In spite of all Peter’s failings and weaknesses, Jesus calls him the rock on which the church will be built.

Peter is not great because of his awesome record as a disciple. He’s not great because he has the right answer. Just like Paul tells us, he is great because of what God has done through him. As a matter of fact, when Jesus says, “on this rock I will build my church,” the original text is not clear exactly what the ‘rock’ is. Some people think it might be Peter, but some think it might also be what he confesses, that Jesus is the Messiah and Son of God. Personally, I think that the real rock is not Peter or the confession, but the faith. “Blessed are you,” Jesus says, which is like saying, “What a lucky guy you are, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” A few weeks ago we heard Jesus say, “no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” Peter didn’t come to this conclusion about Jesus on his own. Nobody taught it to him, and he didn’t read it in a book. Peter’s statement professes faith in God’s promise, faith that can only come from God alone. I think that this faith, faith which comes not from Peter but from God, this faith is the rock.

This is why we can’t conform to this world, why we can’t put faith in ourselves or our models. The rock on which Christ’s church is founded is faith which comes from God and is directed toward God. We can’t make this faith grow or come to it on our own terms, we can only watch as God gives us faith on God’s terms. This is why, even when we are worried or downright panicked about what might be going on in our congregation, instead of trying to tighten our control and impose our systems on the church, God calls us to work together, to be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect—the ministry to which God is calling us.

Truly great disciples follow Christ, even when they don’t like where he’s going. Peter will show us that next week when he protests to Jesus’ prediction of his death. Likewise, truly great congregations follow Christ even when it looks like we are floundering. In the midst of trouble, God reminds us that budgets and church attendance and programs are not the measures of a successful church, just as achievements and courage and faithfulness are not the measures of a successful disciple. Balanced budgets are good stewardship, and something we should try to keep, but they are not the reason we gather here. We are called together to do ministry, to act out God’s love to the world. God reminds us not to hold the Church to our standards, to be conformed to the world, but to stand on the solid rock of faith, to follow where God leads, regardless of the cost.

Before my wife and I were married, we dated long-distance for two-and-a-half years. Just to give a point of reference, the whole time we dated was… two-and-a-half years. I spent my last semester of seminary in Dubuque with her, and during that time, we took some ballroom dancing lessons. We learned to foxtrot, rumba, waltz, cha-cha and swing, and we both had a lot of fun doing it, even though I am slightly rythmically challenged.

As we planned the wedding, we decided to use these dancing lessons. Steph has, literally, about 50 cousins (she comes from a big Catholic family), and so she’s attended a lot of weddings. She told me that she would sit at those weddings and see the same traditions over and over, she would think of ways to do things differently when it was her turn.

So, we decided that for our first dance at the reception, we would choreograph a nice foxtrot. It would be more interesting to watch and fun to do. However, whereas at the lessons we were just having fun, now all of a sudden there was real pressure. We practiced long and hard for this event, and somewhere along the way, the dancing stopped being fun. We were so worried about about getting everything right and doing it well that the whole endeavor became a chore. Now, instead of being happy and having fun, we were getting frustrated and worn out.

I tell you about this dance so that I can tell you about another. In the beginning, God walked in the garden with Eve and Adam. Human and divine lived together, danced together to the music of the cosmos. But sin drives us apart from God. It drove Adam and Eve from Paradise, made them forget how to dance. And so it was from the beginning.

At Sinai, God made a covenant with Israel. God came to a people freed from slavery and taught them again how to dance with God. This was intended for our well-being. God handed down the law through Moses to give us guidance, to teach us the steps, as it were. God gave us the law to us how to hear the music and move to it, to exist in the harmony. But, as in the beginning, sin stained the relationship and ruined the dance.

By Jesus’ time, the Pharisees and the scribes who interpreted scripture and dictated the rules for everyone had forgotten their calling. Their job was to mediate between God and the people, but they had become more concerned with showing off their own piety and impressing one another that interpretations of the law they gave simply became a burden for everyone else. The dance became too complex and demanding, even to the point that many stopped dancing with God completely. We fell in love with the dance and forgot the Dancer. What had begun as an undertaking in joy, as a dance of communion with the divine, we had transformed into a burdensome and fearful chore.

I read some verses during the gospel which are not printed in your bulletin. In these verses, Jesus scolds several Jewish cities. We don’t like to hear our meek and mild Jesus speak so harshly, and so we would prefer to omit these verses, but they are important. Jesus upbraids these towns because the people in them, like the Pharisees, were full of themselves, proud of their own dancing ability. They loved the dance and thought that because they did, God loved them. Jesus came proclaiming the good news that God does not love us because of how well we dance, but just because. He came teaching the Old Dance, the one danced in Eden. but the dance he taught was not beautiful enough, not intricate enough, it was not what they expected. They loved their own heritage, their own piety, their own dance more than they loved God, and because of that, Messiah stood in their midst,  doing great deeds of power, but they couldn’t see him.

It is hard to be called out by Jesus like this, to be rebuked by the Son of God for being so good at worshiping God. I think that’s why the lectionary editors left these verses out of our readings today. We want believe that with God, everybody gets and “A” for effort, that the dance we have been perfecting for generations is the one that goes with God’s music. But is it? Jesus claims that the dance of Judaism in that time was a heavy burden, laid on people’s shoulders by the Pharisees [Matt 23.4]. With so many demands and rituals and expectations, it was a dance without joy.

We like to think that this is a problem that’s already been solved, a problem that is “theirs” but not “ours,” a problem back “then” but not a problem “now,” but are is it? At a time when more and more people ignore and avoid church, are we really a community where outsiders can feel the joy of dancing with God? Or does sin continue to convince us to focus more on the leaps and pirouettes and spins than on the love of the dance?

Jesus saw that these people carried this heavy burden, that because of sin, the dance of worship had lost its joy for these people. Their religion, their God, had become so complex and so formalized and so heavy that instead of being their joy, it had become their burden. And so, he says to them, and to us, “Come to me, all you that are weary and heavy burdened, come to me everyone who is tone-deaf and can’t keep a beat. I have a dance to teach you. It is not new; in fact it is very, very Old. But, it is easy, and graceful, and it is o-so-much fun!”

This dance does require some work and practice. We do not get just to rest on our laurels—that would be no better than the proud people of Capernaum. But this dance which Jesus teaches is easy and light. It does not require us to recite creeds or wear our best clothes or memorize verses of scripture. It does not require any of the burdens or chores of our religion or of any other. It only requires us to “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.” [Micah 6.8]

That’s it, those are the basic steps. Not too hard, huh? The greatest commandment, as Jesus says, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind,” and to “love your neighbor as yourself.” [Matt 22.37, 39] After you get that part down, the rest just follows naturally.

Where this dance really gets interesting, though, and where we can find the most joy, is in the variations. Like my foxtrot with my wife, the basic steps are easy, but they are also boring. The fun is in the turns, the twirls, and the dips. Now, this is also where we can get ourselves into trouble. This is where I got so caught up in remembering what to do and how to do it correctly that I lost all joy in the dance. This is the part where we risk messing up and looking like fools.

But it is precisely because of this that this is also where grace comes in. As Jesus says, this dance is easy and light. If you’re thinking about it too hard, you’re not doing it right. At our reception, when the time came and we queued up the music, we had to let everything go, listen to the music, and let it be what it was. And everything was great! We had a blast, the the guests all enjoyed it. When dancing God’s dance, we have to convince ourselves that God is not keeping track of all the mistakes and missteps and missed beats. Instead, God is dancing for the joy of it, dancing with us without a care.

The gift of grace allows us to dance and not care what it looks like, but just to feel the rhythm of love and the harmonies of compassion and simply let the music carry us away. Of course as with any dance, this requires work. In order to let the music carry us, we first have to understand the basics. That is why we recite our creeds, sing our hymns, come to worship and Sunday School, memorize those scripture verses. In order to love the dance, we have to become one with the music, feel it flowing through us. We have to learn from the first Dancer: “Learn from me,” Jesus says, “and you will find rest for your souls.” We learn from him, and the dance is no longer a burden, no longer a chore. It becomes, as it was in Paradise, an ecstatic dance with God simply for the joy of it.

Today, we celebrate Holy Trinity Sunday. This is one of the few feasts or holidays of the church year that does not commemorate an event, like Christmas, or a person, like St. Peter. Today we celebrate an idea: the Triune nature of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Three in One, One in Three. The idea of “Trinity” has confused and confounded Christians for centuries, and yet it remains the core of our understanding of who God is.

It sometimes seems arbitrary and overly complicated, the result of too much theologizing (and perhaps too much beer) by academics who have obscured our view of God. In fact, the idea of  God as Three in One came from average, every-day believers who struggled to explain how they experienced God. They believed—as we do—that there is only one God, but they also saw God—as we do—working in three distinct ways in the world. And so, they could only describe God as one, yet three. Three distinct persons, yet sharing the same essential nature, the same God-ness. Three in one, one in three.

There is a Dr. Pepper commercial on the radio right now that makes me think of  Trinity. Paul Teutul Sr. from Orange County Choppers is challenging a man on the street to try Dr. Pepper and describe what it tastes like, but the guy drinks a whole can and still can’t describe the flavor. In the end, the conclusion is that, “the only way to describe the taste of Dr. Pepper is to say that it tastes like Dr. Pepper.” That’s God: the only way to describe Trinity is to say that it is like Trinity.

Over the centuries, we have tried again and again to understand Trinity, or to find analogies to describe it. Sometimes, we say God is like an apple, which has rind and flesh and seed: no one is the whole apple, but the apple is not whole without any one. But this is not right, because the Father, the Son and the Spirit are all equally and fully God; one without the others is not less than God. Or, sometimes we say God is like a woman who is a mother, a daughter and a sister, all at the same time, but only one person.  But this is also wrong, because God is not one person who acts in three separate ways, but three separate persons, each having the same God-ness. In the end, no metaphor we can come up with will ever be able to properly explain or describe God, because the only way to describe Trinity is to say that it is like Trinity.

St. Augustine thought a lot about God and tried to explain the Trinity. He wrestled with it, trying to put the idea into words. One day, as he was walking along the beach, he saw a child dig a hole with a seashell, then run to the water to fill the shell, run back and dump it into the hole. After watching her do this a few times he approached her and asked, “Child, what are you doing?” She replied, “I’m trying to put the ocean in the whole.” It was at that moment that Augustine realized he was doing the same thing by trying to comprehend God with his small mind. He could no more fit the infinity of God into his tiny head than that child could fit the ocean into her tiny hole.

So why do we celebrate this complicated and confusing idea of Trinity? Why should we waste our energy talking or thinking about this idea that we do not even find in Scripture? There are references in both the Old and New Testaments t God the Father and God the Spirit, and of course, Jesus, but the word “Trinity” or the idea of God as three-in-one do not appear anywhere. So why not just let it be?

I think it is because those early Christians who first described this image of Trinity were onto something. They recognized one God working in three different manners they had to describe it, because Trinity is fundamental to our self-understanding as Christians.
As Christians, we worship God the Father, God above us. This is the God who created heaven and earth out of nothing, who has made the everlasting covenants with Adam, with Abraham, with Moses and with us. This is the God who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt through the wilderness into the promised land, the God who ruled them as a king once they got there.

This is God who is all-powerful and all-knowing, who reigns over all creation. Yet, this God is also all-loving. It is this Almighty God who creates the creature Adam out of the dust of the ground, and then invites the creature into the act of creating by naming all that God has made. It is God who names “day” and “night,” “earth” and “seas,” but then God charges Adam to name all the animals. [Gen 2.19] It is this God with whom Abraham haggled over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, saying “surely you would not destroy the innocent along with the wicked. Will you spare the cities for 50 righteous people? How about for 40? Maybe 30? If you can do 30, you can do 20! Can I hear 10?” [Gen 18.20-32] This is the God who gives the miraculous manna to sustain the Israelites in the wilderness, and when they have the gall to grumble about how bland and tasteless it is, also sends quail [Num 11.13, 31-32]; this is also the God who is so angry at the Israelites for their idolatry at Sinai that he tells Moses, “I will consume them and make a great nation of you instead!” but Moses says to God, “Calm down! I know you’re angry, but these are still your people. You made a promise to Abraham. Why don’t you give them another chance?” And because of what Moses says, God relents. [Ex 32.7-14]

This is the God who ruled over Israel as king. Unlike all the other nations who had flesh-and-blood kings on thrones to govern, God was Israel’s king. When the people needed guidance or counsel, God raised up judges like Gideon or Samson. But then, the people began to complain, the wanted a human king like everyone else. And so, even though their rejection broke God’s heart, God anointed Saul as their king, and when Saul failed, God gave them David, the greatest king in Israel’s history. [1 Sam 8] This is the God who wants to be known to us as “Father,” because God so loves the world. God the Father, the Almighty King of the Universe, still stops to listen and even respond to us lowly humans, even inviting us to take part in God’s act of creating and in shaping God’s story throughout history.

We also worship God the Son, God beside us, God who came down from heaven to become a person just like us. We believe that Jesus is completely God, but also completely human, not two beings but one. This God gave up all the comfort and majesty of heaven to live as a peasant, be oppressed by the very people who claimed to worship him.

This is the God with dirty hands, the one who laughed and loved, rejoiced and suffered, worked and rested with us. This is the God who experienced first-hand what it is to be human, who didn’t just sympathize with us, but actually came to accompany us and walk beside us in all of our pleasure and pain. This is the God who gave up everything to die in shame because of God’s love for us. It is this God who teaches us about the Kingdom of Heaven, who shows us how to live the Kingdom here and now, and who redeems our faults and reconciles us to God through the gift of grace.

And, we worship God the Holy Spirit, God within us. This is the God who swept over the waters at creation, the breath of life who filled Adam’s and Eve’s lungs and brought them to life, who spoke through the prophets. This is the God who is the Holy Fire, the Divine Wind that ties us together and stirs us up and sends us out to be Church.  This is the God who comforts us in our grief, who gives us hope when we despair; this God is the well we draw from when we have nothing left of ourselves, but life still demands more. This is the God of verbs: do, serve, minister, walk beside, advocate, feed, bless, protect, love.

Because we worship this God that is One in Three and Three in One, we know that a fundamental characteristic of God is relationship. We see in God’s triune nature that God is in relationship with God’s self, Father, Son and Holy Spirit all in communion together, but we also see that each of these three is in communion with us, that each person of the Trinity actively works to bring us into closer communion with God in a different way. The Triune God is truly Immanuel, God-with-us, above, beside and within.
When we look at the world and we see disease, poverty, famine, injustice, disaster, suffering and despair, we ask “What can I do? What can ELC do? I am only one person, we are a just mid-size congregation in Wisconsin; how can we work for equal rights for workers in South America or treat people with AIDS in Africa or resist religious persecution in China?” But, it is the Triune God who sends us out, walks with us and equips us to go. The Father commands and encourages us to love one another, the Son frees us from our failures and shortcomings and shows us how to love by feeding, serving, healing, ministering, advocating and accompanying, and the Spirit gives us power beyond our own to change the world.

Martin Luther once said, “To try to deny the Trinity endangers your salvation; but to try to comprehend the Trinity endangers your sanity.” We cannot understand Trinity. Trinity is Divine mystery, an impossible idea. We might as well try to dig a small hole on the beach to hold the ocean. In spite of this, perhaps even because of it, Trinity is also fundamental to how we Christians interact with God and the world.  We don’t need to understand Trinity, but we own the mystery because Trinity teaches us that God is Immanuel, God above us, God beside us, and God within us, even to the end of the age. Trinity invites us to share in that communion with God, with each other, and with creation. And so, because God is Three in One and One in Three, we go.