The Holy Trinity: How God Loves

[This was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, yesterday.]

John 8:48-59

Two-thousand years before the birth of Jesus, three strangers appeared beneath the oak trees at a place called Mamre, where a husband and wife and their party were staying. The couple had come from a place in what we know today as Iraq, Ur. Practicing the hospitality that was part of their faith in the God they had come to know and worship, the couple--Abraham and Sarah--welcomed the threesome to their dwelling and fed them a feast. Over the course of their visit, the three made a promise that in one year, Sarah, an old woman, would give birth to the son promised to them by God. They come to realize that they are in the presence of God.

Later, the three strangers engage in a private conversation. “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? [they ask] Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” [Genesis 18:17-19] 

Was God talking to Himself? 

Yes, said Saint Augustine, a 4th century Christian scholar and founder of the Augustinian order of monks of which Martin Luther would be a member four millennia after Abraham and Sarah welcomed the Lord--Yahweh, I AM. In that conversation among the three leaving Abraham, God was talking to Himself, Augustine believed. I agree with Augustine.

If so, it’s not the first time the Bible records God doing that. In Genesis 1:26, we’re told that God spoke to Himself: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness...”

These Bible passages give us hints at what Jesus later made explicit in the Great Commission, that there is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God’s three-in-one nature is part of the mystery of God’s identity and being, but the Trinity--a term never used in the Bible that we use to describe what God has revealed about Himself--is more than just an odd theological concept. God’s triune nature is essential to Who He is, whether we’re ever able to fully understand it or not.

From the oaks at Mamre, fast forward two thousand years to our Gospel lesson. Jesus is in the temple in Jerusalem. He’s teaching. He’s met opposition. Among the opponents are those who had believed in Him, but are now turned off by the challenge of being His disciples. (That happens a lot.) These people are so upset with Jesus that they accuse Him of having a demon [John 8:48]. (They also accuse Him of being a Samaritan, reflecting their prejudice against folks from Samaria.)

Jesus then ushers them (and us) into the mysterious realm of the Holy Trinity. “I am not possessed by a demon,” said Jesus, “but I honor my Father and you dishonor me. I am not seeking glory for myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge. Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death.” Jesus is pointing to the Father Who judges sin. Jesus seeks to bring the Father glory, not Himself, just as the Father seeks glory for Jesus, not Himself.

This is the nature of the love that exists within the Trinity: self-giving love that doesn’t seek for itself, self-sufficient love that didn’t need to create the universe or the human race in God’s image, but chooses to do so out of pure, giving love. It was this same love, Jesus said, that brought Him to the world. "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son..."

If you really honored God, Jesus tells His fellow Jews, you would see that I am God and you would honor Me too. The crowd is scandalized. “Now we know that you are demon-possessed! Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say that whoever obeys your word will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?” Jesus replied, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and obey his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.”

This pious crowd is paralyzed with anger at Jesus. Who did He think that He was? They should know the answer to that question by now. They should remember what the three strangers--identified in our English translations of our Bibles as L-O-R-D, all four letters capitalized, translating Yahweh--I AM, the name God, would reveal to be His own to Moses--had said that day by the oaks of Mamre. Yahweh had said: “Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him.” [Genesis 18:18]

It was through Jesus that God’s promise to Abraham that Abraham and all people who trust in Yahweh would be made righteous and would become a great eternal nation, the kingdom of God. Through God the Son made flesh, all who turn from sin and believe, are members of God’s new creation. 

Abraham, Jesus says, had heard this promise and if Abraham had been standing in the temple that day, he would have been filled with joy. But the crowd of skeptics in John 8 aren't thinking as Jesus says Abraham would think at all. Verse 57: “You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!” “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!”

Jesus’ response isn’t grammatical. But it is definitive. Yes, Jesus is saying, I know exactly what Abraham thought. Not only am I older than Abraham, I made Abraham. I gave life to everything that breathes and moves. “Before Abraham was born, Yahweh, I AM!”

Now, this is such a stunning claim that if it isn’t true--if Jesus isn’t, as we sing at Christmas, God in flesh appearing, if He isn’t the second person of the triune God, the crowd would be right to be scandalized. As C.S. Lewis’ famous formulation puts it, either Jesus is a liar; a madman, or precisely who He claims to be. As Lewis writes: “You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Jesus didn’t intend for the crowd in the temple to see Him as a great teacher or a magnetic leader who might give them what they wanted. Jesus wanted them (and us) to see is that He is the loving God of the universe in human flesh, Who bears our sin and death on the cross and is raised by the Father to bring the death of sin and death to all who trust in Him. 

It’s to help the people who are rejecting Him in our lesson to see Who He is that Jesus provokes a confrontation with them. It’s why He provokes a confrontation with us in every burning word of Scripture. 

Is Jesus God in the flesh? 

Is He the incarnation of the God that Abraham saw back at the oaks of Mamre? 

If He is, then why would any of us mess around with living lives of unrepentant sin, that break faith with our Creator and our Redeemer, that dehumanize us, that fail to love God or neighbor? Why would we insist on our right to take His name in vain? Why would we justify adultery, in mind or body? Why would we make excuses for murder, physically or through the poison of gossip? Why would we want to take ourselves and our own desires more seriously than we do the will of the One Who made us and brought salvation to us on the cross? Why do we often choose to worry rather than trust in Him? It was for these sins and more that Jesus died for you and me and seeks to set us free, covering them over with His forgiving grace, and putting us at liberty to live as human beings are meant to live.

On hearing Jesus’ claim to be God, verse 59 says: “At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.”

As I reflect on this passage, I wonder, did the crowd want to stone Jesus because they thought He was dishonoring-- blaspheming-- 

God? Or did they want to stone Him because they knew that He was God enfleshed and saw their chance to take advantage of His weakness, His voluntary acceptance of the limits of humanity? 

“This is the heir,” the tenants in Jesus’ parable in Matthew’s gospel say of the son who stands for Jesus in the story. “Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.” Going all the way back to the garden, humanity has been looking for a way to declare our independence of our Maker, to “be like God.” It was for this reason that the world would later crucify Jesus. Get rid of God and the sinners can run the concentration camp, the lunatics can run the asylum!

“But,” as Peter says in the Pentecost sermon, a part of which makes up our second lesson today, “God raised [Jesus] from the dead.” 

And it’s here that we see the practical implications of this strange doctrine of the Trinity. It was out of love that God the Father sent God the Son. It was this same love that caused the Father to bring Jesus back to life. Not love for Himself, but from love for the Son and love for us that the Father raised the Son to new life and through Him, raises all who trust in Jesus to new life. 

Without God’s triune nature then, we could not know that "God is love." Without God's triune nature, we could not be saved. 

Nor could we know or believe in this God, because it’s God the Holy Spirit, the comforter sent in love by God to call us to faith, who makes it possible for us to believe and to have life in Jesus’ name.

If you remember nothing else about the Trinity, remember this: It’s from the love that God has known within Himself--the love the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have for each other--that He loves you and makes you His own through Christ. 

The Trinity is how God loves. It's also how He loves us. Three times over, He loves us, and we are eternally the richer for it! Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Jesus Means Freedom

Matthew 4:12-25
Last week, I mentioned a dialog I had with a group of atheists on Twitter. I didn't mention the comment of one tweeter that particularly caught my attention. The person said: “Christianity requires faith in an absurd dictatorial system that defies all sense.”

What interests me about that comment is that it has nothing to do with whether God exists or not. The person who wrote it was saying, “I’m not interested in Christianity because to be a Christian means submitting to the lordship of Jesus Christ.” In essence, the person was writing, “I don’t want anyone bigger than me telling me what to do.”

Well, neither do I!

The fact is that you don’t have to be an atheist to feel that way.

It’s what the devil felt and why he’s been in rebellion against God all these millennia.

It’s what Adam and Eve felt, wanting to “be like God.”

It’s what we all feel, believers and unbelievers alike, when we’re tempted by sin or rationalize our ways to committing sin despite the witness of God’s law written on our hearts [Romans 2:15].

The truth is that none of us wants anyone bigger than us telling us what to do. We want freedom. (Or at least what we call freedom.) We want to be our own bosses.

So, why would anyone follow Jesus?

The answer to this question is as mysterious and wonderful and, ultimately, as plain and compelling as Jesus Himself, I think.

We see some of that answer in today’s Gospel lesson, Matthew 4:12-25. The events it recounts occurred immediately after Jesus had been tempted in the wilderness. At the outset of our lesson, we’re told that after John the Baptist was arrested, Jesus went to the region of Galilee, then left Nazareth, the town in which He was raised, and settled in another Galilean town, Capernaum. Capernaum was a seaside place, now known as Tel Hum. The entire region is part of the inheritance of two of ancient Israel’s tribes, Zebulun and Naphtali, from which the Old Testament prophet Isaiah said “the light of the world” would dawn on the world.

It’s interesting that God decided that the light of the Messiah should initially be revealed there. It was looked down upon by the good religious folks of Judea because its residents came in frequent contact with Gentiles, non-Jews. But by beginning here, God was signaling that the Son of God, Jesus, hadn’t come just for Jews. He came for all people, including you and me.

In verse 17 of our lesson, Matthew gives a summary of what Jesus was about: “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”

That was the message. It still is.

It’s a message that Jesus delivered in more than just words. It still must be.

Jesus came to call the world to turn from sin so that they could be part of the kingdom of heaven He brings to those who trust in Him...

• Trust in Him more than they trust in their own judgment.
• Trust in Him more than they trust in their own feelings.
• Trust in Him more than they trust in anyone or anything else.

So, my atheist correspondent was right in one sense: To trust in Jesus is to submit to a King Who is bigger than us.

This may not seem like such a compelling offer. Yet, as we’ll see, there were people--seemingly self-sufficient, enterprising, successful people--willing to turn from their sins and turn away from whatever else they were doing in life in order to follow Jesus.

Verse 18: “As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people.’ At once they left their nets and followed him. Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.”

Please, just because you’ve read or heard these verses a million times, don’t overlook the enormity of what’s recounted. Here are Simon and Andrew, working at the family fishing business. Fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were guaranteed a steady income. The constant stream of Gentiles traveling along the international trade route that passed through their territory would always be looking for fish to cook, as would the natives of Galilee, for whom fish was a diet staple. Why on earth would Simon and Andrew leave such a sure thing to follow Jesus to God-knows-where? And then there are James and John, two fishermen so well off that the Gospel of John tells us that they had servants. But when Jesus called them, “immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.”

There is no way that Simon, Andrew, James, or John could know what awaited them.

They didn’t know that this Man Who called them was God-in-the-flesh.

They didn’t know that He would be crucified.

They didn’t know that they would be crucified or executed for their faith in Jesus.

Nor could they see the glory and eternal life that awaits all who trust Jesus with their sins and their lives.

And they couldn’t see all that they would end up doing to tell others that, in Jesus Christ, “the kingdom of heaven” had drawn near to all people and that all they needed to do to become part of it was repent and believe in Christ.

They just followed. But why?

Verse 23: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them. Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.”

Matthew records that as time went on, Jesus performed fewer miracles and focused more on speaking His message. But at the beginning of His ministry He performed many miracles. And all of them--the healings, driving out demons, relieving people of pain, removing paralysis from dead limbs--were also part of His message.

And the message was simple: This Jesus had absolute control over life, death, and the elements of the universe; this Jesus was and is God and because He is God, He can give what only God can give, new life.

Undoubtedly, as they saw these miracles, many people asked each other questions similar to the one that the disciples would later ask after they’d watched Jesus calm a storm that threatened to kill them: “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!" (Matthew 8:27)

What kind of man is this who can send demons packing?

What sort of person is this who can erase pain, remove death, destroy leprosy?

Those who came to follow Jesus did so because, by His words, His actions, His life, and ultimately, His death and resurrection, came to know that He was more than a man. As Simon Peter would later say to Jesus: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." (Matthew 16:16)

When Simon, Andrew, James, and John first followed, they didn’t know what that might entail for their lives, but they did know that they wanted Jesus, they wanted life with Him.

Most people in first century Judea didn’t want Jesus as their Lord, of course. That’s why they crucified Him.

But even then, the power of God over life and death and the universe are such that Jesus could not be kept dead. As Peter would later say: “it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.” (Acts 2:24) He rose on Easter, demonstrating that faith in Him is not in vain, that God will have the last word, and that all who repent and trust in Christ will live with Him forever.

But what about our freedom? When Simon, Andrew, James, and John followed Jesus, did they give up their freedom forever? Yes. And no.

They gave up the freedom to do whatever their sinful natures dictated to them, to shaft whoever they wanted to shaft, to desecrate themselves and their worlds in the selfish pursuit of worldly happiness...and all worldly happiness has an expiration date on it that will come at the grave, usually before.

But they also gained a greater freedom. In following Jesus, we are set free from sin, death, and pointless lives.

We are set free to live life with the love, abandon, fearlessness, hope, and purpose, now and in eternity, for which we were made.

In Jesus, the God Who made us in His image, frees us to move toward lives that reflect the specifications and purposes for which He made us.

He sets us free to be human: to live, to think, to love, and to be all that God created us to be.

Martin Luther put it like this in his famous essay on Christian freedom: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject of all, subject to all.”

When, some time ago, our own Georgeann sensed God telling her that she needed to begin planning a weekend retreat for the women of Living Water and their friends, she thought of all sorts of reasons for not doing it. But God kept insisting.

Was Georgeann exercising freedom when she said yes to God’s call? Absolutely!

You see, when God gets His way with us, it isn’t to enslave us, it’s to set us free to do and be exactly what, deep in our hearts and souls, we know we are meant to do and be and long to do and be. The German Lutheran theologian, Ernst Kasemann, summed up the truth simply. “Jesus," he said, "means freedom.”

This is why people followed Jesus in Galilee.

It’s why we follow Him still.

It’s why we are Christ’s disciples today.

In following Jesus, disciples do give up control of their lives.

But unlike the other things to which we might give our lives in this world, Jesus gives us life back: a life filled with God’s love, God’s power, God’s promise, and the freedom to become exactly what God intended for us to be when He formed us in our mothers’ wombs.

May we grow in our discipleship as we live in the freedom of Christ’s lordship over our lives. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message was shared during worship this morning.]

God: Three in One and One in Three

John 8:48-59
Two-thousand years before the birth of Jesus, three mysterious strangers appeared beneath the oak trees at a place called Mamre, where a husband and wife and their party were staying. They had come from a spot in what we know today as Iraq, Ur.

Practicing the hospitality that was part of their faith in the God they had come to know and worship, the couple--Abraham and Sarah--welcomed the threesome to their dwelling and fed them a feast. Over the course of their visit, the three made a promise that in one year, Sarah, an old woman, would give birth to the son promised to them by God. They come to realize that they are in the presence of God.

Later, the three strangers engage in a private conversation. “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? [they ask] Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” [Genesis 18:17-19]

Was God talking to Himself?

Yes, said Saint Augustine, a 4th century Christian scholar and founder of the Augustinian order of monks of which Martin Luther would be a member four millennia after Abraham and Sarah welcomed the Lord--Yahweh, I AM. In that conversation among the three leaving Abraham, God was talking to Himself, Augustine believed.

If so, it’s not the first time the Bible records God doing that.

In Genesis 1:26, we’re told that God spoke to Himself: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness...”

These Bible passages give us early hints at what Jesus later made explicit in the Great Commission, that there is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It’s part of the mystery of God’s identity and being, but the Trinity--a term never used in the Bible, but which we use to describe what God has revealed about Himself--is more than just an odd theological concept. God’s triune nature is essential to Who He is and appreciating it, whether we’re ever able to fully understand it, can deepen our relationship with God.

From the oaks at Mamre, fast forward two thousand years to our Gospel lesson. Jesus is in the temple in Jerusalem. He’s teaching. He’s met a lot of opposition. Among those opposing Him, we’re told, are those who had believed in Him, but are now getting turned off by the implications of what it means to be His disciples. They’re so upset with Jesus that they ask Him if they aren’t right in saying that Jesus has a demon [John 8:48].

Jesus then ushers them (and us) into the mysterious realm of the Holy Trinity. “I am not possessed by a demon,” said Jesus, “but I honor my Father and you dishonor me. I am not seeking glory for myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge. Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death.”

Jesus is pointing to the Father Who judges sin, as He judged the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah shortly after the incident at Mamre. Jesus seeks to bring the Father glory, not Himself, just as the Father seeks glory for Jesus, not Himself.

This is the nature of the love that exists within the Trinity, self-giving love that doesn’t seek for itself, the self-sufficient love that didn’t need to create the universe or the human race in God’s image, but chose to do so out of pure, giving love.

It was this same love, Jesus said, that brought Him to the world. "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son..."

If you really honored God, Jesus is telling His fellow Jews, you would see the love of God embodied in Me and you would honor Me too.

But the crowd is scandalized. “Now we know that you are demon-possessed! Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say that whoever obeys your word will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?” Jesus replied, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and obey his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.”

You can almost picture the pious crowd paralyzed with anger at Jesus. Who did He think that He was?

But if the crowd had known their Father God as well as they claimed to know Him, had they known His Word, they would have known exactly Who Jesus was (and is).

And they would have remembered what the three strangers--identified in our English translations of our Bibles as L-O-R-D, all four letters capitalized, translating Yahweh--I AM, the name God would reveal to be His own to Moses--had said that day by the oaks of Mamre.

Yahweh had said: “Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him.” [Genesis 18:18]

It was through Jesus that God’s promise to Abraham that Abraham and all people who trust in Yahweh would be made righteous and would become a great eternal nation, the kingdom of God.

Through God the Son made flesh, all who turn from sin and believe, are members of God’s new creation.

Abraham, Jesus says, had heard this promise and if Abraham had been standing in the temple that day, he would have been filled with joy. Abraham would have said exactly the same thing of Jesus that another old man of faith, Simeon, said of Jesus on the day the infant Jesus was brought to be circumcised in this same temple: “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.” [Luke 2:29-32] Abraham, Jesus says, would rejoice in seeing Him!

But the crowd of skeptics in John 8 aren't thinking as Jesus says Abraham would think at all. Verse 57: “You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!” “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!”

Jesus’ response isn’t grammatical. But it is definitive.

Yes, Jesus is saying, I know exactly what Abraham thought. Not only am I older than Abraham, I made Abraham. I gave life to everything that breathes and moves. “Before Abraham was born, Yahweh, I AM!”

Now, this is such a stunning claim that if it isn’t true--if Jesus isn’t, as we sing at Christmas, God in flesh appearing, if He isn’t the second person of the triune God--then He is, in C.S. Lewis’ famous formulation either a liar, guilty of one of the most horrible hoaxes in history; a madman--on the order, Lewis says, of a man who claims to be a poached egg; or precisely who He claims to be.

As Lewis writes: “You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Jesus didn’t intend for the crowd in the temple to see Him as a great teacher or a magnetic leader who might give them what they wanted. (The kind of patronizing nonsense non-Christians and people who claim to be Christians say about Jesus a lot.) All Jesus wanted them (and us) to see is the love of God poured out through Him.

It’s to help them see that He provokes a confrontation with them. It’s why He provokes a confrontation with us in every burning word of Scripture.

Is Jesus God in the flesh? Is He the incarnation of the God that Abraham saw back at the oaks of Mamre?

If He is, then why would any of us mess around with living lives that are displeasing to Him, that break faith with our Creator and our Redeemer, that dehumanize us, that fail to love God or neighbor? Why would we take His name in vain? Why would we commit adultery? Why would we murder, physically or through the poison of gossip? Why would we take ourselves and our own thinking so seriously and fail to honor God as God or fail to honor the thinking of the One Who made us and redeemed us? Why do we worry instead of trusting in Him? (I'm learning to ask myself questions like these every time I sin or contemplate sinning more.)

On hearing Jesus’ claim to be God, verse 59 says: “At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.”

As I reflect on this passage, I wonder, did the crowd want to stone Jesus because they thought He was dishonoring-- blaspheming-- God? Or did they want to stone Him because, in light of His credibility, they knew that He was God enfleshed and saw their chance to take advantage of His weakness, His voluntary acceptance of the limits of humanity?

“This is the heir,” the tenants in Jesus’ parable in Matthew’s gospel say of the son who stands for Jesus in the story. “Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.”

Going all the way back to the garden, humanity has been looking for a way to declare our independence of our Maker, to “be like God.”

It was for this reason that the world would later crucify Jesus. Get rid of God and the lunatics can run the asylum!

“But,” as Peter says in the Pentecost sermon, a part of which makes up our second lesson today, “God raised [Jesus] from the dead.” And it’s here that we see the practical implications of this strange doctrine of the Trinity.

It was out of love that God the Father sent God the Son.

It was this same love that caused the Father to bring Jesus back to life. Not love for Himself, but from love for the Son and love for all who believe in Him--you and me--that the Father raised the Son to new life and through Him, raises us to new life.

Without God’s triune nature, we could not be saved.

Nor could we know or believe in this God, because it’s God the Holy Spirit, the comforter sent to call us to faith, who makes it possible for us to believe and to have life in Jesus’ name.

If you remember nothing else about the Trinity, remember this:

It’s from the love that God has known within Himself for all eternity that He loves you and makes you His own.

The Trinity is how God loves. It's also how He loves us. Three times over, He loves us, and we are eternally the richer for it!

Amen

[This was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church on Sunday, May 22, 2016.]

[Blogger Mark Daniels is the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio.]

Hope for the Living

[This was shared during the funeral for Dale, a member of the congregation I serve as pastor, earlier today.]

Psalm 23
Romans 8:31-39
John 11:17-27

Over the past three-and-a-half years, as his pastor, I’ve gotten to know Dale a bit. Because Dale, who was never a talkative man from what I have gleaned, was increasingly silenced by illness in this period, some of what I’ve learned about him has come from others.

One day, for example, while visiting Dee at her house, she showed me a beautiful piece of furniture that Dale made for her dining room. He was a tremendous carpenter!

But his talents weren’t confined to carpentry, of course. Luke used to tell me about how knowledgeable Dale was when it came to anything mechanical or, as Luke would put it, “handy.” (High praise from Luke!)

From everyone—from Dale himself—I also learned how much Dale loved the outdoors. He loved to boat and hike. Were it up to him, I think, Dale really would have kept a “home, home on the range.” (A song he loved to sing.)

In later years, unable to hike or travel, he enjoyed, when the weather allowed, sitting on the deck amid the trees and the chatter of the birds. (I know he appreciated the gift of the “birdie cam” he recently received.)

Dale’s love of nature was also reflected in the home he built on that hill near Lake Logan back in the 1970s. This dwelling did not always meet with Elaine’s approval. As some of you will remember, the first time I visited Dale and Elaine, she commented on their house, “Dale says it’s secluded; I say it’s isolated.”

From that, I learned something else about Dale (and Elaine): whatever differences in their personalities, these two who grew up as classmates in a rural Michigan one-room schoolhouse, were a team. Dale smiled when Elaine said things like that to me. It was the smile of recognition of a “discussion” they had rehearsed countless times before.

Sometimes, Dale’s smiles would turn into laughter that I loved to hear: the breathy, hearty laugh of someone truly tickled.

I came to know Dale also as a man of great intelligence.

And I also experienced Dale as a caring person. When someone was in the hospital, he wanted to know how she or he was doing. He relished telling me how things were going with Sandy’s and Perry’s lives and work and with his grandchildren. He enjoyed it when neighbor Butch brought his own granddaughter Isabelle, a young ball of energy, along for visits. After I had a heart attack last summer, I mentioned that the church council was after me to take it easier; Dale fixed me with a stare and asked bluntly, “Are you doing it?”

On top of all this, Dale was a man of quiet faith. He was always anxious to receive Holy Communion during our visits. Even when it had become a struggle for him to move his hand to his lips, he determinedly ate the bread and drank the wine that are Christ’s body and blood. And no one ever more sincerely thanked me for bringing the Sacrament to him.

Dale was truly grateful for the grace and love of God, whether he saw it in the meticulously engineered beauty of the created world or in the gift of Jesus on a cross, Whose death and resurrection brings eternal life to all who turn from sin and believe in Him.

And it is to this I want to point all of you who grieve Dale’s passing today. At one level, Dale’s death brings a story to a close. With that, there will be, understandably, some sense of relief. Dale had suffered from multiple maladies over an extended period of time. His suffering is ended. But his death is a sad ending for all of you, too: A father, a grandfather, a friend, a strong presence, is gone.

But you can take heart. You can have hope. Dale’s passing is also a beginning. The Gospel lesson from John which I read a few moments ago tells the story of what happened one day when Jesus went to Bethany, the hometown of friends: two sisters and a brother named Martha, Mary, and Lazarus.

The sisters and the whole town are grieving when Jesus arrives. Lazarus was dead. At first, Martha seems to lash out at Jesus. "Lord,” she says, “if You had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”

But to Martha in her grief and her confusion, Jesus says, “Your brother will rise again” and “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in Me, even though they die, will live and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.” He then asks Martha to trust those assertions. Jesus asks her to believe them, to believe in Him.

Jesus asks the same thing of you this morning. You see, if the promise that Jesus makes to share His Easter victory over sin and death isn’t true today, it isn’t true. It is precisely for moments like these that Jesus makes His promise to be the resurrection and the life!

And our faith in Jesus’ resurrection promise isn’t just a hope whispered against the grim realities of life. After telling Martha that all who believe in Him will live with God forever, Jesus gave a sign of His capacity to make good on His promises. He stood at the place where Lazarus' body had been placed some four days before and commanded his friend’s dead bones to come back to life on this side of eternity. The voice of Jesus, God in the flesh, spoke with the same voice as the One Who called the heavens and the earth to life in the first place. In response to the command from that voice, Lazarus stepped out of his tomb, back into the embrace of his family.

Of course, Jesus would, shortly after the events at Bethany, give an even more emphatic sign of His authority over life and death and sin. After bearing the weight of all the sin of human history—including your sin and my sin—on the cross, though Himself sinlessness, Jesus rose to life again. The Bible says of the crucified and risen Jesus: “God raised Him up, having freed Him from death, because it was impossible for Him to be held in its power.”

Fortunately, God recognizes how hard it is for us to believe such good news, especially on days like these. That’s why He sends the Holy Spirit to any of us who want to believe. If we will pray to the God the Father in the Name of Jesus, the Holy Spirit will help us to believe in the same Lord so welcomed by Dale every time he gratefully received the Lord’s Supper and listened to God's Word...the same Lord he so reverenced every time he joined the Saint Matthew family for worship over the radio on Sunday mornings.

In the days and years ahead, you will miss Dale, just as you have missed Elaine. Grief is natural and understandable when the love runs deep and the memories are piled high.

But those who follow the risen Jesus don’t grieve like others do. We have hope. We belong to a Savior Who rose on Easter.

Because of Jesus, Dale will rise too. So will all who believe in Jesus.

May God fill you with this hope and the peace that comes from it in the days ahead…and through all the days of your lives. Amen