The First Sunday after Trinity

The First Sunday after Trinity – 14 June 2009

Jeremiah 23:23-32, Psalm 73, 1 John 4: 7-21 , Luke 16:19-31

I love my older daughter Edith very much and my love for her is not based on a level of perfection she achieved for she is not perfect. In fact, I love her because of her imperfections, even though they can be quite bothersome. There are times when Edith seems to be two different little girls in one. There is the nice, sweet, and heavenly little Edith and then there is the rude, mean and hellacious little Edith. In the space of a minute, she can be singing sweetly while dangling toys for Shirley to grab and then whacking her brother on the head so hard with a toy that he could have gotten a stitch or two. However, the only difference between Edith and most of us is that she is not able to hide her two different identities; she is only a child and has not learned the elaborate facades adults put on to hide their multiple identities. We are all like Edith, we all have a side to us that is mean, rude and hellacious and a side to us that is nice, sweet and heavenly, or to put it theologically in the words of St. Paul, “I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.” (Romans 7:25). We are both servants of sin and servants of God. My task this morning is to explain how the Holy Spirit works in our life to bring out our heavenly side, the side that serves God.

In order to do this, I must begin by reviewing the sermon from Pentecost. On Pentecost, I said that one of the jobs of the Holy Spirit is to lead us into worship, as Jesus said, “True worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.”[1] Worship is intricately connected to the Holy Spirit, so much so that if the Holy Spirit is absent there is no worship.[2] Last week, on Trinity Sunday, I suggested that God has created us to worship and through worship, we find our God-given identity. This means that the Holy Spirit works through worship to form our heavenly identity. Worship is also our service to God as indicated by the three common biblical words translated as worship: the Hebrew word ‘ebed, which means servant; the Greek word latreia, which means service; and the Greek word leitourgia, which was a secular word taken over by the church meaning service to the community or state without pay. Worship forms our heavenly identity because it is our service to God.

However, you might be thinking, “If the Holy Spirit works through worship to form our God-given identity, why do I still struggle with my split identities, or in the words of St. Paul, why do I keep doing the evil I do not want to do?” The parable of the rich man and Lazarus can provide us with a possible answer. Commentators have noticed that the rich man is nameless and this means, in the culture in which Jesus lived and taught, that the rich man had no identity or to be more specific, the rich man did not have an eternal identity. As Tim Keller rightly said, “He is only called a “Rich Man,” strongly hinting that since he had built his identity on his wealth rather than on God, once he lost his wealth he lost any sense of self.”[3] We struggle with multiple, competing identities, we continue to do those things we do not want to do because we vainly continue to create new identities, identities not built upon God. For instance, when Edith is exhibiting her hellacious, rude and mean identity, more often than not, it is because she is jealous that her siblings have been getting attention. Like this morning, when our son Gunder got an ice pack because he fell out of chair a smacked his head (he was being naughty put that is another story). Edith got instantly jealous and purposely fell out of her chair hoping to smack her head on the floor to get an ice pack. Her hellacious identity is built upon parental attention, an identity that will always bring destruction for we parents will always make mistakes. Alternatively, consider the character Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray. When Dorian is at the height of his youthful beauty, charm and innocence, a portrait is painted of him. Dorian traded his soul for the portrait and remained perpetually youthful and beautiful, while the portrait grew old and ugly for it took upon itself the affects of Dorian’s sins and vanities.[4] The portrait is Dorian’s real identity, but Dorian creates another identity for himself, an identity that is beautiful, charming, ageless, desirable and allows him to go through his miserable life looking as innocent as a school boy. However, Dorian’s real identity, the hideous painting, consumes him in the end and transfers all of its ugliness, sin, and abuse back onto him. Whenever we create an identity that identity will be like Dorian Gray’s portrait, an image of ourselves that will distract us from the affects of our sin, abuse and negligence.

Here is the problem, our big problem, God has created to serve him through worship and has given us an eternal identity, but we rebel against our God-given identity and attempt to create our own identities. The identities we create will slowly consume us, as a burning coal in the fireplace slowly consumes a log.

We cannot escape from our true identity it will consume us in the end. But this is not always a bad thing for the identity God has given us is also like a portrait. It is a picture of whom we were created to be and who we will become in eternity. It is a portrait presently hidden with Christ, as St. Paul says in Colossians 3:3, “your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” The life we now live is a life marred with the affects of our sins and abuses – like the portrait of Dorian Gray. However, our life, our true life and our God-given identity is right now hidden with Christ in God and one day we will be like that life, we will become the portrait God has painted of us. One day, the opposite of what happened to Dorian Gray will occur in us. We will be become the beautiful portrait God had commission and painted.

Now you may be asking, “What does this have to do with worship?” When we worship, we are taken by and through the Holy Spirit up into the heavenly realm, the realm where our true portrait is hidden with Christ. Through worship, the Spirit brings our future portrait into the present and slowly and painstakingly begins to mold, form and remake us into that portrait. N.T. Wright says it this way, ”If the Spirit is the one who brings God’s future forward into the present, worshipping in the Spirit the God who raised Jesus from the dead means standing both at the overlap between heaven and earth and also at the place where past, present and future are mysteriously held together.”[5] When we gather as the church in worship, when just two or three are gathered together in worship, the Holy Spirit brings us up to the heavenly realm in the presence of the Father and Son. In the presence of the Triune God, the potter who has created our clay bodies will slowly begin to re-work our marred and broken identities and slowly. Through the patient work of the Spirit in worship, we will slowly begin to resemble our portrait that is now hidden with Christ, the portrait that reveals our true identity as son and daughters of God.

[1] John 4:23. There is a debate about whether spirit should be spelled with a capitol “S” or a lower case “s.” I am persuaded that Jesus was smart and clever enough to speak in such a way that he meant both Spirit and spirit.

[2] In fact, we might take a lesson from the rich man from Jesus’ parable. The rich man was not an evil pagan, he is presented as a good Jewish man, a man who would have regularly worshipped in the local synagogue and traveled to the temple in Jerusalem. The rich man would have worshipped according to the law, thus he would have worshipped in truth but would not have worshipped in and through the Holy Spirit.

[3] Tim Keller, The Reason for God, pg 78. The rich man is contrasted with Lazarus, who is the only person in Jesus’ parables to be given a name.

[4] Oscar Wilde, A Picture of Dorian Gray, chapter 2.