Text: Isaiah 63:7-9; Ephesians 1:1-14
You may remember the golden calf
incident from the story of the Exodus.
Briefly, Moses went up the mountain to meet the LORD God and receive the
Ten Commandments. He was up there forty
days which to the people was a little too long considering to lightening
display going on up there. They thought
he had died which posed a problem; if Moses was gone then they had no
connection to Yahweh. Yahweh was the
name God revealed to Moses. It’s a form
of the verb to be and it means “I am who I am and I will be who I will
be”. To solve this problem they had
Aaron make a couple of idols, two golden calves, from the gold the Egyptians
had given them as they left and, as the Bible says, “They rose up to
play.” In the wake of that Yahweh told
Moses to take the people and go to the land he was giving them. Yet, Yahweh was no longer going to go with
them fearing he would only wind up destroying them for they were a stubborn
people.
Moses had
a way of changing Yahweh’s mind about things and so he made his case: “Moses
said to the LORD, "You have been telling me, 'Lead these people,' but you
have not let me know whom you will send with me. You have said, 'I know you by
name and you have found favour with me.'
13 If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may
know you and continue to find favour with you. Remember that this nation is your people." 14 The LORD replied, "My
Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest." 15 Then Moses said to him,
"If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. 16 How will anyone know that you
are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will
distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the
earth?" 17 And the LORD
said to Moses, "I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am
pleased with you and I know you by name" (Ex. 33:12-17).”
That last
question Moses asks is very important…VERY IMPORTANT! “What else will distinguish me and your
people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” What distinguishes the Trinity's people from
all other peoples is his saving presence with his people. The ancient Israelites were the one people
whom the One true God was visibly
acting to save from the most powerful nation at the time before the eyes of all
the other nations. Not only had the
Trinity acted visibly to save the
Israelites but he also kept his presence visibly
known by being with them in a whirlwind cloud during the day and a pillar of
fire at night.
After the
Exodus and the the Trinity's giving them the Land of Canaan, the LORD God
continued to act to save them, but his visibility moved from clouds and pillars
of fire to the Tabernacle/Temple and Israel's keeping of the Covenant by
keeping the Law. Thus, God's visible
presence in this world became integrally connected to the way the Israelites
lived together as a community. When they
kept the Covenant the Lord God visibly blessed them. When they did not, the LORD God let their
enemies overcome them as if he had abandoned them.
In our
passage from Isaiah Yahweh’s presence with his people during the Exodus is what
Isaiah was referring to. Isaiah
remembers how the Trinity had identified with the Israelites in the distress of
their slavery, indeed felt their suffering.
Then he became personally involved in delivering them from slavery and
made his presence evident among them by the visible signs of the whirlwind and
pillar of fire. His presence with them
and his presence alone made them distinct among all peoples. Nothing about the Israelites in themselves
made them distinct. It was only the
presence of their God Yahweh who had entered into their suffering and delivered
them.
Moving on
from there, the Exodus story foreshadows what Yahweh has done for all peoples
in, through and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit sent by the
Father because of his/their love for us.
The Trinity has personally and visibly entered into our human situation
as the man Jesus of Nazareth and lived and suffered more than most of us have
or will. Indeed, Jesus’ last twelve
hours before dying and his actual death were worse than anything any of us want
to imagine. God the Father raised Jesus
from the dead as we will be and Jesus ascended into heaven to return one
day. Until then God, the Holy Spirit,
remains personally present with and in us pointing us to Christ Jesus, bonding
us to Christ Jesus to share in his relationship with God the Father, and He
begins the work of deliverance or salvation in us that Jesus authored in his
life with us. AND, all this happens
predominantly within the context of Christian community.
Jesus
personally experienced what we experience in our doubts, our fears, our grief,
our regrets, our joys, our laughter. He
knew in the form of a constant temptation to which he did not succumb what we
know by instinct and do succumb, turning against the will of God the
Father. He knows personally the
inescapability of humanity’s futile enslavement to be self-serving in very evil
ways. But he remained faithful to the
Father, indeed faithful for us. He is
humanity's one and only once and for all faithful response to God. By his incarnation, faithfulness unto death,
and his resurrection God the Son as Jesus the man has freed us from our futile
enslavement to be self-serving in very evil ways. The Holy Spirit is at work in us now to make
that freedom a reality. He personally
addresses us each so that we know the steadfast love and faithfulness of God as
Jesus the Son knows it and makes us able to faithfully respond to the Trinity
by keeping the one commandment that Jesus gave his followers, that we love one
another as he has loved us each. As he
laid down his life for us each, so we lay down our lives for one another in
mutual, self-giving love. The personal
knowledge of God’s love and faithfulness, of his presence in our lives, in his
suffering with us through life, in the very least…the very least…has given us
the ability to choose to set aside pridefulness and self-centeredness and our
otherwise butt-headed opinionations in order to love and to be faithful to one
another and in this we love and are faithful to the Triune God of Grace whom
Moses knew as Yahweh, the LORD God.
The Triune
God’s presence with us is what makes us distinct from all other forms of human
community. We Christians claim that God
is with us. Every year at Christmas time
we rather sanctimoniously throw around that ancient Hebrew name Immanuel which
means God-with-us. The skeptic asks,
“Where is the whirlwind? Where is the
pillar of fire?” Our only answer can be
that “Our whirlwind, our pillar of fire, the physical evidence of God’s
presence with us is the way we love one another.” The Christian faith is not a matter of
private belief where we make some personal self-saving decision with respect to
Jesus and postmortem individual security.
God the Son did not become human, live faithfully, and die just so I can
have the possibility of being forgiven by God set before me to simply believe
that I might go to Heaven when I die instead of Hell. God the Son became human, lived faithfully,
died, and was raised firstly according
to Ephesians 1:1-14 for the purpose of uniting humanity to himself in a truly
organic way to be the Father's children, sharing with the Son in his relationship to
the Father in the Holy Spirit. The
incarnation of the Son was not the Trinity's catering to our sin and
death. The incarnation of the Son was
God's plan all along. Yet, because of
our sin and death Jesus the incarnate Son consequentially suffered and died and
in so doing destroyed sin and death in the Trinity's good creation once and for
all. God the Son as Jesus the man has
taken sin-death-evil into the Trinity's very self where it can no longer
exist. Consequentially, we who should
never have known separation from the Trinity are now in Christ reconciled to
the Trinity. Jesus the incarnate Son has
lifted our sin upon himself and carried it away to destruction which is what
the Bible means by what we inadequately translate with the word
"forgiveness".
Secondly,
by the powerful working of the Holy Spirit the community which Jesus gathers to
himself is humanity in whom the image of the Trinity is being restored. When the Trinity is present people begin to
love one another unconditionally just as the Trinity has loved us as and
through Jesus and his life giving ministry unto death and through to the other
side where there is new creation. God
enters into our lives, especially into our suffering, in such away as to leave
us knowing that he is steadfastly loving and faithful. His presence takes on hands and feet as we
struggle together in response to his love and faithfulness to die to self,
struggle together to be obedient to scripture, struggle together to support one
another, struggle together to build one another up in Christ, struggle together
to speak the truth in love, and struggle together to be people who
forgive. In all of this the reality of
the mystery of the Trinity's saving presence with and in us becomes
authentically visible for the world to see.
The Triune God of Grace is making us, his people, to be a different kind
of people, people who reflect his image of persons in loving communion within
the new humanity born in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the
new humanity of the new creation that is soon to come. Let us be that people. Amen.
