servitude

You know the stories about pet alligators, right? You all heard the same things that I did, where families would get a tiny baby crocodile, and it would do what crocs do, which is to get bigger as they fed it, and then, after a while, it would get too big for the family to handle.  So, they'd flush it, but after doing so, the croc would grow to massive size in the sewer.  This, of course, is bad for essentially everyone. 

Now, that idea of a baby croc, small enough to handle, small enough to tame, is a great illustration for what it is to have a pet sin that any of us may have. For we do have a pet sin, each of us does.  And you, likely, know what your pet sin is, don't you? You know what it is as much as I know what mine is. Perhaps it's drinking.  Maybe it's gossip.  Maybe it's pornography, or cheating, flirting with people who aren't your spouse.  Maybe it's your pride, your desire to be the best in the room no matter what.  Whatever your pet sin is, though, we all have something in common with them, and that is that the sins that we have start small, and then we encourage them to get bigger.

It's like getting a puppy for your kids.  Let's say you get a golden retriever for your child, your three year old girl.  Now, when the puppy is a puppy, like a really little puppy, your daughter can take her for a walk.  No trouble there so far.  But, as the puppy and the girl both eat, sleep, and get older, one will grow faster than the other.  What that means is that you could count on your daughter when she was three and the dog was a puppy to direct and guide that dog where it should go.  She can control that dog.  But a two year old dog and a five year old girl?  Different story altogether.  In that arrangement, with that leash, the girl will end up going where the dog wants to go, not the other way around.  And if that girl and that dog are both tied together, then woe to her when the dog wants to run away. 

Now, friends, your pet sins are just like that.  Your pet sins being the things that you are for sure for sure that you can control.  One more drink, one more link clicked, one more juicy gossipy story shared.  One more mp3 stolen, one more drink with your married co-worker.  One night spent with a girl you don't even like that much, but it beats being alone, right? One more fight with your spouse. One more comment with your girlfriends bashing your spouse.  You know, our pet sins.  The ones we think we can control.  And like with anything else, these little sins, these pet sins, we feed them time to time.  And when we feed them, they grow.  And pretty soon, as we feed them, they get bigger than us.  All of a sudden, that thing, that sin you thought was your pet, it pulls you around.  How on earth are you going to compete with that especially when you keep on feeding it.  It's a nightmare scenario, in which you feel as though you are being pulled around by your sins, almost compelled to keep on committing them, even though you hate yourself as you do them.  Paul talked a lot about this, but most prominently where he said of himself that the good he wants to do is what he avoids, and the evil he wants to avoid is what he does!  That's him, and that's the rest of us too.  That sin that you fed for years and years and years, the thing that you were sure you could control, that you enjoyed because you were in charge and fed it bit by bit, it's a monster now, and now it's in charge.

They say that the first sign that you're addicted is when you can tell that you no longer enjoy feeding the addiction.  The first sign that you're hooked is that you aren't having fun when you're doing those things anymore.  If you're pulled to more and more extreme pornography, you're probably not enjoying it anymore.  The thrill is gone.  You're just feeding the monster.  If you're an alcoholic, you don't actually enjoy drinking anymore, it's just to get you to the point of feeling normal.  You know that this is the case.  And if you're addicted to sin, if you're enslaved to it, if sin that you thought you could feed is in charge, then you're stuck feeding it over and over again.  And that's a problem for you.  And this is what Jesus meant when he said that everyone who sins is a slave to sin. He's right, you know; when you sin, it gets to be in charge, and you don't get to decide what you serve anymore.  You serve your sins, and you chose your masters, shackling them to you, and ensuring that you would not and could not let go. 

None of us wants to feel as though we are in servitude to anyone.  None of us wants to feel as though we are in servitude to anyone or anything, we want to feel as though we have agency, and can do what we want.  But you will find a master for yourself to serve, you really will. If you will not follow the edicts of Jesus Christ, you will find a master somewhere out of something.  You will make it for yourself, you will choose who you serve, and you will serve that master.  But nobody can serve two of them.  And this is where Christ comes in.

Jesus knows our plight.  He knows that we are in a situation in which we have lashed ourselves to certain sins, that we are fascinated and interested in serving masters that we think we can control, and so we do.  And he knows that if he were to free us from one of those, we would instantly replace it with another one.  This is who we are and what we do, every single time.  So Christ, in his wisdom, decided to do something that would circumnavigate all this trouble - he lashed himself to you.  If you read through the Old Testament reading from Sunday, when Jeremiah discusses his relationship with God, he refers to God as stronger than himself, as a dread warrior, which is phenomenal, fantastic, and worth remembering for any of us who are struggling with sin.  For as we struggle with sin, it feels as though we have a monster that we are feeding pulling us down.  We feel as though there is a millstone around our necks dragging us down.  But that's not the entire story here.  In the Christian faith, as opposed to all others, it's not the story of what you need to do for God, it's the story of what God has done for you.  For any of you feeling dragged down, burdened, cumbered with a load of care, remember your baptism, and in your baptism, something amazing happened.  You had the presence of Christ in your lives who lashed himself to you.  In the same way as you chained yourself to your pet sins, Christ chained himself to you, he lashed himself to you in your baptism, and he is prepared to do the work necessary for your salvation. 

It's all about who is stronger, you know.  It's all about who is stronger, who is a dread warrior, who can drag whom.  If you're lashed to things, one of your volition, one of God's, then you'd better hope that God is stronger than you, and you'd better hope that he can drag you to heaven.  Which he does.  This is exactly the work of Christ, to drag humans towards salvation if necessary, to pull them along, though they may fight, though they may kick and scream, though they desperately want to lash themselves to other thing in the way, but Christ will continue to pull us towards salvation, towards heaven.  If left to your own devices, you will make destructive choices, harmful choice, because you feel as though you can be in control.  And as you tie yourself to your sins, as you put a leash on them, you tend to feel as though you can and will always be in control.  And as your sins get bigger, the thing you tied yourself to is now in control.  It is bigger than you, stronger than you, and is pulling you, pulling you down.  But Christ is stronger.  He is stronger than you, he has battled and has prevailed.  Your baptism is the pure and certain proof of that, where Jesus tied himself to you, and is pulling you towards the salvation he has earned for you.  You're never going to find yourself getting your story straight 100%, you're never going to find yourself serving righteousness of your own free will.  What you will find is that Christ will pull you, he will drag you towards what is good for you, towards salvation, towards heaven.  That's the bond that counts: not the ones you make for yourself, but the ones he makes for you.

Trinity

Everything in the creation account is true.

This simple, relatively orthodox statement is controversial these days, as it is usually to be found when Christian teaching deviates from cultural safeties.  It always strikes me as strange that the church is frequently chastised for marching too closely in lock-step with the cultural and social norms of the past, and yet is castigated for being counter-cultural today.  You would think that if the church was expected to hold permanent truths no matter what happened elsewhere, then the church would always be at odds with the culture.  But the culture constantly requests, nay demands, that the church march in lockstep with it, and then hates it when it does.  There's a lesson to be learned somewhere in here.

Point being, that back in the day, the Christian church held to the view that the world was created in six days by the Lord our God, and that he looked at it and saw that it was good.  Fine fine fine, and the culture outside was there as well.  Everybody saw that it was fine, nobody really had too much of a problem with things, and the world proceeded as it was intended to.  But things changed, they developed, and the world that was content to have a six day creation no longer found that to be sufficient. They had looked into things, dated the world by stars and glaciers, had checked fossils and tree rings, and had determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world certainly didn't take six days to make.  That can be argued.  What can't be argued is what happened next.

For we, the clumps of atoms and stardust that we are, made of dirt and with the breath of life in our nostrils, we need to know something about ourselves from the story of creation.  When God makes everything, and places us as the crown of creation, the most important aspect of it, the shining star and glittering symbol at the top, he breathed into our nostrils the breath of life, told us to have dominion over the earth and to subdue it.  He told us not to sin, and then we sinned.  And that's what you need to know about the origin story. 

I'll put it another way.  They're bringing back the Universal monster movies for reasons that I can't quite identify, and the old Universal monster movies worked for a good reason, and have continued to be worthwhile for the same reasons.  Setup and payoff.  Of course, when looked at from the outside, without suspending disbelief, then the story collapses right away.  Naturally, vampires don't exist.  We all get that, of course.  But if you accept as the subject matter of the film that there are vampires, that drink blood and die upon exposure to sunlight, well, then you would expect the vampire in the film to fall in line with that.  If the setup is given that vampires die on exposure to sunlight, and they drink blood, and then for the rest of the film the vampire just wanders around during the day, drinking sodas, then you would find the film to be ultimately unsatisfying.  He's not a vampire if he doesn't fit with the setup, and if he does, then he is. 

Now, as human beings, indeed, as all of creation, we have a setup in the Old Testament.  We have a setup there, where it tells us that God made everything, he created the universe out of nothing, made it, formed it, fashioned it, spoke everything into being, and finally made us as the apex of creation.  We were created in a world that God looked at and saw was good.  And we were placed in creation, told to tend it and take care of it.  And then we fell, we fell and all creation with us.  And after that, the world became a dangerous frightening place, and we were going to have to work to make it work for us.

That seems to fit, doesn't it?  We keep on forgetting, as we do, that the creation account is true, and uncomfortably true.  And when we toss it out, assuming that we are now too smart for it, we have advanced too far, and now no longer need it, well then, we are going to find ourselves missing the most important point.  And that point, clearly, is who we are, and why we are here.  And that is a moment that is hard to figure out, really, and for some reason we miss that more than we miss anything else.  Oh sure, we can get to how we arrived at this point through the scientific method, but the world has continued to clamor for meaning even though science has progressed.  We keep asking ourselves who we are, and what it is we're all about.

Understanding that we are people, made to be good, tasked with having oversight over all of creation, and that we fell from grace, that's not only important to know, but that setup explains almost everything else that we see around us.  We think we're pretty well okay, but keep on getting into trouble.  We think that the world is improving, but people are still petty, bitter and dangerous.  We feel like things should be better than they are, and we are surprised that they aren't.  Though we shouldn't be.  The creation account has already set that up for us.  People were created good, fell from grace, and became sinful people, passing sin down from parents to children this entire time.  There is no substitute for this, for understanding this element of the human condition that makes everything else make sense.  Everything you see around you is the payoff for this setup.

Now, the thing is, the creation account tells us what we need to know about the human condition and the human situation.  But what it doesn't do, of course, is to go into great detail about what it is that God did to create everything.  It tells us that he told the earth to bring forth plants, but the scriptures don't tell us exactly how that happened, nor what it looked like.  And for good reason.  Are you looking into the scriptures to find a blow by blow of names and dates and facts and figures?  No, of course you're not.  And do you know how I know?  Because you know certain Biblical stories pretty well, don't you.  You know the Biblical account of creation, of Cain and Abel. You know the story of the flood, and Noah with the Ark.  But do you know what happens between those two things?  Let me share Genesis 5 with you.

Did you read all that?  I bet you didn't.  I will wager that you skimmed that at best, even if you did click the link . I would wager that if you looked at that link, you rolled your eyes, and decided not to read it too terribly deeply.  Funny, isn't it? The part of Genesis that does what you say you want, tells you names and dates and numbers, and you skip it to 'get to the good parts.'  The good parts like what it means to be human.

Now,  the massive numbers of humans stacked up here are what we skip over, and as you know, it comes up a couple of times.  The begats, the numbers, the bits you skip.  But these parts are incredibly important, because they tell you who you are.  For it isn't just this part in Genesis that tells you who all the generations of people were all the way up to Noah.  Instead, you get this in the New Testament as well.  And in the New Testament, it traces the ancestry, the family tree of Jesus all the way back to Adam.  The parts that you skip tell you something really important about not jus who you are, but who Jesus is.  And Jesus' family tree goes all the way back to the beginning, back to Adam, back to the garden.  This is the family that Jesus came to save.

Remember how I said that the setup leads to they payoff? Well, this is it.  If the setup is that we were created, that the garden was made when God created everything, that we were formed as good and then fell, and that tells us what we need to know about who we are and what we're all about.  And then in the New Testament, when it tells us about the work of Christ, it tells us that he took on flesh and dwelt among us.  He took on flesh to bear our sin and be our savior.  He took on flesh, and was the flesh of a very particular family.  Your family.  If Christ goes all the way back to Adam, if the savior of the world goes back to one particular family, it's worth noting that he died to save that family, and that it's your family.

Have a hard time believing all this?  This is where the third part of the trinity kicks in.  We were made by God in his image, then fell from grace.  And we were redeemed through the work of Christ, who took on flesh in your family to redeem your flesh and your bloodline.  And if this is tough, that's why we have the third part of the trinity.  That's why we have the third part of the trinity, the Holy Spirit who gives us faith, sanctifies us and makes us holy.  All of us have trouble believing all of these things, as we do with any hard concepts.  But this is where you get to trust in God, and lean not on your own understanding.  This is where you get to say to Christ 'Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.'  And this is where through your baptism, through the scriptures, through communion, and through the preaching of God's word, faith is created, sustained and restored in the Holy Spirit.  The person of God who knows that we are weak in our faith, and will need to be sustained in our belief. And because he knows this, he's not going to give us truth, and then just count on us to figure it out and to get with it.  Rather, he is going to give us truth, and then work through word and sacrament to increase our faith that we may find comfort, solace and strength in that truth, that our faith may increase and our trust in God who creates, redeems and sanctifies may increase.

And that's what Trinity Sunday is all about.  Now go say the Athanasian Creed.