August 1, 2021 Sermon

 

August 1, 2021              1 John 5: 1-12               Rev. Peter Hofstra

          The human mind likes to be systematic.  We structure things, create categories.  New experiences are interpreted on the basis of those categories.  From what I understand, that is how memories are formed.  Our brains are not so much temporal vaults where we stack things up as we experience them, but rather, we have built up a store of memories, of comparisons, that there is a structure to them.  New memories come from applying this structure to what we remember. 

          That makes sense to me as a student of theology.  It is how we have sought to interpret the Bible.  We read through it, we draw out things that work alongside one another, and we seek to provide structure to it.  One of the most basic structures we have applied to the Bible is our understanding of God.  We have God the Father, creator of all, we have God the Son, Jesus, the star of the gospels, and we have the Holy Spirit, the centerpiece of Pentecost.  But when it comes to the Biblical revelation of God, it is not that neat, even though this is how we organize the Apostle’s Creed, how we organize the Nicene Creed.

          And this works for teaching and worshipping.  The call of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is our baptismal blessing, seeking the power of God as God is revealed to us.  But in a nation that is ever sliding away from the established language of the Scriptures, the ‘established’ language about God, to a language that seems ever more vague.  People claim to be spiritual over and against being religious, but without any understanding of the Holy Spirit as the basis of our Christian spirituality.

          What is the biblical take on the Trinity?  We can systematically build the theology of the Triune God, but is that how God has revealed Godself to us?  Because one of the things about the bible is that it is anything but systematic.  It is messy, God working through people with different agendas, with different points of view, with different foci.  If we are going to use the truth of Scripture, are going to understand the truth of Scripture, as an answer and response to the vague notions of spirituality that seem to be taking over what it means to be a person of faith in this nation, would be it be reasonable to see what the Bible itself has to tell us about how God has revealed the Trinity? 

          After all, this language is to be found in the Bible.  That is why we have our theology of the Trinity as a foundation to understanding our faith.  But God’s agenda in how the Trinity is revealed may be different from our desire to categorize and organize things.  In 1 John 5, all the members of the Trinity are clearly named and present, but I would argue the desire is to inform our hearts of the truth of our faith, and not so much our minds as how we might organize our faith.

          As we delve into our Scriptural passage today, I hope to better understand that heart learning, that priority God has for us in God’s Word.  So what is John writing in his letter?  In the first five verses of 1 John 5, John takes us from Jesus, our Savior, through the love of God the Father, to the promise that, in our faith, believing Jesus is the Son of God, we will conquer the world in God’s love. 

          As we come into verse 6, we get to what John wants us to understand about God.  Jesus is the one who has come to us, by water and the blood, not water only, but both.  I believe we are talking about the sacraments here, baptism and communion.  Jesus has come by the water, by the promise that we will die and be born in the spirit.  Jesus has come by the blood, shorthand that by the body broken and the blood of Jesus shed on the cross, we will know salvation. 

          Then comes the presumption of the Holy Spirit, the one who testifies to the truth of Jesus.  This is the Spirit of Pentecost, who IS the truth.  This is the Spirit of God that comes upon us and indwells us, the presence of God in our minds and in our hearts that points us to the truth of Jesus as our Savior, that points up the truth, that convinces us from within. 

          Now it gets deeper.  There are three that testify, the Spirit, the water, and the blood.  This verse has come down to us in some of the ancient manuscripts, according to the footnote, as reading “There are three that testify in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.”  But John is not trying to construct a theology of understanding God.  John is appealing to the direct experience of the people that this letter is addressed to.

          This understanding of the coming of the Holy Spirit is central to the founding of the church.  To answer the question, “How do we know it is truly real?”, that question of faith finds its answer in the Spirit.  We are not going to find our faith in historic truth.  Ultimately, there is no way to ‘prove’ God, or Jesus, or any of it.  The Spirit is a power beyond human comprehension, God’s guidance within us, to understand.

          And the water, the baptism, have we baptized so often and with such a repeated ritual that we have lost the real significance attached to it?  It was in the water that the Spirit came upon Jesus as Jesus’ baptism.  It was in the symbolic moment of water at Pentecost that the Spirit came down to us.  But that descent is not just a divine intervention.  It celebrates an event, it is the passage from death to life, going down into the waters of death and coming up to new life, it is the symbol, the sacrament of the death and resurrection of Jesus, which makes Jesus who Jesus is in the first place.

          And the blood, the Eucharist, hailing back to Jesus, who is the lamb of God and by whose blood the Father has taken away the sins of the world.  It is how we pass from death to life.  It hearkens back to Passover, certainly, but it is the meal we will celebrate today where we will take the elements, where we will reflect on the body of Christ broken on the cross, the blood of Christ shed on the cross, the death of God’s only Son that is the death for all humanity so that the restoration of life to God’s only Son is the life for all humanity.

          Then John tells them, if we receive human testimony, God’s testimony is greater.  Well, when we read this letter, we are receiving human testimony.  But where does John begin to talk about testimony?  He speaks of the testimony of the Holy Spirit, the testimony that is true, the testimony that he himself is speaking from.  But the human does not presume to insert himself into the narrative.  The testimony of God is greater because of the fact that God is testifying to the Son.

          But for John, the centerpiece is neither God nor the Spirit, but the Son of God.  It is not that either the Holy Spirit or God the Father are not important, but the testimony of both, that of the Holy Spirit that is true, that which comes from the Father which is superior to that of human testimony, that people have this testimony in their hearts who believe in the Son of God, who believe in Jesus.

          In fact, not to believe in God is to make a God a liar by not believing the testimony God has given about God’s Son, our Lord Jesus.  Because what all of this testimony comes around to, God’s testimony, confirmed in the Spirit and in the water and in the blood, this testimony is the promise of eternal life, given us by God, but this life is not free standing on its own, but this life is found in God’s Son.

          So it comes down to a simply split.  Whoever has the Son has life, and whoever does not have the Son does not have life.

          Being theologians, we manage to take all of this incredible life saving stuff that has been given to us by the Almighty, and we manage to make it sound so boring by calling it the Trinitarian Formula, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, or, by task, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.  And by no means am I saying that such organization is not important.  It caters to the way the human brain has been created.  And it is a good shorthand to get at how the All Mighty Being that is God has come down to allow us poor, sinful humans to try and get a handle on things.

          But the Bible’s order of precedence is pretty clear in this passage.  It is Jesus and Jesus and Jesus.  God is pushing Jesus, the Son, on us.  The Spirit is confirming the truth of God’s pushing Jesus on us.  The conclusion of John’s passage makes it pretty clear why.  Without Jesus, there is no eternal life.  And notice that the Son with the gift of eternal life is not simply the focus of the Trinitarian nature of God.  It is the sacramental focus as well.  Water and blood, baptism and communion, the means of grace commended to us by the command of our Lord Jesus, they point us in the same direction, to Christ as the giver of eternal life.

          In a country where people identify with being ‘spiritual’, with reaching out for something transcendent, something beyond themselves, while many would speak in broadly Christian language, the object of this spirituality is a broad feeling that things are better. 

          What the Bible teaches us, when we focus on the language of the Spirit, when we focus on the language of the transcendent, the language of God, is that there is a very specific path to the betterment of humanity.  And that path comes through Jesus Christ.  To recognize the desire for a better world presupposes that we acknowledge there is something messed up with this one (which there is).  For Christianity, that is the language of sin and brokenness, a division from the intimate relationship with God that we were created to have.

          And the work of God has been to implement the plan to bring us back into that intimate relationship with the God of love, which comes through the person of our Lord Jesus, who is the Christ, the anointed one.  And we can walk the journey to Golgotha, to his death, and the journey to the Garden Tomb, where the stone was rolled back and he was returned to life, as the journey we are invited to partake of as followers of our Lord.

          So the expression may be for us “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”, but the press of Scripture is to accept the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom salvation comes in the power of God the Father, the truth of which is guaranteed for us in our hearts and in our minds by the true testimony of the Holy Spirit.  It is Jesus, our Lord and Savior and Friend that is our starting point, the place where we, as humans, come into contact with our God, who, in divine power, came down to us as a human being, that he might lift us up once again to the relationship that we have been created for, the relationship of eternal life in the love of the one who created us in the beginning, a relationship that we choose, not one imposed upon us, a relationship of eternal healing, joy, and wonder.  The human mind likes to be systematic.  I believe it likes the promise of love and eternal life even better.  In our Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.