What is Trinity Sunday?
The Church celebrates this Sunday the blessed, Holy Trinity. God is Three and One. In the calendar, Trinity Sunday follows Pentecost. Pentecost was the pouring of the Spirit (The Third Person of the Holy Trinity) upon an infant Church. Pentecost enabled the Bride of Christ to be the instrument of change in the world. She has become the fiery sword that conquers evil and puts foreign armies to flight. Pentecost was the undoing of Babel. The unclean lips of Babel have become–by the Spirit– the clean lips of the messengers of Yahweh going to all the ends of the earth.
The Trinity seals this mission with divine approval. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have covenanted together to see that the divine promises are fulfilled. Trinity Sunday is the renewed call to go into the world not in the name of some unknown God, but in the Name of the True God who reveals Himself in Three Persons.
Furthermore, Trinity Sunday is the Church’s Catholic response to disunity. To believe in an apostolic and catholic Church is to affirm the Trinity. There can be no true unity without this affirmation. The Trinity shapes our catholicity. We are bound by it, and anything else is a cosmic betrayal. But beyond that, it is also the Church’s response to cults who thrive on denying the sacred Trinity. The Trinity is the Church’s proclamation that the Christian faith is not just any other faith, but a unique faith centered on the divine covenant made from eternity. The Father sends the Son, the Father and the Son send the Spirit. The Father loves the Son, the Spirit loves the Son and the Father. There is love forever within the relationship of the Trinity. In fact, love is Trinitarian. There can be no love in a God who is only One. This God has no equal love to share. But in the Trinity, the Father loves the Son equally, and the Son and the Father love the Spirit equally. Therefore, a denial of the Trinity–as the cults do–is a denial of true love.
Trinity Sunday also exhorts us to trust in God alone. This God who is love loves us and incorporates us into this Trinitarian love. Because He is love, we too are called to model this divine love in our communities.
We celebrate the Trinity because we are shaped as a Trinitarian people: to love one another and to enter into this eternal feast with God as head, and we as body.
What is Pentecost?
Many Christians know little about the Church Calendar, which means that many evangelicals will treat this Sunday like any other day. This Sunday marks the beginning of the Ordinary Season (not in the mundane or common sense, but the term comes from the word “ordinal,” which probably means “counted time”). This season is composed of 23-28 Sundays, and it fleshes out the mission of the Church. To put it simply, Pentecost is the out-working of the mission of Jesus through his people.
Some pastors–myself included–usually take these few months to focus on passages and topics pertaining to the specific life of the Church, and how the Church can be more faithful and active in the affairs of the world. The Pentecost Season emphasizes the unleashing of the Spirit’s work and power through the Bride of Jesus Christ, the Church.
Liturgically, many congregations wear red as a symbol of the fiery-Spirit that befell the Church. The Season brings with it a renewed emphasis on the Church as the central institution to the fulfillment of God’s plans in history. As such, it brings out the practical nature of Christian theology. Joan Chittister defines Pentecost as “the period of unmitigated joy, of total immersion in the implications of what it means to be a Christian, to live a Christian life” (The Liturgical Year, 171).
Pentecost as Spirit-Work
There is a Spiritlessness in Reformed teaching and worship today. Pentecost exhorts us to be spiritual (Spirit-led) while emphasizing the titanic involvement of the Third Person of the Trinity in beautifying the world to reflect the glory of the Father and the Son.
Calvin was known as the “Theologian of the Spirit.” This is hardly manifested in many of his followers who tend to flee from the implications of a Spirit-led anything, choosing a mental overdose of theological categories. However, the Spirit is crucial to the forming and re-forming of any environment. It communicates our thoughts, emotions, and prayers to our Meditator. The Third Person of the Trinity emotionalizes and intercedes on our behalf in the midst of our ignorance (Rom. 8:26-30).
Further, the Spirit draws individuals (John 6:44) to enter into one baptized community of faith. The Spirit, in the words of James Jordan, is the “divine match-maker.” He brings isolated individuals into a Pentecostalized body, a body that has many parts, but one Head.
So, let us embrace this Season! Let us join this cosmic Pentecostal movement and embrace the mission of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
Epiphany Re-Gathering
The Epiphany season is a babelic reversal. It does not contain the fullness of the Pentecost reversal, but it is the beginning of this undoing. Babel was meant to be a flood-proof structure and empire. Jesus opens the flood gates, so the Gentiles may enter in.
Christmas Sermon: The Marriage of Heaven and Earth
Sermon: People of God, merry Christmas! On this joyful day Christians celebrate the birth of our Lord. We celebrate the humanity of Christ, and we celebrate our humanity. To be human is not to shelter an insignificant body, but a body that will become incorruptible at the resurrection.[1] In the end of the day, we are Christian humanists. Because of the incarnation, we are truly human. We do not despise our humanity. We recognize that in Christ we are better humanists. Stanley Hauerwas writes:
Christian humanism is not based on the presumption that our humanity is self-justifying. Rather Christians are humanists because God showed up in Mary’s belly. We are not an evolutionary accident. We are not bubbles on the foam that coats a stormy sea. We are God’s chosen people.[2] Continue reading “Christmas Sermon: The Marriage of Heaven and Earth”
Are You Going to Church on Christmas?
My good friend, Steve Wilkins, has already written a few insightful thoughts on the subject. It is not hard to find churches all over the country cancelling Christmas Sunday. In many ways this is a theological travesty. The celebration of Christmas on the 25th is a long held tradition going back to the 4th century. The Church elected this day to celebrate the birthday of our Lord. However, many in our day have imbibed of cultural Christmas, wishing to indulge in everything else, but the worship of the Triune God. How is it possible to celebrate an ecclesiastial holy day by abandoning the ecclesia? This makes no sense.
But as churches and church-goers debate whether they should gather together, not forsaking the assembly (Heb. 10:25), many of us have made a clear commitment to honor our Lord’s incarnation on this sacred day.
It is not often that (see note at the end) the church celebrates Christmas on a Sunday. Indeed a rare occasion that should be viewed with even greater enthusiasm by the Christian community. This is a wonderful opportunity to re-iterate our loyalty to Christ and his Bride. Christ and Church go together. Attempting to celebrate one without the other is biblically irreconcilable.
But what are the cultural implications for such a view? What does that say about our evangelical culture’s understanding of the role of the Church? It is safe to conclude that this perspective is openly hostile to the early church and the reformation, who stated unequivocally that outside the church there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. The ecclesia speaks salvation to the world. By embracing the world’s paradigm the modern church is being de-Christianized.
When any excuse serves as a substitute to not be present where God desires his people to be, then God’s people have in some way ceased to truly rejoice; they no longer sense the psalmist’s joy when he said, “I rejoiced when they said unto me: Let us go to the house of the Lord.”
Am I going to Church on Christmas Day? As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
Note: My friend Randy Evans correctly observes: “Christmas was on Sunday six years ago last time – and the time before that it was eleven years. The next dates are 2016, 2022, 2033, 2039, 2044 and 2050.”
All Saints’ Day
How shining and splendid are your gifts, O Lord
which you give us for our eternal well-being
Your glory shines radiantly in your saints, O God
In the honour and noble victory of the martyrs.
The white-robed company follow you,
bright with their abundant faith;
They scorned the wicked words of those with this world’s power.
For you they sustained fierce beatings, chains, and torments,
they were drained by cruel punishments.
They bore their holy witness to you
who were grounded deep within their hearts;
they were sustained by patience and constancy.
Endowed with your everlasting grace,
may we rejoice forever
with the martyrs in our bright fatherland.
O Christ, in your goodness,
grant to us the gracious heavenly realms of eternal life.
Unknown author, 10th century
Thoughts on the Church Calendar
Fellow CREC pastor, Toby Sumpter, offers some thoughts on the Church Calendar as well as some helpful resources.
The Epiphany of our Lord
MATTHEW 2:11-12
And when they had come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down and worshiped Him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12Then, being divinely warned in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed for their own country another way.
And when they had come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down and worshiped Him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12Then, being divinely warned in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed for their own country another way.
DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT
Have you ever received a gift at Christmas that you didn’t understand, or that didn’t mean very much to you at the time? Maybe you received a Bible before you knew how to read, or a watch that belonged to your grandfather before you knew how to tell time. Continue reading “The Epiphany of our Lord”
Twelfth Day of Christmas
MATTHEW 2:9-10
9When they heard the king, they departed; and behold, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came and stood over where the young Child was. 10When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceedingly great joy.
DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT
Today brings to a close our celebration of the 12 days of Christmas. Tomorrow opens a new season; the season of Epiphany. On this day our reading reminds us of the marvelous way in which the birth of our Savior was announced to the Gentile nations. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and upon those who sat in the region and shadow of death Light has dawned. (Matthew 4:16). Continue reading “Twelfth Day of Christmas”