Do You Not Realize?

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

Trinity Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

2 Corinthians 13:5-14

Theme: The Trinity and the place of mystery in faith

 

 “⁵Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? —unless, indeed, you fail to meet the test! ⁶I hope you will find out that we have not failed.  ⁷But we pray to God that you may not do anything wrong—not that we may appear to have met the test, but that you may do what is right, though we may seem to have failed. ⁸For we cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth. ⁹For we rejoice when we are weak and you are strong. This is what we pray for, that you may become perfect. ¹⁰So I write these things while I am away from you, so that when I come, I may not have to be severe in using the authority that the Lord has given me for building up and not for tearing down.

¹¹Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. ¹²Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. ¹³The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. ’

 

What place does mystery have in our faith?  Granting that there is a necessary degree of DIS-comfort in following the call of Christ on our lives, how comfortable are we with believing something we don’t readily understand?  I posed that question this past Wednesday night, and it seemed that at the time, the general consensus was ‘very comfortable.’ 

 

As you have heard me say before, and as we’ve found time and again in scripture, the Christian faith is about putting beliefs into action.  It’s not about simply understanding something to be so, or believing something to be the truth, it is about translating that understanding and that belief into something palpable, something real, something genuine, something … hmmm … measurable, visible. 

 

Christ’s whole beef with the ways of established religion in first century Palestine was that the two had been separated.  His main problem with the religious leaders in Jerusalem was that they had divorced their belief – their faith – from what they lived, to the point where it had seemingly become the norm, and not the exception to disassociate what the intent of scripture was from how one lived one’s life – and THAT was the accepted model of behavior. 

 

Last night I was called over to Riverside to the ER on a chaplaincy call.  The nurse who called me, who is a woman of deep faith, advised me at the outset of the call that the reason she was asking me to be there was to provide pastoral presence, not simply to translate. Calls like that come in not quite regularly, but sometimes frequently in a short space of time.  As I drove over, I was aware of the clock, and wondered how long I would be there, medical tests being what they are, and waiting periods for the results being what THEY are, I expected to be there for several hours at least. 

 

When I arrived, the young man I was seeing and helping with was in some pretty serious pain.  Within just a few minutes of my arrival, he seemed to go into some sort of seizure.  It was a fairly mild one, but still unsettling to watch.  My thought as I was holding his hand and telling him to breath – because he had stopped – was that there was something else going on here.  I had no idea what, exactly, but knew that he wasn’t well.  He came out of the seizure and was babbling under his breathe for a long time after that.  As I helped get him ready to be transported to the radiology department for an x-ray and a CT scan, I was explaining to him what they needed to do while he was in there – the images they were going to be taking – and he seemed to only be half aware of what I was telling him.  As clear as I tried to be with him, his mind was elsewhere.  There was something else going on there.

 

When the ER doctor finally came in to see him after he’d been brought back from radiology, he began asking him a fairly routine set of questions, in order to get a baseline idea of what he was dealing with.  The young man was still pretty much out of it from the pain and was preoccupied with other things, and try as we could, we were only able to get a couple of somewhat straight yes or no answers out of him.  After several minutes of asking questions and not getting answers, the Doctor, somewhat exasperatedly, said he needed to hurry up and get answers, because he had other patients waiting.  We were able to get one or two more answers from the man, enough for the doctor to order a couple of other tests, and then he was off to the next bay and the next patient. 

 

As I sat next to him, I looked at the clock again, and realized there were things that I needed to get back home for, but I also knew that whether I realized it or not, my being there in the room with him was providing him more that simply someone to translate for him, to help with hanging the IV bags or transport him to the CT room, there was something else going on there. 

 

But I had to keep reminding myself of that as the evening wore on.  A few minutes later, three bays emptied of their patients, and the staff was scrambling to get the beds ready for the next patient as well as keep up with the care of the patients they already had.  I stepped out and grabbed a sheet for the gurney in the next room and started helping the nurse put it on.  She laughed and asked me if I was getting bored.  I told her the man I was with was resting a little better, so I figured I’d make myself useful.  What ensued was a conversation about how God works through different events and circumstances in our lives to bring us to himself.  We weren’t just changing the sheets on the bed.  Something else was going on.

 

Wednesday night I began putting some thoughts together with you about how we are to go about the business of living in what is for us a very real, physical, touchable, concrete world, while professing a faith that by definition involves a belief in someone who is – at least to the untuned mind – long dead and gone.  Specifically, I mean Jesus Christ.  In a slightly larger sense, I’m also speaking of the Trinity; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  It is what our catholic brothers and sisters refer to as one of the mysteries of our faith.  It is something we hold to be foundational TO our faith, and at the same time we admit to not being able to understand it – not because of any lack of mental capacity, but due to our status as finite human beings. 

 

Our passage this morning, as several other places in the New Testament, witnesses the author signing off at the end of a letter.  In the farewell he uses what has become a benediction -- The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. Some estimates of when the letter was written put it around 55 of the Common Era.  That means that it was within 20 years of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection.  What is significant about that is that it underscores the fact that even early on the three persons of the Trinity were already being identified together – in communion with each other and infusing the life of the early church. 

If we back up to the beginning of the passage – this morning’s passage – we find Paul wishing the church of Corinth to spend some time figuring out what they believe – “Do you not realize” he asks, “that Jesus Christ is in you?”  

 

It would seem a fairly standard question, to those of us who have grown up around Churchspeak – or Christianese – the language that is unique to protestant churches – sometimes unique to a denomination – that has developed over the past several hundred years. 

 

But let’s put ourselves – as much as we can – into the brains of those folks in Corinth who were getting this letter and hearing it for the first time.  “Jesus Christ in us?  What does he mean?”  I would suggest that it is as valid a question for us today as it was to our spiritual ancestors in Corinth.  Do we not realize that Jesus Christ is in us? 

 

The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of the Father, and the Communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all. 

 

What we are asked to begin to understand – and if not understand, accept – and if not accept – allow for – the possibility that in Christ there was something else going on than a religious genius ‘getting it’ all over again after ‘it’ had been lost for several centuries.  What we hold as central to our faith is that Jesus was not only a man, fully human, but that he was also divine – fully God.  And beyond that, in his absence we have what is in essence his presence through the Holy Spirit dwelling in us.  In other words, we are, once again, not alone. 

 

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is chock full of hands on, common sense, nose to the grindstone get along suggestions, recommendations … orders, in some cases.  Though he does delve into some theology – the underpinnings of the faith – he is very PRACTICAL in speaking to the problems the church was experiencing.  But with all the practical applications he was giving them, there was an awareness that those were just superficial things, that underlying the actions was a worldview, an understanding of humanity in relation to God that was coming through in just those ways.  There was something else going on there.

 

The scans and X-rays all came back after being read by a radiologist across the world, and they were all negative.  What seemed to be classic symptoms of a kidney stone were at least initially disproven by a specialist.  The head CT’s also came back negative, nothing to show that might have caused seizures.  The doctor decided to keep him under observation for most if not all of the remainder of the night.  After explaining all that to the young man, I asked him where he lived.  He told me, and I wished him well, and told him I hoped we would be able to see each other again soon.  I explained that the Doctor was going to keep him for most of the night, and that I was going to need to go on home.  He extended his hand and thanked me for being there with him.  Started to stumble through it in English, and I laughingly told him to please talk to me in Spanish.  He said “You are a good man.  You were good to be here with me.”  I had wondered in the back of my mind if he would even be able to remember the night’s events, between his pain and the seizures and the pain medications, it seemed unlikely.  But he lucidly dispelled those doubts in our saying goodbye. 

 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

 

It means we go about this business of living out our faith in a concrete world, in a concrete way, in very real and genuine expressions of faith – whether that be expressed in the visitation of the sick, or calling and checking in on someone, or sending them a card, or sharing a meal, or asking a question of care in the full expectation of engaging in conversation, not just a passing greeting.  But we do all that in the awareness that there is something else going on here.  Just as there was something else going on through the life of Christ on earth, there is something else going on in our life as the body of Christ in Emmerton.  We are not just a place to house a food pantry, to collect money for our benevolvence fund, we’re more than a staging area for meals on wheels each January, we are not just engaging each other on this physical, finite, palpable plane of existence; we are breaking through this veil and bringing in the Kingdom of God.             

 

Let’s pray.