Why do Christians Continue to Sin?

You’ve all heard the story. A young man and his family, after much worry and debate, decide to visit their neighborhood church. They arrive a few minutes early to get accustomed to the sanctuary, to read the bulletin, to settle in and get comfortable. They walk in and take over much of an open pew about half-way up the aisle. They carefully place the children between them – sister, Mom, youngest, Dad, brother. No one is in front of them, no one is behind them! They get the kids started with the kid’s bulletins, get them calmed down and begin to breath a sigh of relief, listening to the background music, open up the bulletin and….

Here comes an older woman, who clears her throat loudly. “Excuse me, you are sitting in MY pew!”

And, depending upon the story, they either leave the church right then and there, or they all move to the row behind them, the kids are tortured because Mom knows that the woman will be listening to every whisper, and so they leave at the end of the service, never to return because church is so difficult with young children.

Genesis 2:8-9, 15-17, 3:1-6; I Timothy 1:12-17; Matthew 6:9-15 

Why do Christians act like the older woman? Why is it that almost everyone can tell this story from personal experience or the experience of a friend or family member?

There is another, similar story. The family attends a church for several months or years. Then one day, an established older member of the church makes fun of a child, complains about the cut of the woman’s dress, insults the husband, or doesn’t make a phone call to the family when they miss three weeks in a row because of sickness. And the family leaves the church, never to return.

A third story. One Saturday, you are riding with your atheist brother-in-law, the man who never has anything good to say about Christians. He has finally started to listen to you about God and are deep in conversation with him. You’ve just about got him committed to coming to church, stopped at a traffic light, when the guy behind you begins honking his horn loudly and yelling. You look up to discover that the light has turned green while your brother-in-law and you have been talking. The guy behind shoots his SUV around the car as your brother-in-law begins to drive forward, and the man flips your brother-in-law the middle finger. As the jerk pulls back in front, you and your brother-in-law see a huge Christian fish symbol on the rear bumper of the SUV. Your brother-in-law declines the invitation to church – can you imagine why?

Why do church-going Christians continue to sin? Why do Christians act like jerks? Why do Christians continue to hurt other people?

The George Barna organization conducts regular polls of Christians and non-Christians about religious and church-related topics. Over the years, many responses have changed, but there is one thing that hasn’t changed…while Jesus is admired by almost everyone, Christian and non-Christian, those same people have a low and declining opinion of Christians and the church. People love Jesus, but despise Christians. Do you have any idea why that would be so?

Well, naturally, the reason is that supposedly holy Christians continue to sin, to act in unholy ways. And it almost seems like we become more vicious the older we get. In fact, I can see it happen in the church.

A teenager or young adult, recognizing the evil in their heart, makes a commitment to Jesus and is baptized. For the first six months or so, he or she still has a problem with their language, with their bad habits, with their attitudes. Do you really expect someone new to the faith to have learned to control their tongue? After all, controlling our tongues is so EASY for us, isn’t it? And so we pastors often tell people – our churches are filled with people who are still learning what it means to be a Christian.

But anyone watching a new Christian sees them working hard on those bad habits, gradually walking down the path of holiness, changing, changing for the better. After about six months, they may backslide a bit, but generally speaking, they will continue a slow improvement for about five years.

Somewhere around that five year stage, they level off, like an airplane that has reached cruising altitude, and if they are like most people, they will stay about the same until they’ve been attending church about twenty years. Somewhere around that time, they will become very involved in the church in some leadership role – they lead a Sunday school class, they become a trustee, their husband or wife is a trustee, they organize funeral dinners, etc. And it is then that the rot most commonly hits them.

They now believe that they are essentially sinless Christian leaders who have practiced so well that staying holy is easy. In fact, they are so good that they begin talking to their friends about how poorly acting the young children are, how those young parents just don’t have their acts together, and about how the church needs to do more for the older people like them. They get used to their comforts and the respect that others have shown them, and so they begin to separate their holiness from their lives. They feel they have arrived and don't need to keep working on their holiness.

Holiness becomes something theoretical, to be talked about like students who are solving the cube root of 127, never applying to our real lives, but instead being reserved for the safe confines of the Bible study class. After all, everyone knows that we are good people, and therefore, whatever we do and say must be the actions and words of good people. And so, at first, our Saturdays lose their holiness and we honk at the slow people in front of us at the traffic light. And then, we start commenting to our friends in church about the three-year-old that laughs and giggles in the sanctuary, we look at the cut of the young mother’s dress and point out to her that that cut isn’t suitable for church, and we are simply happy when the children who sit behind us aren’t there to kick our pew. Our pew.

And then, one day, we see the pew as our pew, our bible, our hymnal, our carpet, our worship service, our church – and we have become the little old woman or man in the story, for we forgot that staying on the path of holiness gets tougher every day as we grow older, least we forget that God made the sacrifice for us! We did not sacrifice for God! – We simply returned what was God’s in gratitude. But we looked around at other people who walked different paths and we want what they have instead of what God has given us for today and in the centuries after we join God in New Jerusalem. So while we at first turned to God in gratitude, our envy of others leads us to now look at following Christ as sacrifice. And we become crabby to others.

Yet, as Hosea wrote, God does not desire our sacrifice, but mercy to others.

Martin Luther, the most important of the reformers who broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500’s, helped us understand sin in a way that helps us understand why Christians continue to sin. According to Luther, we must recognize that there are two different ways the word “sin” is used in Christianity.

But even before these two definitions, let us go back to the root of the word. “Sin” comes from the French word “sine”, which meant “outside”. When shooting an arrow at a target, if you missed the target, the spotter called, “sine” – “outside”. It is related to the same sense that “sine” in trigonometry means “opposite over the hypotenuse” of a triangle. It is the distance from the target to the arrow where it hits. “Sine” means “outside”. And so “sin” means we are outside of God’s will for us, we have missed the target, we have shot at too much of an angle - or perhaps we have tried to get too much of an angle?

So the first meaning, the common meaning of sin is a crime against God. A sin action is a crime against God. When we steal a car, a horse, or a pencil, we have sinned. We have broken one of the 613 commandments that God gave to people in the first five books of the Bible. Sin is a crime committed against God, against the king of the Universe.

But there is a more important use of the word “sin”. There is, you see, the “condition of sin”.

We are born in sin. We are all naturally born in the condition of being in rebellion to God. The condition of sin is the condition of rebellion. An infant is in rebellion – have you noticed that a baby is the most selfish individual you can find? We even compare selfish adults to acting like children or acting like babies. "You're such a baby!" we say.

And so, we all begin in the condition of sin. We are in rebellion to God, the King of the Universe. And because we are in rebellion to the King, we don’t really care what the King’s laws are. In fact, we might just break some laws just to show the King that we are in rebellion. And we all know that the punishment for treason, for being in rebellion is death. And as a rebel, we break laws right and left. We commit acts of sin right and left.

But one day, we meet the King’s Son and decide these rulers aren’t that bad. In fact, we decide to follow the King’s Son and now we are out of the condition of sin and the King declares us “not guilty” of the crime of treason, the King pardons us and we no longer need to keep an eye out for the King’s soldiers. We have become Christian followers.

But there is still a problem. We spent so long not caring about what the King thought that we didn’t bother to learn the Kings Laws, and so we are surprised to find out that some things go against the King’s law. And so it takes us a while to clean up our spoken language. We find out that we are not supposed to have piercings or tattoos and we are worried and ashamed. We ask the King to forgive us and the King is happy to forgive us, for the King is delighted that we are no longer in rebellion, but are trying to follow His Son. And so it goes.

We still commit acts of sin for the simple reason that we have lived so long ignoring the Law that we have a hard time following the Law now that we care about the King and His Son. Yet, if we continue to study and learn what the King desires, we will commit less and less acts of sin each day, each week, each year. And so, hopefully, we will grow closer to the King’s will for us over time. Yet, we may still commit acts of sin without being in a state of sin.

But there is another reason that Christians continue to sin. It is because of a certain complacency which has been generated because words change their meaning over time, yet the church has continued to use the same words over the centuries.

“Believe in God. Believe also in Me” Jesus said in John 14. In our modern usage, “to believe in” someone often means “to accept their existence.” If I believe in God, if I believe in Jesus, the modern usage implies that I accept they exist. So far, so good – for it is necessary to accept the existence of God and Christ for our salvation to happen.

But 400 years ago in our early English translations, and also in the original Greek, "belief" had a more comprehensive meaning. “To believe in” a person meant to put our hopes, our aspirations, our trust in that person, just as in modern America people will believe in one or another politician. In the 2016 election, there were people who believed in Bernie Sanders, who believed that Bernie would transform the country, that he could be trusted, that his program was transformative, critical, and correct. In the same way, other people believed in Donald Trump, believing that Trump would transform the country, that he could be trusted, that his program was transformative, critical, and correct. Likewise Hillary Clinton, many people believed in her, that she would transform the country, that she could be trusted, that her program was transformative, critical, and correct. We are to believe in Jesus at least as much as people have in these politicians. (You will also notice that there were people who did not believe in any of these politicians, for they had become either wise or cynical, ever hoping but not believing. )

When Jesus says, “Believe in God. Believe also in Me”, Jesus is asking us to do far more than just believe in the existence of God and Jesus. Jesus is asking us in our hearts to believe that He will transform the world, that He can be trusted, that his program is transformative, critical, and correct. When we are asked to “believe in His Holy Name”, we are being asked to believe that as God’s Son, the Son of God, Jesus has the power and the ability and the desire to save us for eternity, to change the present world, to give our lives purpose and meaning. It is far, far, far more than simply believing in His existence.

For if we simply think that a one time declaration of belief, even a one-time declaration of faith, a baptism by water – or even by water and the Spirit – is enough, then we are not reading and listening to what Jesus has told us He expects of His followers. For He says to believe in Him twice, but He says to follow Him eighty times.

You see, if we take the simple way, holding that a simple belief in the existence of Christ is all that is necessary – then the world will come back and choke out what little faith we have, because we will have fallen asleep, secure in our belief that Christ existed and we had done all that was necessary.

There supposedly was a man back in the early days of World War II when the income tax was extended from covering only a handful of very wealthy people to covering virtually everyone. Everyone was on board with fighting the war, worried about the Japanese and the Germans. So, wanting to do his part, the man said, “What do I have to do?” And the response he heard was “mail in your Form 1040.” So he put his name on the Form 1040 and mailed it to the IRS without filling out the rest of the form or sending in any money. He had done what he thought was enough – but we all know it wasn’t what was needed. If everyone had responded as he did, the war would have been lost. Clearly, much more was needed - treasure, blood, sweat, and tears were needed.

We, too, are in a war, a spiritual war. As Paul points out, we struggle against hidden powers, against spiritual princes and rulers of this planet – demonic and devilish forces. Just as a man or woman who has been through basic military training – and believes that he or she has learned all there is about battle, the man or woman who has learned the basics of Christianity still has a lot more to learn.

But you know, when that new private comes home for leave after basic training, he or she can still teach other people things about how to fight the enemy, how to survive the enemy’s attacks, and besides, that new private is much stronger than when they began. And so it is with Christianity – even a newly baptized Christian is spiritually much stronger than the ordinary lost soul, able to teach them something which may lead them to eternal life.

In the original Greek, the word pneuma is translated to English in three ways. Pneuma can be translated as Spirit, or breath, or wind – the word meant all three things in Greek. So when we talk about the Holy Spirit, we could just as easily speak of the Holy Breath or the Holy Wind. And the Holy Spirit is intimately connected to the pursuit of holiness.

So teach others what you know and strive to learn more about the path of holiness. Don’t sit down by the path and watch others walk past – get up and walk with them. For it is when we sit down by the path that our spiritual muscles begin to weaken, our spiritual lungs lose their spiritual breath, our spiritual eyes lose sight of where we were headed – and we begin to sin once more, complaining, gossiping, backbiting, despairing, hurting others – and ourselves – and walking as secular people without the Holy Spirit.

And so, if we sit down by the path of holiness, watching others instead of walking along, learning, working, praying, running with the Holy Wind behind us with the Holy Breath coming in and out of our spiritual lungs, we will begin to ignore the Spirit, like people who sit for a long time forget they are breathing. And then we will begin to sin once more. Instead, we must walk the path, breathing in the holy breath, with the holy wind at our back, listening to the holy Spirit.

And one day, in this church – and in any church – someone may walk up to you and say something totally out-of-line, something totally mean and nasty and insulting and terrible! And they will mean it! Worse yet, I might be that person!

So how do we handle this when someone is mean to us in the church?

We look at our friend, we swallow the words we feel like saying, and instead we practice what is perhaps the most difficult yet important discipline of the mature Christian believer: We love them and forgive them. We turn to the witnesses and say, “Wow. I guess our friend must be under some stress today. Let’s pray our friend has a better afternoon.” And then you do just that.

And God smiles, because you have just shown God that you understand forgiveness and are trying to follow the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who forgave us even though He had to go to the cross for us.

Give thanks for God’s love today. Step up and pray a prayer of forgiveness for someone who has hurt you. Take an opportunity to pray for yourself and for a friend, neighbor, or family member. Come to speak through the Spirit to the Father that sent His Son to die just for you…and me.

How Can God Be Three and One

One day, many years ago, two friends were swimming in the water at Myrtle Beach. Suddenly, one spotted a triangular-shaped fin approaching through the murky green water near the other friend. “Shark!”, he yelled to alert the other friend.

About that time, the second friend’s big brother stood up out of the ocean and took off the shark-fin hat he was wearing, enjoying the panic he had caused his little brother and friend.

Sometimes, we have difficulty seeing everything around us deep enough to understand what is going on, and we make assumptions based upon just what we can see. In the case of the three friends, the problem was that the two younger friends could only see what was above the surface. They assumed that a shark was under the surface, when it was actually the big brother playing a trick with that plastic shark-fin hat.

And so it is with the Holy Trinity of God. There is far more under the surface than what is visible – and what’s under the surface may be very different than what we think we see.

Genesis 1:1-3; I Peter 1:1-9; John 1:1-5, 14-18

This is the first sermon in a new series: Answering Tough Questions. During this series, I’ll try to be answering some of the tough questions we get asked about God, Christianity, and the church. And hopefully, you can take these answers and provide them to the people who have asked you these tough questions.

We have all heard the formula: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

We have all heard that God is Three-in-One, a Trinity, a Tri-unity. We sometimes call the Trinity the Godhead to distinguish the complex from the simpler God the Father.

But just what does this mean? Are God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit separate Beings, or are they the same Being?

Yes. Yes, they are separate, but yes, they are the same.

But how can this be? Even John Wesley, the founder of Methodism believed fully in the Triune – the Three-in-One – God, but argued that it was very difficult to understand.

Well, first of all, we need to be certain in our understanding that Christians claim all three members of the Trinity are God.

We don’t have problems with recognizing the claim that the Father is God. In fact, when we think about God, we naturally think about God the Father, the Creator of the Universe, who, as Creator, is outside the Universe but can extend into the Universe, like a man who builds a home begins outside the home but can enter into the home. And God the Father has a name which God gave Moses at the burning bush: “I am that I am”. In the ancient Hebrew the name (when we use the Western alphabet) was written YHWH. Now we aren’t 100% sure how this was pronounced because the earliest written Hebrew didn’t have a way of indicating vowel sounds, but scholars are pretty sure it was pronounced “Yahweh” which was often shortened to “Yah”. But the English translation is “I am that I am”, or just “I am”. This is why certain Christian songs talk about the great "I Am".

Notice that the name explains that God is the Creator. All other people and things are creatures – create-ures. God is THE Being. “I am that I am”. God exists because God exists. And that answers the question that sometimes pops up – “where did God come from?” God is fundamental. The great “I am” is not only the Creator, but is the creating principle itself, the creating power, the entire concept of creating.

Likewise, we have little trouble accepting the concept of Holy Spirit as God. The old term was Holy Ghost, but Ghost has come to mean an evil spirit to most people, so the modern term is Holy Spirit. After all, we know that God is a Spirit Being, and therefore if there is a Holy Spirit, then that Spirit must either be God or be part of God in some manner. In the Greek, pneuma means spirit, breath, or wind..

But many people have trouble accepting Jesus the Christ as God. After all, Jesus was a man who walked on the earth. And this was debated heavily for the first three hundred years after Jesus’ Resurrection. Here are some basic ideas that lead us to conclude that Jesus the Christ is God.

First, Jesus said He was God. Where? First of all, in all those places where Jesus says “I am”, as in the time Jesus says, “before Abraham was, I am” and everyone around picked up a rock to stone Him because they understood He was claiming to be God. This sort of mention of “I am” happens repeatedly, most often in the Gospel of John.

And then there are the miracles where Jesus heals people, brings people back from the dead, and also claims to be able to forgive sins. After all, by what authority can Jesus forgive anyone of their sins unless He has a special connection to the Father who declared what is sinful and what is not sinful under the law. Only God can forgive sins – which is exactly what Jesus does.

And there is also the time Jesus said in John 10:30 – “I and the Father are one.” Which is a pretty clear statement of what Jesus thought.

Now, we know that Jesus may have thought He was God, but that doesn’t make Him God, right? So what are the other possibilities?

He could have been a crazy lunatic who had read too much Scripture and walked in the sun too long. But His teachings and the loyalty of His followers don’t describe a guy who was insane. Instead, the teachings of Jesus describe a man who had deep wisdom, knowing far more about life and the universe and people than anyone else.

He could have been a liar, perfectly sane but lying on this one issue. Well, if so, it was the one thing in ancient Israel that virtually guaranteed Him a violent death. In fact, His claim to be God was ultimately the crime that He was executed for. He was killed because He claimed to be God, even in front of the assembled elders of Israel as it says in Matthew 26:63-66. And when He was taken in front of Pilate, John 19:7 reads: The Jewish leaders insisted, “We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of God.”

I don’t know about you, but somewhere before that point I would have probably admitted that I was lying – if I was lying. Maybe even if I wasn't lying...

But the third reason we believe that Jesus is God is that after all these claims, after His execution for the crime of claiming to be God – God raises Him from the dead. And there were over 500 people who saw that He had come back from the dead, with four separate written accounts and another five authors from the time who accept as facts both of these concepts – that Jesus is God and Jesus has been raised from the dead. We know that the Jesus movement suddenly bloomed and grew before 70 AD, just as the parent religion of Judaism was in a losing battle with Rome which resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD – and these histories are from Jewish and Roman writers, who mention this new religion. There is plenty of evidence that the story of Jesus being raised from the dead is true - in fact, the only real objection is from people who have already decided that no one can come back from the dead - which is the very reason Christians have labeled this resurrection a miracle - it is true that this is a special case, since people don't normally rise from the dead.

So, since Jesus claimed to be God, performed miracles, was executed for claiming to be God, and was raised from the dead by that same God, we believe that Jesus was correct when He claimed to be God, for a holy God would not allow His reputation to be stained by a liar or a nutcase. Jesus must be God.

But how can there be God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit – and there be only one God?

I’m going to give you a few analogies, but we must understand something. The Godhead is unique – there is nothing completely like God in the Universe, so these analogies will fall short. But they may each teach us something about the nature of the Godhead.

Let me hold up my hand with three fingers extended. Do you see one hand? Or three fingers?

To a certain extent, this is like the Godhead. Our answer of three or one depends upon how we are looking at the hand/fingers, whether we are focusing upon the hand or the fingers. Although, if we really think about it, we understand deep down that fingers only describe part of a hand, that there is no contradiction at all, simply a choice in where to focus our attention - the hand or the fingers.

This is an example of what philosophers call the problem of categories. Our brains are designed in such a way that we like to quickly put ideas and objects into categories. Apples and oranges and lemons and pears are fruits. Carrots and beans and cucumbers and zucchini are vegetables. But what is a tomato? We get confused, because it crosses the line between the definitions used by gardeners – to gardeners, tomatoes are fruits – and the definitions used by chefs – to chefs, tomatoes are savory, not sweet, and therefore they are vegetables.

Or there is the idea of a black swan. Around 1800, if you would have asked any scientist on earth, he would have told you that all swans are white. It was part of the description of what a swan was. But then, a species of black swan was discovered in Australia, and our category became confused.

Likewise, I went to a chili cook-off a few years ago, and there was a category for “white chili”. What do you mean, “white chili”? Chili must be red – with tomato sauce. But no, it turns out you can have white chili, beans and meat and peppers in a white sauce. A new category. And we get confused over the question of whether the Godhead should be put in the category of one God or in the category of three gods. And the answer, just like white chili, is that there is a new, special category for God. One God in three persons.

Yet the question of the Godhead is not just a problem of putting the right category on the Trinity, it is not just a problem of looking at things from two different views, it is not a matter of looking at the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as pointer finger, middle finger, and ring finger parts and the Godhead as the whole.hand, for there are indeed three different personalities which are each fully God – perhaps persona is a better word – and there is one Godly substance which unites them together as one. Yet it is not true that you can lop off one of the Trinity like you can lop off a finger – for the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit are each complete by themselves. But it is true that our willingness – or not – to put God in a separate category is critical to our understanding.

Another approach to understanding the Godhead is to look at the egg. An egg is composed of shell, egg white, and yellow yolk like God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and God the Father. Yet it is difficult sometimes to tell just where the white and the yolk separate, for at the boundary, they are somewhat mixed, aren’t they? And if you were to put the egg in a blender, the white and the yolk are impossible for us to tell apart without special instruments, but we know they are both there.

In this way, we can learn something about the Trinity – Although we often talk about the Three as separate entities – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – the reality is that the boundaries between them are not sharply cut and dried, just as the boundary between egg yolk and egg white is not sharply defined. And the early church fathers realized that there is one Godly substance – yet three Godly persona – which are perfectly in harmony with each other to the point where it becomes difficult for an outsider such as us to see the difference between the Father and the Spirit, for example.

We also know that a full egg is actually quite strong compared to just the shell of an egg. And so the Father and Spirit strengthen the Son. Have you ever noticed that Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel Chapter 14 that He must go away before the Comforter, the Holy Spirit will come? Almost like the egg shell must be broken before the egg white can come out.

Repeatedly, Jesus states that He is in the Father and the Father is within Him. There is an intermixing between the two that confuses us, for Jesus prays to the Father and says the Father sent Him, and tells us that He will go back to the Father – yet He also says that He is in the Father and the Father is within Him. They are together and yet they are also distinctly separate. Our category processor in our mind breaks down and screams for help.

Some people have tried to explain the Trinity as the Sun, the sun’s rays, and the warmth that we receive from the Sun. In this analogy, the Father is the Sun, the rays are the Christ, and the warmth is the Holy Spirit. This is more a functional explanation than anything, explaining how the Trinity acts together yet separately.

A related view is this. Imagine a water pump, a water hose through which the water flows, and a man who directs the flow of water. In this analogy, the water pump is the Father, the water is the Spirit, and the man directing things is the Christ. For we see in John 1 that “everything that was created was created through the Word” and “the Word became flesh” as Jesus Christ.

In this view, we understand that God the Father is the power source behind creation. The Word, the Christ who became Jesus is the wisdom that directs how Creation is made, and the Holy Spirit sustains the creation that has been made, doing the direct work of making and keeping the creation going.

This functional view makes a lot of sense, because we see Jesus finding a need – For example, Lazarus needs to come back from the dead. Jesus prays to the Father, Who is the source of creating power, and then Jesus commands, “Lazarus, Come Forth!” Finally, the Holy Spirit animates Lazarus again, allowing Him to come out of the tomb.

Yet we can also be led astray by this, for it makes us think that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are different components in a system, parts of a whole when they are much more intermingled. Consider this:

In Luke 4, Jesus is "full of the Holy Spirit". In Luke 10, Jesus is "full of joy through the Holy Spirit".

A modern functional analogy for the Trinity is based upon the idea of software. When we decide to go onto the Internet, we use a piece of software called a browser. Internet Explorer is one, Safari is another, Chrome is a third brand of browser, Navigator or Mozilla is another. That is the piece of software on our computer that asks for the information from a server – a computer located hundreds of miles away that has the webpage sitting on it. So a browser asks for information from a server and receives information back from that server and then displays it so we can understand it on our computer screen.

In this analogy, the Holy Spirit is like the browser, allowing us to easily communicate with God the Father through prayer. The Father is the Server in this analogy. Two pieces. But there is one additional piece of software needed.

When you decided to use Chrome as your browser, there was a special piece of software called an installation program that installed the browser on your computer. Without that installation program, you couldn’t ever use the browser to talk to the server.

In our analogy, if we want to use the Holy Spirit browser to talk to God the Father, who is the far away server with all the information on it, we have to first have Jesus Christ install the Holy Spirit within us. Jesus is the installation program, which came from God the Father/server, and installed the Holy Spirit, which proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Now when we look at this all in operation, we can look at an installation program as separate from the browser it installs, both of which are separate from the server. But we can also look at them as a software system, a single piece of software with three parts, all of which are necessary for everything to function well.

(As an interesting aside, you may be aware of the two classic Christian churches, the Roman Catholic in the West, and the Orthodox churches in the East. They split around the year 1000, in reality over the question of whether Rome was the boss over all Christians, or just western Christians. But the split was framed as a theological debate over the question of whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, or from both the Father and the Son. The Orthodox believe that the Spirit proceeds just from the Father, while the Roman and most western Protestant churches believe that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. Of such things are church splits made! Read this book for more information.}

So back to the Trinity.

Imagine that you have a company. The Company is run by three people. In a normal company, those three people would always be arguing and debating about what to do, how to budget, what the next priority is…you get the picture.

But imagine a company where the three managers are so much in tune with each other that there is never any disagreement. Imagine that whenever they speak, no one ever says, “You should have said this”, or “You should have said that”, because they all three are always in perfect agreement with each other, an agreement that comes from their mutual wisdom and love. Such harmony. Such love! This is the Trinity in operation.

Yet, the three are different in some respects. The Father has tremendous power to create, while the Son has the power to direct the creating process. The Spirit connects all Creation together, can provide perfect communication, and is everywhere present, while the Son can only be in one place at one time – the Father is everywhere at all times. Two are spirit beings – one is not only God but is human. All completely trust each other – and all love us.

And all are necessary for our salvation.

For the Father created the Universe and each of us. The Son came to earth to teach us by word – and by the deed of His sacrifice upon the cross – that the Trinity loves us deeply. And the Holy Spirit then comes to each of us, normally at our baptism, to connect us to the love of the Father and the Son, because the Son cannot be in all places at once, but the Spirit can be, giving us access to the wisdom of the Father and the Son so that we can make good, wise decisions in our lives.

Have you ever wondered why, after Jesus died on the cross, He had to return to Heaven? For He could have stayed. But He tells us that for the Holy Spirit to come, He had to leave.

For imagine this. If Jesus had stayed, the Jesus movement would have grown – as far as His voice could project. People would have gone to Israel to find Jesus, and then stayed, because they would not want to leave and wander the world.

The disciples did not leave until Jesus was gone and the Holy Spirit arrived, because the Spirit proceeds from the Son like dandelion seeds come from a dandelion flower, and the Spirit moves throughout the world where ever it desires to go – while Jesus never traveled more than a couple hundred miles or so from his birthplace in Bethlehem. As a human at that time, he couldn’t.

But the Spirit today is in Jerusalem – and London - and Nairobi – and Seoul – and Sidney – and Rio – and Mexico City – and Atlanta – and New York – and in Clarksburg, here today.

Give thanks for God’s love today. Take an opportunity to pray for yourself and for a friend, neighbor, or family member. Speak through the Spirit to the Father that sent His Son to die just for you…and me. Amen.

Why we go to church

One of the masterpieces of modern movies from 1997 is an intense R-rated thriller. It stars Michael Douglas and Sean Penn and is called simply “The Game”. It is a complex story about a multi-millionaire who is so intensely focused upon his money making that he has forgotten to treat people as people. He is sucked into a game where he eventually looses his home, his company, and his money and ends up poor, waking up in Mexico in a cemetery with no wallet. The R-rating is for language and a couple of love scenes, but mostly for the violence and intensity. Despite the R-rating issues, there is a lot to be learned from this movie about what is important in life. Or, you can learn by reading Proverbs…

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Psalm 125; James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37

Our first reading today is from the 22nd chapter of Proverbs, which is part of the collection labeled “Solomon’s Proverbs”. You remember Solomon, don’t you? He was King David’s son, known for being the wisest king of Israel, or even the wisest man who ever lived. He gives us a series of proverbs, short, easy to remember verses that give us wise advice.

A good name is to be chosen over great wealth;
favor is better than silver and gold.

The rich and the poor have this in common:
the Lord made them both.

The one who sows injustice will reap disaster,
and the rod of his fury will be destroyed.

A generous person will be blessed,
for he shares his food with the poor.

Don’t rob a poor man because he is poor,
and don’t crush the oppressed at the gate,
for the Lord will take up their case
and will plunder those who plunder them.
These proverbs talk about the trade off between wealth and a good reputation, about how to treat people who have less goods and money than we do, about the inherent commonality between all people.

You know, as children and teenagers, we all had a tendency to look for status. We looked for the approval of others – our parents, our teachers, our friends. Unfortunately, we often sought a higher status by finding ways to push down other people, those children and teenagers around us.

Certain things are so common in our culture that we take them for granted. As children, we or our friends made fun of the boy who had a speech defect, we laughed behind the back of the girl whose choice of clothes showed she shopped at Gabe’s rather than a fashionable department store, we giggled at the child who wore clothes too long or too short, we had special words for the child that was fat or skinny, who was short or tall, who had skin that was too dark, a haircut that was strange or new, an accent that was different, a response that was just a bit too slow or had trouble reading aloud in class or knew all the answers. Differences were weaknesses, a way to step on top of someone else. Above all, children and teenagers instinctively knew when another child’s parents had a different amount of money from them – if the other child had less money, that was a reason to pick on them, to laugh at them, to push them around. If the other child had more money, that was a reason to hate them.

Even as adults, our culture asks us to focus upon our status. Our teeth must be white, our hair must have bounce, our bodies must be buff, our cars must be cool, and our clothes be clean and fashionable. Our nails must be neat, our beards trimmed, our tats must be just right, and our shoes must shine. We have to live in the right neighborhoods, our children go to the right schools, and we have to hold the right opinions of our politicians. Our homes must be decorated and our cars must be polished while our back porch’s must have all the right accessories from The Home Depot. And we all play the game to some extent – but I often wonder – when is our nest feathered enough? When do we cross the line from having a comfortable house to becoming greedy, stingy, and selfish? When is our nest feathered enough? After all, Solomon tells us “the generous person will be blessed, for he shares his food with the poor.”

Solomon also reminds us of two things. First, “The rich and the poor have this in common: the LORD made them both.”

You’ve undoubtedly heard of Pablo Picasso, the Spanish painter that created so many works of art that are difficult to understand. Do any of you have a genuine Picasso painting on your wall? If you do, I’ll give you a $100 for it today. I might even give you $200 if it looks good. That’s because a genuine Picasso sold at auction in 2015 for $179 million.

But imagine that you could have an actual photograph of God? What would that photograph be worth? Would its value be dropped just because someone else had a photograph of God in a different time, at a different place, at a different angle? No, both would be of immense value. And that is what we are, for Genesis 1:27 tells us we are all created "in the image of God". For we are all images of God, special three-dimensional photographs of our four-dimensional God, the God that exists throughout all space and all time. We are all images of God, just made from different angles at different times, in different places. And thus, we are all worthy of the respect due a fellow image of God, for when you harm the soul of another, you are marking, cutting, or tearing that beautiful image of God.

Remember that $179 million Picasso painting? Of course, that’s nothing compared to the Leonardo Da Vinci painting that sold last November for $450 million. It is appropriately, a painting by Da Vinci of Jesus, called Salvator Mundi – the Savior of the World. How very appropriate! $450 million for an image of an imagining of an image of God. How much more valuable would an original image of God be? Billions?

The second thing that Solomon reminds us is that we are not to harm the poor or downtrodden, “for the Lord will take up their case and will plunder those who plunder them.” I’ll put it in the language of children. If you are mean to defenseless people, God will revenge them. A sobering thought, isn’t it, that the homeless man or addicted woman we feel uncomfortable around is protected by God.

But respect for the poor and downtrodden isn’t limited in the Bible to King Solomon and what he knew of God’s character. Our Gospel reading today tells of a time when Jesus needed a vacation. He'd been trying to take a couple days off for a couple of weeks. After the episode of feeding the 5000, and the Pharisees hassling him and his disciples about the way they ate their bread, Jesus left the region around Galilee and walked up to Tyre and Sidon, modern day Lebanon.

When he go there, he tried to simply take a few days off at a house, but people noticed Him, like Brad Paisley trying to walk through a county fair. A woman whose daughter was possessed by an evil spirit came to him and fell at his feet, asking Jesus to drive out the demon. And then, apparently because the woman was a Greek-speaking local, descended from Phoenician sailors, Jesus tells her, referring to the people of Israel: “Allow the children to be satisfied first, because it isn’t right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs”.

Imagine Jesus refusing to heal a woman’s child because she was not Jewish! And he called her a dog, which was definitely NOT a complement in those days. But it should be remembered that the people of Tyre and Sidon, of Phoenicia were the people who had worshiped Baal during the time of David. The Jews of the day despised these people, for they worshiped other gods and did not follow the law of Moses. Just as the Christians of today despise many of our neighbors who worship chemicals or haven’t followed the rules of our society. Jesus chose to challenge her, to see if she really had faith in Him or not. Was her pride stronger than her love for her daughter?

But this woman had spunk. She said, “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” She was willing to take the insult if her daughter was healed – and she was sure that Jesus could heal her daughter! She had faith that Jesus could do just that!

And Jesus showed her his essential nature, helping all who had faith in Him. He told her, “Because of this reply, you may go. The demon has gone out of your daughter.” And when she got back home, the demon was gone. Her faith in Jesus had been answered.

Jesus then took a long walk around the far side of the Sea of Galilee to the region of the Decapolis, which means the region of the Ten cities on the southeast side of the Sea of Galilee. A group of people brought a deaf man to Him for healing.

Now at the time, the Deaf were considered sub-human, considered stupid because they could not talk plainly, and picked on by people sneaking up behind them. But Jesus treated this man as a man, healing him as any other person, which astonished the people. The man wanted healing and that was good enough for Jesus.

You see, disabilities in this day were considered to be God’s punishment for the sins of an person or the sins of his parents – which is a view our culture still holds today, although it is buried a bit under the guise of science.

After all, don’t most of us consider that the difficulty in breathing that a man or woman has after smoking for twenty years is the natural punishment for smoking? Don’t we consider the yellow skin from cirrhosis of the liver to be the natural punishment for a lifetime drinking too much alcohol? Don’t we even consider behavior difficulties, and the bad eyesight and deafness of a child from what we call fetal alcohol syndrome as a misguided punishment to the child because of his mother’s sin of drinking too much while pregnant? Don’t we blame all sorts of inabilities to get along in society on the moral failings of the parents, and all sorts of addictions on the moral failings of the person? Don’t we often blame being poor on the moral failings of the person – if they’d work harder, avoid drugs, avoid alcohol, stop spending money on cigarettes, on gambling, they wouldn’t be poor?

And so, for many people, if a person is sick because of a moral failing, an addiction, a bad habit, a foolish decision, then aren’t we still saying that this is God’s punishment for sin and therefore, they aren’t deserving of help?

Isn’t this just what we are saying when we say, “let the druggies die?”

Aren’t we glad that Jesus didn’t decide to let us die because of our moral failings, for we have all failed to live up to God's standards - even our own standards of right and wrong. Aren’t we glad that He chose to give His life for us, to reconcile us with our Heavenly Father, to give us life?

You see, both Solomon and Jesus told us to help the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed, the disabled. For one simple reason – they are images of God, created by God just as we were. Each of us are worth billions of dollars or...we are priceless.

And God loves everyone of us. Enough that His Son died for us. If Christ would sacrifice His life for us, miserable people that we are…can we give up some time, some treasure, some kind words and deeds for the people we see around us every day?

I’d like to tell you a story that shows just how much God loves each of us.

Last Friday afternoon, Saundra and I went up to the Pittsburgh VA hospital because one of her people was having open heart surgery, and his wife was there all alone. We left about 12:30, hit major traffic just above Morgantown and again at the merge with I-70. Eventually, we made it onto I-376, down to the Fort Pitt tunnels, across the bridge and up the Mon River to Oakland, found the VA, but were on the wrong side. We called in, talked to a pleasant lady at the information desk, and were told how to get into the parking garage, which we did, driving the wrong way in a one-way inside the garage.

When we entered the building – a huge entrance – we must have looked lost, because no one was at the information desk, but someone pointed us to the back-up person. She directed us and we found where the OR waiting room was, but our woman wasn’t there. About this time, we both hit the restroom – 3 hours in the car is a long time! Saundra called her, and found out she was in another waiting room just down the hall. We found her – her husband was still in recovery, and remained there for the next hour as we talked about hearts and kids, dogs and homes, church and Christ.

Eventually, we were able to see her husband in ICU. He made it through the surgery just fine and she felt much better after she had seen him. We said our prayers and left, stopping at restrooms on the way out. Eventually, around 4:30, we moved out into rush hour Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, I made the wrong decision at a turn, and we found that we could not get back on I-376, but had to take the Birmingham bridge to the South Side, having to move out of the way of a turning bus because we had stopped too far forward at a corner.

Once again, crossing the bridge, we were in the wrong lane, so we had to double-back to head south along the Mon River. It was about this point, just as we had got back into the right way out of town, led by our trusty Google Maps telephone app on my phone, that Saundra realized she didn’t have HER phone. We called it. No answer, so it wasn’t in the car. So I pulled off, swung around, and we headed back to the hospital to find the phone.

I dropped Saundra off at the front entrance and went to the now-familiar parking garage. Meanwhile, Saundra went to the information desk and asked if anyone had turned in her phone. No luck. She went back up to the waiting room. One man – no phone. She check the restroom. No phone. She even went to the ICU – thankfully the woman was gone and the man was asleep. But no phone.

By this time, I’ve come in and talked with the woman at the information desk, and the backup information person at another desk, finding out what the plan was if Saundra did NOT find the phone. All the time, I’m calling her phone every couple of minutes. I settled in to wait for Saundra, because I knew she would have to come out this way. Sure enough, she came down the hallway from the elevators and then she checked the restroom. I called her phone again. Very shortly, Saundra came out, holding the phone high in victory as she walked past the backup lady and up to me at the information desk. Both of the VA women were clapping their hands.

Saundra came up, saying “Praise God, it was in the bathroom stall! God is good.” The information desk lady agreed, “God IS good!’ And then, her tone changed, and she said, “I’ve been dealing with a rough patch today.” “Yes?”, we said. “My 23-year old son died in a car crash six months ago and I keep wondering, ‘was he alone? Did he cry for his momma?’”

Saundra reassured her that Jesus was with him, that he wasn’t alone, and that Jesus would have said, “I’m here now – Momma will be along soon.” The woman took up that thought and ran with it. Her whole attitude changed from sadness to joy as she realized that it really wasn’t going to be all that long before she would see her son – and her son would not be waiting alone. She apologized for bothering us. I said, “We’re both pastors. It’s what we do.” The woman look up in amazement as God's amazing coincidence hit her.

Saundra said, “And God knew that you needed to know you’re not alone, too. Now we know why I had to lose my phone today.” And there was much joy, praising of God, and tears. After a few minutes, we took our leave and headed out of Pittsburgh, this time making it to I-376, fighting traffic at Washington, having supper while we waited for the traffic to clear, and finally getting home around 9:30.

We had gone to Pittsburgh to be with a lonely, scared woman whose husband was undergoing major surgery. But God knew that we were needed elsewhere. We ended up helping another lonely, scared woman we had never met before, a woman whose Friday afternoon was fast becoming a lonely Friday evening and weekend with many hours to go before any hope of comfort. She needed to see Jesus in the flesh – and late Friday afternoon, Jesus came to see her in our skins.

Folks, this is the reason we have church! It is so we can learn how to be Jesus in the flesh to other people. Jesus in the flesh to ALL people. It is so all people can learn just how much God loves us, not because of the good things we do, but in spite of all the bad things we have done and said. It is so we can change the terrible world around us into a world where compassion and love for others is common, normal, and expected because everyone knows that if they follow Jesus they will live forever, reuniting with loved ones some day, living in a society that is fair, finding joy in lost phones.

Saundra and I are just two people. Out here in this room there are dozens of people. On the Internet, this sermon will be read by hundreds of people. Imagine if each of us was ready to step up to praise God in the small things like finding a misplaced phone. Imagine if each of us were ready to respond to people who talked about rough places in their lives, in the hospitals, in the Wal-marts, in the Circle K’s, the 7/11's, the Starbucks, in the McDonald’s, in the workplaces of our lives. Imagine if we were all doing this every week, every day even. What would happen to the world around us?

The women at the VA did not look like us on the outside, they did not have our accents, they did not dress like us. We could have just treated them as human-looking robots, as dogs, like people so often treat people at information desks and checkout counters and McDonald’s order counters. But on the inside, they were children of God, images of God just as we are, special portraits of God taken from a different angle than we are, but infinitely valuable, just as we are. We try to approach people with this idea in mind - that all people are images of God. And this is the point of our readings today.

Our proverbs reading has this point – we are to treat all people well, because the LORD is the maker of them all.

Take this reading from Proverbs 22 and learn it.

A good name is to be chosen over great wealth;
favor is better than silver and gold.

The rich and the poor have this in common:
the Lord made them both.

The one who sows injustice will reap disaster,
and the rod of his fury will be destroyed.

A generous person will be blessed,
for he shares his food with the poor.

Don’t rob a poor man because he is poor,
and don’t crush the oppressed at the gate,
for the Lord will take up their case
and will plunder those who plunder them.

For like Michael Douglas in “The Game”, you may be poor the day after tomorrow. Will you have shown the world – and God - who you really are?