|
|
Baptopresbycostal
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
May 18, 2008
Trinity Sunday
Matthew
28:18-20
Well, it has
been a busy week at First Baptist, at least it has for the new pastor. On
Friday someone asked me how I was doing and what it was like getting acquainted
with such a large, loving congregation. I said it was overwhelming, frankly,
but in a good way—kind of like having your face licked by an entire litter of
Golden Retriever puppies all at the same time. It has been overwhelming,
but many of you have tried to make it easier for me by not expecting too much
too soon, by repeating your names over and over (and over!) again, and by
telling me your stories—where you came from and how you got here. It’s a good
way to get to know each other, and on this Trinity Sunday I thought I would
return the favor by telling you my story, or at least those parts that seem
relevant to this idea of one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit.
Some of you already know
that I grew up Presbyterian. It seems like a long time ago now but I still have
some dim memories of those days. I remember shining my sturdy Buster Brown
shoes before church. I remember studying a pink, paperback catechism that asked
and answered all the important theological questions. I remember learning the
Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed that we recited together in worship each
week. But mostly I remember that we talked a lot about God, or, as they
sometimes said it in those churches I attended, “Gawd!”
Presbyterians on the whole
are a highly literate people. They seem to attract educated, affluent,
professionals, and their articulation of the Christian faith tends to be fairly
cerebral. If the Presbyterians were going to pick a favorite person of the
Trinity, it would probably be “God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and
earth.” There seems to be a love among the Presbyterians for the kind of awe
and reverence that God inspires. I remember my mother sitting on the floor of
our bedroom when I was a boy, holding the hymnbook in her lap as she tried to
teach her six sons all four verses of “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise.” We
would lie in our bunks and taste those exotic words on our tongues, picturing a
God so bathed in light as to be inaccessible, “hid from our eyes.” And it
wasn’t only the hymns. In the words and worship and witness of the Presbyterian
church, God often seemed to be “up there” somewhere, watching over his people,
and over us—his children—with a patient, paternal eye.
But then, when
I was thirteen years old, I began attending a little Pentecostal church not far
from our home in West Virginia, and I got another impression of God altogether.
It started when my brother Scott was invited to this church by some neighbors
and when he came back he was laughing and crying and as happy as I had ever seen
him. I suppose I went out of curiosity. When I got there I found a crowd of
simple, mountain people jammed into that building: women with long hair, long
skirts, and a conspicuous lack of jewelry, men who talked loud and laughed hard
and gave each other holy hugs, and a worship band that sat up on the platform
playing drums and guitars without ever changing expression. But when Pastor
Tommy Wingo began to preach things got lively. His sermon was interrupted every
once in a while by a loud gasp, as if someone had just smacked him on the back,
and then he would let loose with a string of words in some unintelligible
language: “speaking in tongues” they called it. Once he got started everybody
did. People spoke and shouted and cried in tongues. Others walked up and down
the aisle with their arms waving and their eyes closed. Every once in a while a
woman would pass out somewhere near the front of the church, “slain in the
Spirit” as they said. It was like nothing I had ever seen in the Presbyterian
Church, but there was something about it that was enormously exciting. In that
little church the extraordinary Spirit of God was moving among the most ordinary
people you have ever seen. Coal miners and grocery store clerks and people on
welfare were being “filled with the Holy Ghost,” as they put it, empowered by a
God who was not “up there” somewhere, but right down there in that white
clapboard church on a creek bank in West Virginia. In the few months I spent
visiting that church I learned some important lessons and gained a deep
appreciation for a God who is not only transcendent, but also immanent.
And then, in
college, I got acquainted with the Baptists. It started in my junior year when
I fell in love with a beautiful Baptist girl from another state. She sent me an
application for admission to her college almost as a joke. On a whim, I filled
it out, and on a whim, they accepted me. So, in the fall of 1979 I transferred
from St. Andrews Presbyterian College in North Carolina to Georgetown College in
Kentucky, a Baptist school. I went to a meeting of the Baptist Student Union
during that first week where—as I’ve told some of you already—a student stood up
to make an announcement about a disco to raise money for summer missions. “I
want you to come,” he said. “I want you to shake your body for Lottie and shake
your fanny for Annie.” Everybody laughed, and I did, too, but I had to ask my
girlfriend later who Lottie and Annie were. Lottie Moon, of course;
Annie Armstrong, duh! Famous Baptist missionary women, revered as saints.
But not even Lottie and Annie could compete
with the Baptist admiration for Jesus. Baptists, as you know, are big on
salvation, and so there is an understandable emphasis on Jesus the Savior. Out
on the American frontier Baptist preachers used to claim that they were saving
sinners from the fires of Hell like you would snatch a burning log from the
fire, an idea that has persisted among Baptists and inspired a worship style
that focuses on the altar call, that time when people are encouraged to come
forward and make a profession of faith in Christ. Sometimes they are encouraged
by fifteen or sixteen verses of “Just as I Am.” Along with the need for
salvation Baptists emphasize the need for a genuine relationship with Jesus.
They speak of him as their “personal” Lord and Savior. Some of the students I
met at Georgetown talked about him as if they had just come from having lunch
together, and I envied them the ease and the intimacy of that relationship.
“What a friend we have in Jesus,” they sang, and indeed they did.
Looking back it seems to me that each of
these traditions that contribute to my rich Baptopresbycostal heritage
emphasizes a different aspect of the Trinity. If you painted images of God the
Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit on three panels of a large wooden
triptych and put it at the front of some universal church I could imagine the
Presbyterians gathering in front of the image of the Father, Baptists gathering
in front of the image of the Son, and Pentecostals gathering in front of the
image of the Spirit. It’s not that any of these groups would deny the
importance or the existence of those other aspects—Pentecostals talk about Jesus
and Presbyterians talk about the Spirit—but each of these groups seems to be
more at home with one person of the Trinity than with the other two. So, I’m
grateful that I’ve had the chance to spend some time among all three groups, to
feel at home with the whole of the Trinity. I can see that if I had only spent
time with Presbyterians, or Pentecostals, or Baptists the three-legged stool of
my Trinitarian faith might lean dangerously in one direction or the other. And
at the extreme I might find that I had little or no regard for one particular
aspect of the Trinity—the Holy Spirit for instance. While a three-legged stool
can stand even if one leg is shorter than the others it can’t stand on two legs,
and certainly not on one.
It was that kind of observation that inspired
the Athanasian Creed, the one that is quoted in our “Preparation for Worship”
statement this morning. It is attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria, a bishop
of the early church who seemed to feel a need to set the Christian record
straight on two counts: one, the divinity of Jesus, and two, the doctrine of the
Trinity. The Athanasian Creed is short and redundant to the point of being
tedious, but it gets its point across. Listen to the language: “We worship one
God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. Neither
confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of
the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the
Godhead of the Father, of the Son and of the
Holy Ghost is all One, the Glory Equal, the Majesty Co-Eternal.” It goes on
like that for several paragraphs before concluding with: “So there is One
Father, not Three Fathers; one Son, not Three Sons; One Holy Ghost, not Three
Holy Ghosts. And in this Trinity none is afore or after Other, None is greater
or less than Another, but the whole Three Persons are Co-eternal together, and
Co-equal. So that in all things, as is aforesaid, the Unity is Trinity, and the
Trinity is Unity.”
Probably even before that conclusion you had
gotten the point that the three are one and the one is three, but you may not
have gotten the point of getting it. This creed begins with the shocking
suggestion that unless you believe in the Trinity you cannot be saved. “Whoever
would be saved,” it says, “must believe those things that are common to the
Christian faith, and whoever does not will perish everlastingly.” And what are
those things? That “we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.”
Although this creed is not binding in any respect—not even among Catholics and
certainly not among Baptists—it is important that we pause long enough to note
that in the thinking of this early Christian pastor you couldn’t even be saved
without a proper Trinitarian faith. That three-legged stool on which you tried
to sit would tip over, and dump you into Hell.
Somewhere in the urgent appeal of that pastor
is the truth that to ignore any person of the Trinity is to risk great peril.
And yet we do it all the time. At my last church we tended to talk a little
more about the Father than the Son, and a little more about the Son than the
Spirit. Was it because we were embarrassed by the intimacy of close
relationship with Jesus? Was it because we were afraid of the unpredictable
power of the Holy Spirit? It’s possible. When I was visiting that Pentecostal
church as a teenager I prayed to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, but I was
more than a little afraid that God might give it in the middle of geometry
class, and I would jump up on my desk and start speaking in tongues. Being
Presbyterian seemed much safer. I could keep God up there, somewhere, in
Heaven, and not down here in geometry class. And, frankly, it took me a while
to get used to the “Jesus” talk I heard among those Baptist students in
college. They seemed a little too comfortable with him, a little too familiar.
It wouldn’t have hurt any of them, I thought, to show a little more reverence
toward God. But in both cases I can see that God was trying to get off that
throne I had put him on, “high and lifted up” as it says in that well-known
passage from Isaiah. I can see that through those experiences God was trying to
come down to my level where I could get to know him, was trying to fill me up
with the kind of power I needed to be a Christian. To resist the Father’s
movement toward me as Son and Spirit would be to resist the full, and intimate,
and empowering embrace of the Trinity. And so, over time, as I fell in love
with Jesus, as I opened myself to the Spirit, I gave myself up to that embrace,
and felt that I had come home at last.
Maybe that’s why Jesus told his followers
that as they went into all the world making disciples they should baptize them
in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Maybe he knew that the
fullest expression of the Christian life would be found where there was equal
emphasis on all three persons of the Trinity. I don’t think he would go as far
as Athanasius did: I don’t think he would say that if you didn’t accept the
doctrine of the Trinity you would “perish everlastingly.” But I think he knew
that everlasting life begins even before we die, and it begins as we come to
know and love God as Father, Son, and Spirit. I think Paul knew it, too, and I
think that’s why he says to his dear friends the Corinthians, at the end of that
second letter: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the
communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”
Amen.
|
