Sermon Synopses - 2008

Sermons at Trinity are usually ex tempore, that is done without notes...Please enjoy our "Sermon Synopses" or short summaries of sermons preached at Trinity

Link to Sermons Synopses for additional summaries available from this year.

Sermon for Wednesday, April 30, 2008

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” – John 16:12

What are the things that Jesus has to say to his disciples?  And why can they not bear them now?  Fortunately for us as we read John, we do know what was said later, because we have the epistles of 1,2 and 3 John.  If we look to the epistles of 1,2 and 3 John, we find that the Spirit has many things to say about love, things to say that are at once beautiful and hard to bear.  Beautiful, because in the Johannine writings  we hear that God believes us capable of great love, hard to bear because we hear how difficult it is to love.  The epistles of John connect loving with 1)  a complete turning away from the things of this world, 2) a close adherence to belief in Jesus as the Christ, and 3) a vigilant guard against false teachings.  Todd said that he never would have associated these things with love!  But here they stand in the context of writing about God’s love for us.  “Love is more difficult – and more rare – than we realize,” said Todd.  We usually settle for a second-rate, ersatz kind of love, thinking that in our human loving, we have found God.  But John tells us that a deeper love awaits, a true love that can be found only as we are faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, accepting, following, believing, seeing and knowing him.

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Sermon for Sunday, April 27, 2008
John 14:15-21

Todd began by telling us of spring in California, about the annual migration of the California grey whales from Mexico to the Gulf of Alaska.  He told about how, when the calves are born in the lagoons of Mexico, they do not know how to breathe.  Their parents must nudge them to the surface until they learn how to rise and breathe on their own.  “The birth process is not truly complete until the calves come to the surface to breathe,” said Todd

Todd told how we are now on our annual migration from the season whose primary symbol is water – Easter – to the season whose primary symbol is Spirit (air / breath) – Pentecost.  In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus begins to nudge his “progeny” to the surface, telling his disciples that they will need to learn to be a community, not just of the water, but of the Spirit when he is gone.  They will need to learn to “breathe” on their own.

Up until now, Jesus’ disciples have been in the water.  Todd gave many examples of water from John’s Gospel – John baptizing, Jesus healing next to the pool at Beth Zatha, “Out of the believer’s side will flow rivers of living water,” etc.  Todd spoke about the many disciplines of the water present in the first 12 chapters of John:  hearing Jesus’ voice, accepting Jesus’ invitation to “come and see,” following, seeing, believing.  Now, the disciples would be asked to take on a new discipline, the discipline of the Spirit:  loving one another.  Note all the talk about love in John chapters 13 – 17!  To love one another is the new “discipline of the Spirit” that complements the disciplines of the water.  Practicing these disciplines enables Jesus’ disciples to truly be “born of water and spirit” (see John 3).  The disciples’ “birth process” as disciples is not truly complete until they are born from above and “breathe” the Spirit and love one another.

Todd left us with an image from his surfing days in Santa Barbara:  One day while out surfing with his buddies, they heard a “deep, primal, 20-ton grunt” just behind them.  With their hearts in their throats, they turned around to see a whale submerging in the water, not far away from them.  They could feel the mist of its spout, and smell its breath.  Afterwards, they realized what an extraordinary moment it had been, to be so close to this mysterious and beautiful creature that lived below but breathed above.  “We don’t know how close we are” to the extraordinary life of water and spirit, said Todd.  Our first instinct to the nearness of this life is probably fear:  we fear what it means for us to be loved to greatly by God, and the response that God’s love calls forth from us.  “If we are faithful to our disciplines of the water and our discipline of love, if we feed from the riches of His depths and seek to fill our lungs with the air of the kingdom above, then we will be able to live lives that are large, beautiful and mysterious, lives with the power to transform this world.”

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