Sermon Synopses - 2010

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 Sunday, December 12, 2010
Advent 3
Isaiah 35:1-10

Isn’t the passage from Isaiah beautiful?

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
The desert shall rejoice and blossom…
Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
“Be strong, do not fear!
Here is your God…
He will come and save you.”
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
And the ears of the deaf unstopped;
Then the lame shall leap like a deer,
And the tongue of the speechless shall sing for joy…
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return…
And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

• Passage is all about restoration; preached to Jerusalem during the dark days of the Assyrian invasion in the 8th century BC.  The Assyrians had ravaged the land and now besieged Jerusalem.  Despite all appearances, Isaiah predicts that God will save Jerusalem and restore Judah.  Sure enough: the besieging Assyrian armies leave Jerusalem and return to Assyria to fight a more pressing battle.  Jerusalem is saved.

The reason we have these beautiful passages about restoration during Advent, right at the beginning of the church year, is to remind us that restoration is what our journey is all about.

• Our Christian journey throughout the coming year – and our journey throughout our lives – is all about restoration
• Indeed, the mission of the church is “to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.”

It is important to be reminded that the journey is all about restoration right from the beginning because there will be times on the journey that it may be hard to keep our eye on the goal of restoration; there will be plenty of times ahead in which it will be difficult to remember that this Christian journey, our mission, is all about restoration

• Difficult in Church
• Later this month, we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents.  What does the slaughter of the infants of Bethlehem have to do with restoration?
• Coming in January and February we hear lessons that tell us…
• …That we may be reviled and persecuted on Christ’s account, and that to be so is blessed
• …That we Christians are not about signs or wisdom, but about preaching Christ, and him crucified
• In March, we will have ashes smeared on our foreheads and be told, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
• In April, on Palm Sunday and in Holy Week, we will celebrate the events leading up to Jesus’ death on a cross
• It may be difficult to remember that the journey is all about restoration!
• If it is difficult in Church to remember that our Christian journey is all about restoration, it is also difficult in our lives
• In the midst of all the brokenness we witness, we ourselves suffer, we participate in, how can it all be about restoration?
• Where is restoration when we or someone close to us is having difficulties in their marriage?
• Where is restoration when we or someone close to us receives a difficult medical diagnosis?
• Where is restoration when we are laid off, or our child is meddling in drugs, or when someone we know commits suicide?
• What does all this – being reviled and persecuted, ashes, death and preaching Christ crucified…. – have to do with restoration?  It is so difficult to keep sight of the fact that our journey as Christians is all about restoration!

Yet here we are in Advent, at the beginning of it all, reading – insisting – that
The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
The desert shall rejoice and blossom…
Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
“Be strong, do not fear!
Here is your God…
He will come and save you…
And sorrow and sighing shall flee away

How can we be so bold?!?  Here in the darkest days of the year

• We can be so bold because of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.
• God was willing to be born into this world, “And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”
• Because of Christ’s Incarnation, becoming “like us in all respects save sin,” God has himself experienced every last bit of human brokenness and pain, and touched it so that we in him might be healed.

[Conclusion]
It is difficult to keep sight that the whole of the Christian journey is about restoration; there is so much that is broken and divided in our world.  But it is all about restoration.  This journey we undertake as Christians, as soon as we are baptized, is about

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
The desert shall rejoice and blossom…
Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
“Be strong, do not fear!
Here is your God…
He will come and save you.”
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
And the ears of the deaf unstopped;
Then the lame shall leap like a deer,
And the tongue of the speechless shall sing for joy…
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return…
            And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

• God is calling each and every one of us here today, and Trinity Parish as a whole, to participate in God’s working “to restore all people to unity with Himself and each other in Christ.”  Will you make room for him this Advent?  Will you let him enter more fully into your life? 
• If you are not baptized into this mission of the Church, I invite you to be.  Become one of God’s allies, working His purpose in the world in the power of the Spirit. 
• If you are already baptized, when you come forward to this table, consider that when we take this broken bread into ourselves, we once again make it a whole, individually and collectively.  We are modeling restoration in our very selves in this act! 
• And by God’s grace, we will take this restored brokenness – wholeness – into the world, seeking out more brokenness so that the wholeness that we have in Christ might touch it, and that that which is broken might once again be restored

Sermon for Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Richard Baxter

What is a Puritan doing in our proposed calendar of saints?  Weren’t the Puritans and Anglicans at odds enough that the Puritans left England and came to settle, among other places, here in Massachusetts?

And Baxter was quite the Puritan indeed! 

• In the introduction to one of his famous books, A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live,” Baxter wrote, “As that to the first sort of men, (the ungodly), I thought vehement persuasions meeter than directions only; and so for such I published this little book.”
• Listen to this sample of his “vehement persuasions:”

To all unsanctified persons that shall read this book… The Lord seeth how you forget him and your latter end, and how light you make of everlasting things…He seeth how bold you are in sin… how careless of your souls, and how the works of infidels are in your lives while the belief of Christians is in your mouths. He seeth the dreadful day at hand, when your sorrows will begin, and you must lament all this with fruitless cries in torment and desperation; and then the remembrance of your folly will tear your hearts, if true conversion now prevent it not. In compassion of your sinful miserable souls, the Lord… hath made it our duty to speak to you in his name… and to tell you plainly of your sin and misery, and what will be your end, and how sad a change you will shortly see, if yet you go on a little longer.

• And this is the kind of preaching that drew enough people that Baxter needed to add on to his church in Kidderminster!

How can we even consider adding such a Puritan “fire and brimstone” preacher to our (Anglican!) calendar of saints?

When saints distasteful to us – or, perhaps, “faithful Christians whose expression of the Gospel is different from ours” – are brought before us, we have the opportunity for learning humility.

• We have the opportunity to be recalled to the fact that our own understanding and expression of the gospel is but one way of receiving the gospel.
• Our way may be perfectly valid… and may at the same time seem completely at odds with another’s way of receiving the gospel, a way that likewise may be perfectly valid.
• When we are faced with a faithful – and in Baxter’s case, by all accounts “holy” – Christian, whose mode of expressing and living the gospel differs from ours, we are called to humility
• We are called to realize how much about Christ and the Gospel we still have to learn, how much we see only “as in a mirror, dimly” (1 Cor 13), and do not yet fully know the extent of the gospel.

[Sidebar:  To be sure, there are plenty of unorthodox presentations of the gospel out there.  1, 2 and 3 John, for example, are quite explicit about this!  Much humility, careful listening and conversation is needed.]

Though I may have found Baxter’s preaching to be distasteful – and I can sympathize with the bishops who barred him from preaching! (at one point, he was barred from preaching in every diocese in England) – if I can bring myself to a place o humility, to see past myself and my distaste, and to recognize the presence of great love for God and a love for souls, then I am more likely to be open to learning something new…and learning about the Gospel, deepening our relationship with Jesus Christ, is always a good thing!

I just heard this past week from Israel (remember Israel, from Nigeria?), and I am brought to mind of my own visit to Africa in the 1990’s where I encountered a very different expression of Christianity that I was used to

• Faith healers
• Bishops who looked a lot like chiefs rather than holy men of God
• Very different way – quite “evangelical” – of speaking about faith.
• Extemporaneous prayer such as I’ve never heard it

Not the way I was used to worshipping / speaking of the faith!  And yet, they were faithful people – extremely so!  I sense that I had and have much to learn from this expression of Christianity.  If I can but approach humbly and be open to learning, perhaps this is an encounter that can lead to growth.

Are there forms of the faith that you find challenging?  (“Evangelical” ways of speaking about the faith?  “Vehement persuasion” in preaching?  Extemporaneous prayer?)  If we are able to approach these with humility – realizing that the Faith is bigger than we are, that we don’t have all the answers, that we still have very much to learn – these expressions of faith have the potential to lead us further into God, who is at once familiar and wholly “other,” who at once is and is not familiar, and we might just grow in ways we never anticipated.

Sermon for Sunday, December 5, 2010
Advent 2
Romans 15:4-13

Hope: 

• Advent is a season of hope – just look at the readings:  Isaiah prophesies a time of restoration and peace in which “the wolf shall lie down with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid.” John foretells the coming of Jesus, the Psalm foretells a king who will rule righteously and whose reign will be filled with peace: 
• Advent is a season of hope, and you can see as well as I that we live in a world in which hope is often scarce.
• Where is there hope when we see a world torn by war?
• Where is there hope, when we see so much corruption and greed?
• Where can we find hope, when we are laid off or lose our job?
• Where do we find hope when we receive a difficult medical diagnosis?
• Where is hope when a loved one dies?

Reading from Romans:

• Romans is a book filled with hope. Gist of Romans:   “In Christ, you Romans have hope!  In Christ you Roman Gentiles have the hope of being part of God’s chosen people.”
• Three “recipes” in Romans for hope, one of which is today’s reading. 
• Today, going to look at three recipes to see where we might find hope when we need it.
• Chapter 5: “We know that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”  Suffering ultimately produces hope!
• Chapter 8:  “Hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what is seen?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”  We won’t always see hope; indeed, if we can see it, it is unlikely to be hope.  And hope requires patience – “we wait for it with patience.”
• Chapter 15:  “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.”  The scriptures are an ingredient for hope. 

Now, you may not think that hope is key for you right now, but the day will come when you do.  Take a look at where we can find hope when we need it.

• Two ingredients that happen automatically, when we are need of hope:
• Suffering.  Don’t have to go far to find that.  Know that when you are suffering, you have the first ingredient for hope.
• If you can’t see hope, you are probably closer than you think to finding it.  “Hope that is seen is not hope.”

• Two things we can do:
• Patience / perseverance. 
• Witness of the scriptures is that God is with us and God can help us through our suffering.  God was with Israelites in Egypt and helped them out of slavery.  God was with Israelites in the wilderness, and helped them through to the promised land.  God was with his people in exile in Babylon, and helped them return safely to Jerusalem.  Persevere!  Be patient! 
• Need help to persevere?  Ask!  “Lord, give me the grace to make it through this time.”  “God is faithful; he will not let us be tested beyond your strength” (I Cor 10:13).
• Scriptures.
• Yes, you can turn to them in time of need – and I am glad to point you to passages that may be of comfort and help to you.  There is nothing wrong with this!
• And I encourage you to read them more often than just when you are in need of hope.  For then you build up stores of hope as you develop your relationship with God.
• Sometimes it’s hard to see how the scriptures can be a source of hope.  Can either take my word for it that they are, or you can read them yourself!  The best way to find hope in the scriptures is to read more scripture, for then you start to recognize patterns:  1)  God is always present.  2)  And, if we ask, God will help his people through whatever difficulty we may face.  3)  And, even more, God can use any situation / suffering that we may encounter to deepen our relationship with him. 

 
I would leave you with a story of somebody in great need of hope.  But I know each of us has a story, in our life, right now, be it ourselves or another, of a person in need of hope.
 
Encourage you to take this person / situation into your prayer.  There are already ingredients present for hope, namely, suffering, difficulty in seeing hope. à you already have 2 of Paul’s 4 ingredients for hope.  You are halfway there! 

• Remain steadfast, and engage the scriptures.  “By steadfastness and the encouragement of scriptures we might have hope.”
• Pray if you need help in being steadfast.  God will not let you be tested beyond your strength.
• Encourage you to take up the practice of reading the scriptures.  If not, you can take it from me that God:  1)  Is always present to his people, 2)  God will help you get through this, and 3)  If we are open to it, God can use our present suffering to draw us even closer to Him.

It is my prayer for us that this Advent, God will reveal himself to us in ways that we might not previously have imagined – perhaps could not previously have imagined – had we not experienced the suffering that we have.  

It is my hope for us this Advent that – in spite of what we see in the world around us, in spite of what we may be experiencing now in our lives – that we will truly come to know the hope that is ours in Jesus Christ.

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