Shalom Starts in the Trinity

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[0:00] right back there. So our reading for the sermon today is 2 Corinthians 13, and that's verses 11 through 14. It's the very end of both letters to the Corinthians from the Apostle Paul. And again, I want to say a little bit about the day that we're in. We're observing in the liturgical calendar, we're observing Holy Trinity Sunday. It's the week after Pentecost, and it kind of makes sense because last week we were introduced to the Holy Spirit in a major way, in a new way. He actually finally appears on the scene after Jesus leaves so that he can give power to do work for the apostles, to speak in other languages, and then to help them preach and go out into the world and give second chances and go and actually serve even unto the point of their own death. And so they were totally inspired by the Spirit to go do that. But then we're left with this question. Okay, now, thank you, Bible, you have introduced to us God the Father, you've introduced to us God the Son, Jesus Christ, now you've introduced to us God the Holy Spirit, and what are we to make of this? Which one of you is really the God that we're supposed to worship? And so over time, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity has been developed by the church,

[1:13] but it's a scriptural doctrine, and that's important for you to remember. It has a biblical basis. It's mysterious, and it's paradoxical. We say that the God is God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, one God, but three persons of the Trinity. And there's more, there's a much longer way of describing it, and really it is both mysterious and paradoxical, but it's not contradictory, and that's an important distinction. We mentioned that last time I preached on the Trinity, I think it was two years ago. One aspect of the Trinity that we want to see today, though God is, though there's one God in three persons, is that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit exist together as a community. And so there's this sense, even in scriptures before, especially in the Old Testament, that God as God in three persons actually has conversations in and amongst himself, which is interesting. And there's a relationship there. If there's a conversation, then there's a relationship. So there's community going on in the Trinity. And this community that God models for purpose, although different in function and what they do, and it's example for us of life together in harmony and peace. And this is what the Hebrews called shalom. Shalom is this concept of right

[2:40] relationships, relationships that are based on justice, on peace, where nobody hurts anybody else, where wholeness and fullness dwells. It's a very strong concept. We should probably spend a whole other time talking about what shalom means. But the Trinity models shalom for us, the Hebrew word for peace. And we're going to look at shalom later because in our reading, we'll see the word peace used a few times. Now, the passage that we're reading is from the second letter Paul wrote to the church in Corinth. And that's at the very end. It's one of the few passages in the Bible, there are several, and this is one of them, in which the name Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are mentioned. And it's a very strong concept. And it's a very strong concept. And it's a very strong concept. And it's a very strong concept. And it's a very strong concept. And it's a very all occur together in one place. And it was verses like this that helped the church to decide that there really was a Trinity, that they were going to put these things together and understand them that way. And that Trinitarian understanding of who God is has been very valuable to the church, especially missionally for the church to understand who it is and what it does. And that's also

[3:50] probably a topic for another day, because I want to focus actually on what's going on right now in Corinth. I don't know if you can hear that, but the chimes are going. It's perfect. The spirit is blowing. The wind is blowing. You don't see where it is and you don't see where it's going, but you can hear what it does. So I'm going to say a little bit about the church of Corinth just to prepare us because there were a lot of problems in Corinth, a lot of division, a lot of immorality, and a real lack of shalom. There was a lack of shalom in Corinth. And this is Paul's most painful set of letters. He really has a lot of correcting to do and it's breaking his heart. And it's short, this passage that we're reading, but listen to how the Trinity comes in at the very end and the gifts it can give and the community it may be pointing to. So that's what I ask you to listen for as we go to a reading. So let's go. Let's go to our reading, 2 Corinthians 13, 11 through 14.

[4:56] Paul writes, finally, brothers and sisters, goodbye. Aim for perfection. Listen to my appeal. Be of one mind. Live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints send their greetings. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for your word. We ask that you would add your blessing to it. In Jesus' name, amen.

[5:41] So I'd like to give a little more background on the Corinthian church. This will come in later, and it's important. Paul had actually lived in Corinth. He lived in Corinth. He lived in Corinth. He lived in Corinth for 18 months. We read about this paradoxically, not paradoxically, coincidentally, in Acts chapter 18. In Acts chapter 18, it says that he lived in Corinth for 18 months. And he earned a living while he was preaching. He earned a living making tents. So he had a profession. He spent each Sabbath in the synagogues preaching the gospel. And this is where we get the term tent maker. Maybe you've heard this term before. And young people taking notes, you want to take note of this. This is an important concept. You want to take note of this. This is an important concept in Christian ministry. A tent maker is a person who supports themselves in ministry with a trade or profession they have. And so they spend part of their week earning money, doing some kind of thing that earns them enough to live off of. And the rest of their week, they spend in ministry. And so Paul made tents during the week. And then on the Sabbath day, he went to the synagogues and he preached the gospel. And Paul has had to write two,

[6:45] actually possibly three letters. They're made, maybe a letter to the Corinthians that we don't have. It would be wonderful if it could sort of appear somewhere in some vault somewhere that we could have. That would be amazing. That'd be the find of the century, actually. But at least two that we have. And he's correcting them up and down. It's a very difficult set of letters that he has to write. And here's why. For one, they had doubted his authority to speak about the gospel. And so he had to explain to him where his authority came from. It came from Jesus. It came from the gospel. And so he had to explain to him where his authority came from. It came from Jesus Christ himself. It came from his own encounter with Jesus. It came from other leaders giving him some authority. They questioned his motives. And they questioned his financial dealings. They had fallen under the sway of false teachers. And they had compared Paul unfavorably to other teachers. They had, and this is sad, they had rampant and uncorrected immorality in the body. And they, either lacked the courage or the wisdom to deal with it appropriately. And so there was open sin in the congregation. And they were powerless on some level to address it and to deal with it in

[8:01] a constructive way. And that's a challenge for every church. And Paul was giving them advice on how to deal with that. There were divisions in the church. And some of them were on economic lines. And so that's just, that's the list right there. It's pretty bad. I mean, if you, I'm going to say this, Foothill were doing a lot better than the church in Corinth. We really are. You know, it's, praise God, if this church was acting like the church in Corinth, I don't know. It would be a very uphill battle for all the leaders of this church to bring things back into the correct way. But we have the scriptures that we draw on. And the scriptures describe for us what a healthy Christian community looks like. And some of that comes from the church. And so, you know, the writing of Paul in this letter. One example that Paul gives them is that he had heard that the way they took communion together was wrong.

[9:04] Some had wealth and were able to bring food. And they, so they fed themselves at communion. They bring their own food. They bring their own cup. But others brought none because they were poor. And then it says that some of them got drunk. They brought enough wine for everybody, but evidently they drank it all themselves. And so they were getting drunk at communion. This is a problem. So unlike our potlucks where we always share with someone who can't bring something or didn't bring something, these are, these, the things that they were doing are something that I would call a not luck. Not a potluck, but a not luck. If you didn't bring anything, you were out of luck. The rich did not share with the poor. And so, you know, the Bible says that the rich did not share with the poor. And this is the communion meal that they were having with each other. The meal, which was to bring people together, became a way to highlight the differences between them. Isn't that interesting? That's a real problem. I'll tell you, I visited a historic church in Norway once, and they were showing us around the church and there's all sorts of interesting things going on in there. But you notice that all the pews had names on them. So

[10:18] I was walking in the church and the tour guide was saying, you may be wondering how they decided who got which pews. Well, it turns out that the families with the biggest farm got the front pews. And as you went further back in the church, it was for families with smaller and smaller farms until the way back you got to just laborers who had no farm, no property whatsoever. And so that's how the church had a seating chart in Norway in the 1800s or so. And in my mind, I think, how did this happen? I mean, we wouldn't do that. If we were to do that now, I don't know what we would do. We would maybe ask you to bring a copy of your most recent tax return with you. And we would kind of look at that one line that has your adjusted gross income. And we'd make an order list and we would let you sit in the pews in that order so that everybody would know who was the richest among us. But we would never do that, partly because of what Paul said. Oh, we would never do that. And I shouldn't point too hard at this church in Norway or this church in Corinth because every church in every season has challenges and makes mistakes. But how could anyone read the Bible and think this was a smart way to run the church?

[11:38] You know, I think sometimes the point of wealth, after a certain point, it's not about the need to provide for yourself and your family because you have more than enough. And I think that's what's going to be the point of wealth for several lifetimes. I think it's to see how much more wealth somebody has than somebody else. And you turn that difference then into a privilege.

[11:58] And I think with the amount of wealth that we have in this country, I think that's a lot of it. There definitely are people who have no wealth. But there's people who have more wealth than they'll ever know what to do with. One simple example of this, and you've experienced it, I'm sure, is when you get on and off an airplane. You know who gets on the airplane first besides people in wheelchairs and families with crying babies and things like that? It's people in first class. And when the plane parks again at the destination, who gets off first so they don't have to wait in this cramped little cabin while everybody's grabbing bags from above? It's the people in first class. They get to go off first too because they're in first class, not last class. You notice they call it coach class. If they were honest, they would call it last class or something like that. But if they were honest, they would call it horrible, like worst class. That would actually be, honestly, that's how I experience it. It's worst class. Like, I don't have any leg room at all. And I get less and less every year, it seems.

[12:58] Now, here's a confession, though not really a confession, is I have flown first class many, many, many times. And I loved it. I loved it. But I never paid once for a first class ticket. I used to work for something that doesn't matter.

[13:22] I remember flying for some flying for some flying for some flying for some flying for some flying for some flying for some nothing and i thought i had won the lottery and i couldn't believe how they were treating me even before the plane took off they asked me if i wanted a drink that had never happened to me in my entire life i got off the plane first when we landed the food was better the seat was bigger there was more leg room the the people were kind of nicer to you i don't know if there's like a setting on the flight attendant like a switch on their back that's like first class be nice worst class be just kind of you know sorry for all the flight attendants out there you're just doing your job i know but clearly you know you get you get a difference even from the personnel on the plane when you're sitting in first class they they're just a lot nicer they have a lot more time for you um the first class cabin on the 747s from minneapolis to london it used to have an ice sculpture on it every single plane had an ice sculpture on it every single plane had a on it the whole way there, the whole way back. That was before my time, so I never got to see the ice sculpture. But they realized that every pound of weight

[14:51] that they brought along cost them so much more fuel, so they stopped doing that. But first class was still great. They treated you well. And I liked it when it was free. It's not worth hundreds of dollars more for all of that. Not to me. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't pay. I mean, I like getting off first, but I wouldn't pay extra for that necessarily. I guess I'm a frugal person.

[15:20] But here's the thing. The real thing is you feel like royalty. You feel, especially when you get on and off the plane, when you're first and you're before everyone else, and you walk in to ease and comfort, and they cram in way behind you. And they're there. And you're resting. And you're resting. And you're resting. And you're resting. the point, and this is the point Paul's making with the Corinthians about their meal, is that we have these privileges that we know of, and we enjoy them. And we have some privileges that we don't even know of unless we think about them a little bit. And we enjoy those too, even if we don't quite know that we have them. And that's true of wealth. It's true of social position. It's true of race. It's true of gender. It's true of all sorts of things. And there are some people who are sitting in the front row all the time, and there are some people who are sitting in the back row all the time. And Paul is looking at something like that in Corinth, and he's saying that is not good. Those of you with wealth are humiliating those who have none, and that's appropriate. That is not a problem. That is not shalom. That is not justice. That is not the community that the church is to look like. So Paul is angry, and Paul is confronting a church that has gone astray.

[17:18] These letters to the Corinthians are so interesting. I think maybe in a few weeks we may have to start a whole sermon series on 1 and 2 Corinthians. It's astounding stuff, because even though Paul is so angry, and even though there is so much that we don't know about, we don't know about the church, we don't know about the church. There is so much conflict and toxicity in the church, yet some of the most beautiful and powerful passages of scripture come out of these very letters. It's almost like a crucible. Something beautiful has to come out of it. Think about these really quotable verses, and I'm going to send a list of verses home that I want you to memorize. 2 Corinthians 2.4, 1 Corinthians 15.7, They are a new creation. The old has passed away and the new has come. 1 Corinthians 13, love never fails. And on and on and on. Christ was raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. I'm going to send you a list. It's going to be exciting. Maybe if we do some of these testimony videos, you can recite your memory verses from 1 and 2 Corinthians into the video. And we can play those for everybody. And the kids could do it too. They have their own memory verses. So we won't add that to their load.

[18:39] They get treats for theirs. So you'll get treats for yours. We have to be fair because we can't have divisions with unequal treatment. So what are the treats? Candy. Yeah, Skittles, Sour Patch Kids, candy bars. We'll get you. We'll hook you up with all that stuff. Promise. Okay.

[18:58] So all that is real. And this was a lot of prelude. But now let's look at our passage. Go ahead and look at verse 11. And I just want to point out what Paul is saying here. And let's interpret some of this together. Paul says, finally, brothers and sisters, goodbye. It could also mean rejoice. That word goodbye could be translated as rejoice. He's telling them that at the end of all this trouble, at the end of all this conflict, and all of his confrontation of them, yet there's hope. And so rejoice. And he says, Aim for perfection. Or you could say aim for restoration is probably a better way of putting it. Aim for the wholeness and aim for the completeness that should come from a life lived together in the Trinity, in the Spirit, in the New Testament church. Listen to my appeal. Be of one mind. And he's not saying be identical to each other. You can have different opinions. But there needs to be unity on one important thing, which is the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross of Jesus Christ, the movement of the Spirit, and especially the resurrection of the body from the dead that's based in the hope of Jesus' own resurrection. Be of one mind about all those things, and many other things will fall in line.

[20:18] And then he says, and this is for them, but it's for us, live in peace. Live in peace. Live in shalom. Live in shalom. Live in right relationships of justice. That are right. That are marked by servanthood towards each other. And the God of love and peace will be with you. A promise.

[20:41] Now, verse 12. Greet each other with a holy kiss. Not a kiss on the lips, I'm pretty sure. But probably on the cheeks. And you still see some sort of cultures do this. Even the French. It's very metropolitan, you know. I don't do it. I just, it's, you know, this is, I think, is one of those things where disobeying Scripture is over. Okay. Because it might have been more anchored in a cultural reality. We don't kiss each other anymore at the church.

[21:10] And I think over time, some people were worried about this being misunderstood or getting creepy. And so it stopped at least in maybe our little corner of Protestantism. We don't kiss each other. Interestingly, there was a church father named Athenagoras. And he warned that taking these kisses too far. Could lead to the loss of your salvation. He wrote this. He was really concerned that people were taking the holy kiss a little too, a little too lingering. A little too long. A little too much with the opposite sex or whatever. And so he wrote some stern letters. He said, you will lose your salvation if you take what should be this holy thing. And you turn it into something profane. Which is definitely a theme all over Scripture. That God does not love that. Taking the holy and profaning it.

[22:03] It's a sign that churches lose their way. So over time, this is one, two, three hundred years after Paul wrote this. Churches had to be reminded not to kiss each other the wrong way. Maybe they had to learn to stop kissing.

[22:18] Churches started making seating charts based on the size of your farm. Right? People lose their way. And we are always. And this is the truth. And this is related. We are. We are always looking for a way to mess up a good thing. We always have to be fighting against that impulse in all of us. And always be brought back onto course by Scripture. And so that's what Paul is telling us today. And even this greeting with the holy kiss is an example to us of a good advice that went wrong. And some, I suppose maybe some people ruined it for everybody. And now we don't do it anymore. And I'm okay with that. Hugs are okay. Okay. Handshakes are okay. And coronavirus, it's like, yeah, it's hand-waving emojis are great. Okay. Let's move on. Verse, we're going to skip. Well, verse 13 says, All the saints send their greetings, which is wonderful. And then finally, this is where we really want to spend some time. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. And so now we're getting to the actual theme of the Trinity. We're getting to one of those Bible passages that mentions Father, Son. And Holy Ghost all together.

[23:35] But it's related for Paul. I don't think it's an accident. I don't think he tacked this on the end just because it may have been a standard greeting at the time or part of a liturgy that people sang to each other. But I think Paul wanted to end this way because he wanted to point out that the whole problem of the church with all of its brokenness and all of its division finds an answer in the example, that the Holy Trinity gives us. Harmony and right relationship and shalom that we find in the Trinity itself, in the three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, communicating with each other. Each has their own purpose. Each has their own role. They work together. They are in unity. But they are also diverse in what they do.

[24:28] And we get each of... These attributes of each person of the Trinity as a blessing over their brokenness. So if you look at it again, you see that grace comes from Jesus, right? Isn't that what it says? May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ... And this is the grace that comes from the cleansing forgiveness. It flows from his sacrifice on the cross. There's forgiveness of sins. And so he's looking at this whole church and saying, you all have made so many mistakes. I've made a pretty long list. I'm sorry. I hope I don't have to write you more letters or come and have another painful visit with you and really have to clean house there.

[25:08] You need to repent. But also Jesus is there to forgive and to give a second chance and to give new life and new hope. So the grace of Jesus will heal your church, will heal your community. And the love of God will heal your community. The love that would give up his son for the sake of the world, the love that would sacrifice him. So dear. Something so dear to him to save the world from its sin. It's that servanthood. It's that self-giving. And wouldn't the meal look differently if people had the same mind as God, where they would say, I can share. The communion meal is not for me to get drunken. The communion meal is for me to remember the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and to share as a community this remembrance of what he has done. And finally, the fellowship.

[26:03] The fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. That's what it says at the final end of verse 14. And that's the end of the whole letter. And here we have what I call a fun challenge. It's a linguistic challenge. Linguists out there will enjoy this. It has two possible actual readings in Greek.

[26:24] One is that there is the community we have with the Holy Spirit himself. And Jesus talks about this. Jesus says, The Holy Spirit will be your counselor and your friend and your guide and your helper. So there's this sense that the Spirit is at your side somehow, invisible, but next to you. And he's with you. And so you have fellowship with the Holy Spirit. And this is your source of power to do work in the world over time, over a whole lifetime.

[26:55] That's one possible meaning. But the other is that the Holy Spirit creates, it's community among us as believers. And we live in that community and are brought closer to each other as a result of the community that the Spirit creates for us. So when he says the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, it can mean the fellowship with the Holy Spirit, or it can mean the fellowship provided by the Holy Spirit for us with each other.

[27:30] And this is... This is the great thing about these things, is sometimes it could actually mean both. And maybe it does here. I kind of like the idea that it does. So for me, it does mean both. The Spirit is your guide, your helper. He's your companion. You have fellowship with the Spirit himself.

[27:50] At the same time, this Holy Spirit creates community amongst believers. And so we have the fellowship of the Holy Spirit when we are with each other, when we share the meal with each other, when we're present with each other, when we sing together, when we hear the Word together. The Spirit is powerful when we work together. And we do work together as God directs us by the power of the Spirit.

[28:15] So I want us to now put this all together, and we are almost done. We have a broken and toxic and dysfunctional church. If they had called me to that church, I would have to pray long and hard before I would be their pastor. I would just... I would only go in... I would only go in there if I had about a thousand other people praying for me every day, because I think that's what it would take. It would have been a tough thing, but the Apostle Paul was definitely up to the task, because he was driven by the gospel. And that's all that mattered to him. And he could apply the gospel to every challenge that he faced. They said, well, you're not as eloquent as some of these other people. You're not as good a leader. You're not as good a speaker. And he said, I don't care. I don't have to be a good speaker. I just have to preach the gospel. That's all I have to do. And he was right. So he had the right personality to pastor this church. But it was broken. It was toxic. It was dysfunctional. It was a church where the wealthy humiliated the poor in the meal that was supposed to be a remembrance of the Last Supper when Jesus the Master served and washed the feet of his disciples. Isn't it funny how we can mess up a good thing?

[29:20] A meal that was designed to highlight the servant leadership of Jesus in just a few years became an opportunity for the rich to come to Jesus. To humiliate the poor and to flaunt their privilege over them and to get on the plane first and get off the plane first and enjoy how great that feels. That's really what it is.

[29:45] It was a church that has rampant immorality and no courage to stand up to it. A failure of leadership. I'm going to be honest with you. I think this sounds a lot like our country in the last few weeks. Doesn't it? People with privilege, people with power, using it against those who don't. There's wealth issues in this country. There's social issues in this country. There are race issues in this country. There are gender issues in this country. If you have another hour, I could keep making a list, but I just don't have time. We are divided. We are not living in shalom. We're not living in right relationships of justice and peace with each other.

[30:29] God is angry at that. And I don't think it's the last couple of weeks or even the last few years or the last few decades. It's been the last few centuries because this country hasn't existed before 1776, but this is all of human history in all of time. It's the whole world all the time.

[30:50] Paul is so mad. He is so mad. God is mad too. And I don't say this because it feels good to say it. I say it because it breaks my heart. God is mad at this world. His wrath will fall on injustice, and it will fall on sin, and it will fall on immorality.

[31:10] I don't talk this way very often, so forgive me. He calls us to shalom, but we fight and we kill. That's what we do. But the good news is that His wrath is not forever. He's showing us the way in the Trinity.

[31:31] For all the things that we think about the Trinity, and I imagine we don't spend much time thinking about it, we can think this. The love and shalom that is inside the Trinity is the blessing that God wants to give us right now. And it is the sign by which we are to live with each other. The challenge is there for us. We need to live into the shalom of the Trinity. Let's pray.

[32:01] Heavenly Father, thank you that you reveal yourself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that you reveal your servant heart, that you reveal the love within your own person. Lord, my prayer for our church, for our world, for our nation, for the inside of my own heart, is that I could live by this shalom.

[32:27] Amen.