Why are we here?

The catalog of problems stretches on and on: personal illnesses and the threats of epidemics, arguments in families and communities, political wrangling, wars and rumors of wars, wrestling over environmental stewardship, refugees and genocide, and...and.

It would be easy to say “Oh, what is the use?”

Maybe we should adopt the adult equivalent of the children's chant: “Nobody likes me, everyone hates me, I'm going to eat some worms....”

Both Paul in Romans and the Gospel of John would urge us not to be so ridiculous, but instead to see ourselves and this tangled world in the context of the love of the Father for the Son in the Holy Spirit, that is, with the life of the Holy Trinity.

Paul has spent chapter 4 of his letter to the Romans explaining “justification”, that God gives us the gift of a renewed relationship with himself, in spite of our problems, in spite of the fact that we don't deserve such consideration.

So now in the subsequent chapter, Paul spins out the implications of this for our lives.

It is all about God; God from the beginning, God standing there ahead of us at the end, God with us even now.

Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Father announces the beginning of his love for us, all the things that are tied up in the word “justification.” It is Good News for us.

Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Father announces the outcome of his love for us, all the things that are tied up in the words “hope” and “heaven.” It is Good News for us.

Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Father announces his intention to be present with us through the problems and crises of life right now, through Spirited word and Spirited sacrament and Spirited life in the body of Christ, the Church. This too is Good News for us.

God from the origin, God from the goal, God with us even now; Good News for life.

To hear this, to celebrate this, to anticipate this: these are the key reasons for us to be together today.

When there is life-arranging or re-arranging news like this, we certainly want to be together, to share this with one another, to make sure that each of us has each heard it clearly not just once but are able to apply it to every life-situation into which we stumble.

There are also things that are not reasons for being here.

We don't come for a lecture in religious philosophy or comparative religion.

To see or be seen has always been a weak reason.

“My mother made me” will only work for awhile until it dies away with a whine.

We are here for an encounter with the Word made flesh, the Triune God revealed in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The gods of the Greeks were impersonal, aloof, distant, and unapproachable.

One tried to placate them with sacrifices to buy-off their irrational vindictiveness.

On a whim, they might zap you at any time.

Greek culture began with the memory of divine disaster, the irrational destruction of everything with earthquake and plundering.

Hebrew and Christian culture began with the memory of divine rescue and life made new through the Exodus and the Resurrection.

The God who meets us in the Lord Jesus is precisely God's nearness and caring, approachability, availability, and self-disclosure, from beginning to end, and every time in between.

That is what Jesus promises when he says that the Spirit will take what the Father has entrusted to him and declare it to us.

The Spirit will clue us in to the nature of God and build up in us as much as we need to know now about the outcome of this creation and its Lord.

And that is truth, Good News for us.

“I'm not religious, but I am spiritual,” some will opine.

What they are is confused.

They do have a religion, and it is all about themselves, what they think, and especially what they feel at that particular moment.

Feelings are notoriously slippery; they wander all over the place, and they are prone to slide into depression very easily, because there are so many problems in life.

What we need is that which is not dependent upon our feelings, but an encounter with truth, the truth that comes from outside of ourselves, the truth that is the Father revealed in the Son through the Spirit.

This is why we hang onto the three creeds and use one of them each week.

They keep pointing us to God as the ground and basis for our lives.

--The Apostles' Creed that reminds us of our Baptism into the Body of Christ and the first time it made a real difference in our lives.

--The Nicene Creed which makes even more explicit that the center of life is bound up in Jesus and his revealing of the love of God to us.

--The Athanasian Creed and its origin in classroom arguments and its insistence that everything that is said of God is said three times for each member of the Trinity.

They are proclamation of truth, not feelings.

But we are impatient, we'd like to know more, now.

But Paul indicates that God's answer is still “not yet.”

In 1 Corinthians 13 he reminds us that in God's good time faith will become sight and hope will become experience even as love continues forever.

Today to the Romans, Paul uses the same trio of faith, hope, and love to encourage us that although we do not have everything now, we will have enough clarity to live, to love, and to serve.

And this is good news for us.

In the climactic scene in the movie A Few Good Men, the prosecutor demands “I want the truth!”

The guilty and disdainful witness retorts, “You can't handle the truth!”

The point of things this day is that we can handle the truth.

We can hear it in the Word, receive it in the Sacraments, and experience it in the community of the church.

Thanks be to God!

It is all about God; God from the beginning, God standing there ahead of us at the end, God with us presently.

God from the origin, God from the goal, God with us even now; Good News for life.

God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.