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C:\Users\Ruskin\Documents 2nd Corinthians 13:11-13 Ruskin Falls, June 7, 2020 Holy kiss, triune God, and peace. Pulaski Heights Presbyterian Church Trinity Sunday Preface These are the closing lines of a letter addressed by the apostle Paul to the church in Corinth. TEXT (English translation: NRSV) Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. (1) First, today, the matter of Christian kissing; then the question of divine tri-unity; then the appeal to live together in peace. (2) How many people have you ever greeted with a holy kiss? Do you even know what Paul has in mind when he tells us we ought to greet one another with a holy kiss? Here and in yet other places in the New Testament, it is written that we are to greet one another with a holy kiss – or as it’s called in 1st Peter, a kiss of love. And, yet, while we’re told in the Bible to greet one another with this exchange of kisses, it isn’t something we nowadays do. Of course it would be understandable if we had temporarily desisted from such a practice, for example due to the new coronavirus pandemic. There just are things that we Christians ought to be doing, that, under certain circumstances, we need to forego. Due to the present pandemic, it made good sense for in-person worship services to be put on hold for a while; and we plan to start back with in- person services when the time is right. However, we weren’t exchanging kisses before the pandemic broke out. Biblical though it be, this is not a practice many, if any, of us in the church ever took up or intend to take up. Even those most insistent on strict obedience to the literal meaning of scripture, don’t insist that we should all be kissing each other in church. It simply doesn’t bother Christians today – it doesn’t even bother those who want to take scripture literally as God’s words – that we no longer greet fellow Christians with the special kiss that we are told, in the New Testament, to greet one another with. This reaction to Paul’s words points to something important about how we read the Bible. It points to this fact: None of us takes every sentence of scripture literally as a statement to be believed and obeyed at face value. Literally speaking, the Bible tells us we should greet our fellow Christians with a special kiss. But few, if any, of us today are prepared to do that – or even to stop and ask what a holy kiss might be. And we do not sense that we are violating the gospel of Jesus by not exchanging such kisses with one another. And that means we don’t take Paul’s words at face value as words we are obligated to believe and obey. And that means: We don’t really accept that every word of scripture is a word from God that we are to believe and obey at face value. For, if we did, then either we should be doing a whole lot more kissing with a whole lot more people, or else we should be feeling guilty for not doing that. And the Bible is filled with verses that you and I don’t take literally and at face value. How many of us consider every word of scripture to be a word from God that we are obligated to obey when we read in 1st Peter 3:3 that women shouldn’t braid their hair and shouldn’t wear either 1 gold jewelry or fine clothes? Or when we read in 1st Corinthians 6:1ff. that Christians are not to get involved in lawsuits involving other Christians? Or when we hear Jesus say in Matthew 5:22 that if you call anyone a fool, you’re going to hell? Or when he says in Luke 9:59, “Let the dead bury the dead”? Or when, in Luke 14:33, he says, “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions”? For all of us, there are passages of scripture that we don’t take literally at face value as a word from God that we are obligated to believe and obey. Nor should we! The Bible is not a collection of sentences that we are passively to accept as timeless truths or eternal commands. Rather, each passage of scripture is subject to interpretation, and different passages need to be interpreted in differing ways! Not all the verses of the Bible witness to the good news of Jesus Christ in the same manner, and not all verses guide us in the same fashion toward how Christians ought to live. Thus, we don’t do scripture justice when we go to pulling verses from the Bible and insisting that they be accepted as all equally true and equally important teachings and commands. Rather, we always must ask how these words witness to the word of God that is the gospel of Jesus Christ. To talk about what a passage of scripture gives us to believe and do, we must engage in interpretation of the passage. (3) Now comes a somewhat different aspect of biblical interpretation: Some things that are not explicitly stated in the Bible may nevertheless become valued guides to Christian faith and action. Some things that are nowhere spelled out in the Bible may nevertheless rightly be embraced as biblical truth. And one of those things is the doctrine of the Trinity. Nowhere in the Bible does it state that God is triune. Nowhere in the Bible does the word “trinity” ever occur. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that God actually is what the traditional doctrine of the Trinity says God is, namely: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – or: Creator, Redeemer, and Advocate (or: Counselor) – all three at one and the same time. No passage in the Bible explicitly refers to God as “one God in three persons.” And, yet, that is what the church came to affirm of God with its doctrine of the Trinity. Yes, there are references to Jesus as the Son of God; and there are passages where he addresses God as Father, who rules over all things; and there is talk of God present with the church through the Holy Spirit. Moreover, there are a handful of passages such as the one we’re reading today, where Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit are mentioned in the same breath. Still, neither this passage nor any of the others actually says what is claimed in the doctrine of the Trinity, namely: that eternal God is one God in three eternally distinct ways of being God. Here’s the traditional doctrine in a nutshell: God is God the Father, who is not a part of but is wholly other than our world, who created all things out of nothing; and, at the same time, without ceasing to be the God who is wholly other than our world, God also is God the Son, who entered our world in the life of Jesus Christ, who was crucified by our world and who then was removed from the world not by death but through resurrection from death; and, at the same time, without ceasing to be the God who is wholly other than our world, and without ceasing to be the God who came into the world in Jesus, God also is God the Holy Spirit, who turns the witness and proclamation of the church into God’s own word to us here and now, teaching, admonishing, comforting, healing, directing, and encouraging us, that we might honor God’s lordship and live as God’s own children. 2 That’s the doctrine of the Trinity in a nutshell. And, while no passage of scripture explicitly states that God is eternally one God in these three distinct ways of being God, the church has found itself brought to talk that way, because that’s how God has revealed Godself to us. Remember: What we know of God, we know because of God’s act of self-revelation. God is not an object we one day might come upon or figure out in our minds; rather, God approaches us in all God’s mystery as a subject who addresses us. Jesus did not come to us as a wise individual who plies us with interesting ideas about the possible existence and nature of God. Rather, he came as God’s act of self-revelation. And Jesus did not found the church to be a good place for pondering the possible existence and nature of God. Rather, he founded the church to be how and where testimony to the gospel he came bringing is turned into the self-revelation of God’s own word, mysteriously speaking itself into people’s hearts and minds and lives today. Jesus was not on a quest, nor is the church on a quest, to find a possibly existent God. Rather, in Jesus and through the church’s witness to him, the God who actually is reaches into the world and addresses us as Lord of all.
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