Author: John Drymon

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

At coffee hour this morning I’ll be making a presentation on our recent trip to Europe, focusing particularly on the animating principle of our travels, which was religious in nature. This is not to say every element of our trip was spiritually edifying, so I’d like to speak briefly now about an element which was quite the opposite but was, nonetheless instructive.

As you may know, London is a famously expensive city. One of us had read somewhere on the internet (so it had to be true, right!?) that a relatively inexpensive way to get a relatively elegant meal in London was to visit the food hall of one of the city’s impressive department stores. So, naturally, we went to Harrod’s, and we found the online claims of affordability greatly overstated. As it happened, we were able to get perfectly adequate meat pies at the Nag’s Head Pub down the street, which was the putative setting of a four-hundred-year-old ecclesiastical urban legend I can tell you about after church.

Anyway, we did spend some time wandering around Harrod’s before realizing this was not the place for us. Yet I confessed to Annie as we were leaving, that it awakened in me (in my fallen nature which has, thank God, been redeemed in Baptism) something that I’m not proud of. Looking at the $5,000 suits and $1,500 fountain pens and $1,200 coffee table books, that wickedest part of me started thinking how much I’d love to be able to own these sorts of things and, more generally, to have the sort of lifestyle which would make possessing such luxuries “no big deal.”

“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher. Granted, I don’t hate my toil, as apparently the writer of Ecclesiastes hated his; in fact, most of the time I rather enjoy my work. Even so, the Preacher makes a point which we could all stand to hear- viz., a life whose chief goal is the accumulation of wealth is a life wasted. It’s vanity, a puff of wind, nothingness. Yet, that evening in Harrod’s department store, I found that vanity somewhat appealing.

Likewise, in this morning’s Gospel Jesus tells a parable of a man who had done well for himself and secured enough wealth to live comfortably indefinitely. Just as the man sits back to enjoy the fruit of his labors he has a bit of bad luck. Not to put to fine a point on it, he kicks the bucket then and there. All work and no play doesn’t just make Jack a dull boy. In this instance, it made Jack a rather dumb boy.

How do we define ourselves? How does society define each of us? Well, what’s the first question we ask upon meeting a stranger? Usually it’s “what do you do?” and the implicit predicate to that question is “for money.” It’s not a bad question to ask, necessarily, but it’s symptomatic of what our culture values above all else, namely work and compensation. It’s how we define ourselves because it’s what we spend the vast majority of our time doing.

In preparation for this sermon, I looked at several studies of working hours and happiness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people in countries where the average citizen worked fewer hours there was greater overall satisfaction with life. Also unsurprisingly, Americans tended to work more and be less happy on average than citizens of nearly every other developed country. This is, of course, a complex issue and how to address it from a policy perspective is well beyond me. It is, however, an example of how endless striving to the end of wealth accumulation is not the key to happiness. I hope this is not a surprise to anybody, yet, as my experience suggests, even those of us who know it can forget it when surrounded by the lure of mammon.

So how do we address this as individuals and as a community? At the end of this morning’s Gospel, Jesus says “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” But what does it mean to be rich toward God?

I don’t think that it just means giving of our wealth to charity and to the church, though that is certainly part of it. I think it’s also about spending our time in pursuits which are godly. It’s about not being so caught up in work that we fail to support our families with our loving presence. It’s taking time out of our day to pray. It might even be recognizing when that lucrative career is getting in the way of our other obligations so much that we’ve got to make a change, and maybe make a little less money.

I don’t mean to be grim or trite, but I can’t imagine many people on their deathbed thinking back and saying “thank God I spent all that extra time in the office and made a bundle.” When we get to that point, we’re more likely to be grateful for the relationships we nurtured and the difference, however small, we might have made in the lives of our fellow pilgrims. In other words, we’ll never regret the time we spent being rich toward God, because while everything else is vanity, a puff of wind, a passing thing, it is our love and generosity which will endure into the ages of ages.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.

Thus, the Apostle Paul warns the Colossians against false teachers, but there is some debate as to who these false teachers were and who actually wrote the letter. This morning, I want to explore this issue of authorship, not just because I personally find those arguments fascinating, but because I think it bears on how we read this morning’s Epistle as affecting our lives as people striving to practice Christianity as best we can. This is a sermon heavy in exploring biblical criticism and exegesis, so buckle up and be assured there is a point I’m coming to.

For the sake of full disclosure, I recognize I hold a prejudice in this regard, which some biblical scholars with whom I disagree would take to be disqualifying, in that I am one-hundred-per-cent committed to the claim that scripture as a whole and our study of it is necessarily prescriptive (or normative), rather than purely descriptive (or idiosyncratic).

So, with that disclaimer behind us, I believe that the Epistle to the Colossians is an authentic product of Paul of Tarsus – not a later addition to the Pauline school, not a forgery, not a collection of some authentic sayings of Paul heavily shaped and annotated by a redactor. This is, I believe, Paul himself with his young apprentice Timothy writing from a Roman prison to their brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae, full stop.

This places me on the side of the minority of mainstream biblical scholars, which does give me pause. Like most issues about which Christians disagree, I don’t think this matter is central enough to the Christian message to get bent out of shape about, but I do think it’s important enough to engage in a good-natured debate with those on the other side of it.

One of the chief arguments made by source critics to deny Paul’s authorship of Colossians is the presence of something called hapax legomena, or words which only appear once. The idea, put very simply, is that authors tend to reuse words and phrases throughout their corpus, so a wildly different vocabulary between works, as highlighted by hapax legomena, suggests a different author. Just like Updike particularly likes the word “lambent”, and Thackeray “artless”, and Cheever “inestimable”, so too does Paul have his favorite words and phrases- sarx and soma and nomos and hamartia, for example- flesh and spirit and law and sin.

Those seeking to deny the authenticity of a particular biblical book or passage will point out where different words are used or, failing that, the same word with a different sense. So, a couple of words we heard in this morning’s Epistle (philosophia for philosophy, theotes for Godhead, neomenas for new moons) are only found in Colossians. Fine, but might this not be because Paul is dealing here with a particular issue which requires bringing these matters up? All of Paul’s letters are occasional, each is a response to a situation in the church to which he’s writing, and there will necessarily be some terminology more well-suited to the argument he’s making here than would be in, say, his Epistle to the Romans.

Or take the “words being used differently” approach. I already said that Paul frequently used the word hamartia for sin, and indeed so does the author of Colossians. I happened to notice an annotation in one of the bibles I looked at this week (I like comparing different versions ofn the same translation for just this reason) for a verse a chapter earlier made an assumption quite out of keeping with a careful, plain reading of the text. Colossians 1:14 – “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” – in the Harper Collins Study Bible includes this annotation from none other than the Society of Biblical Literature: “In the undisputed letters, Paul views sin as an enslaving power, not a misdeed.” Indeed this is true but it implies that this is not the sense in which hamartia is used in Colossians 1:14, despite the fact that the first half of the verse makes it clear that it is!

Further, there is language here which I would argue places the Epistle well within Paul’s theological wheelhouse. Perhaps the best example is found in the passage we heard this morning- ta stoicheia tou kosmou, the elemental spirits of the universe. The Greek word stoicheia is used outside the presumptive Pauline corpus, but always to refer to something much more quotidian. In 1 Peter it refers to the basic elements of creation- ordinary, physical stuff. In Hebrews it refers to basic teaching, like your catechism. Here there’s something more funky going on and you can also find it in one other place- Galatians, which as far as I know hardly anybody disputes as being written by Paul:

While we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world (ta stoicheia tou kosmou)… Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits (stoicheia)?

I will return in a moment to what precisely this means, but two things are clear. Firstly, in both Galatians and Colossians the author is referring to something much different from and more menacing than basic principles or fundamental physical elements, the sense of the word elsewhere in scripture and in extra-biblical sources of the period. Secondly, as far as I can tell, nobody had used the word to denote a spiritual force (as Paul seems to do) since it was coined, apparently by Euclid in the Fourth Century BC, nor had anybody outside the Church used it in this sense until the Fifth Century of the Common Era. It was, I am convinced, a Pauline theological innovation, and it is much more likely that Paul was making use of this concept in two of his Epistles than that an imposter thirty or forty years later was accurately recalling and utilizing one of the apostle’s most obscure, baffling theological moves in a vastly different context.

So why does this matter? I think it’s important that Paul wrote the words that we heard this morning because it gives the necessary context for understanding precisely what he’s railing against, what in heaven or on earth he means by the “philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe.”

Once again, the Society of Biblical Literature got it wrong in my footnotes, claiming the danger to the Colossians was Greco-Roman pagan beliefs that held these elemental spirits in high regard (not recognizing that those Gentiles, for all their faults, meant something very different from what Paul was on about.)

I think what we see here is a prosecution of a nascent gnostic movement in both Christianity and Judaism in the middle of the First Century. Many biblical scholars don’t want to entertain this possibility for other reasons, among them the fact that it would necessitate taking the potential historicity of John’s Gospel more seriously (a rant into which I’ll launch some other time) and the implicit suggestion that proto-Orthodox Christianity, which would later give us the Canon of Scripture, the Sacraments, and the Creeds, had more-or-less won the day on its own merits in the first century rather than revising Church history in retrospect having won merely by force of the political realities of later centuries. These are issues beyond the scope of this sermon.

More importantly for our present purposes, seeing Paul’s argument as an indictment of an otherworldy, body-denying, overly-ecstatic religion of unbridled passion would not only have been a warning to the charismatic spiritual charlatans of his own day and to their potential victims, but Paul might have been the only person in the world who could do so from a place of perfect measure and integrity. This was the man who was blinded on the road to Damascus, who heard loud and clear “Saul, why do you persecute me,” and who allowed that experience to make him the greatest missionary the world has ever known. This was the man who was caught up to the third heaven yet did not rejoice in this, but in the Cross of Christ alone. Paul warns the Colossians not to worship angels (that is, to focus exclusively on the experience of the messengers of God rather than sharing the message), not to dwell on visions, not to be puffed up, but to parlay those experiences into something good and wholesome and edifying for the people of God who are and those who have yet to enter the holy fellowship. Perhaps you have felt the body too limiting, you want to float above it all and live in some spiritual reverie, Paul is saying, but that’s going about it the wrong way. You are here on planet earth. You are flesh and blood a part of the creation God at the first called good. You have died in Baptism and been raised to new life, free from the bondage of sin, and that’s a whole lot more important than getting your kicks from spiritual athleticism, which can so easily turn to spiritual elitism.

I am reminded here of a passage from the Parochial and Plain Sermons of John Henry Newman:

And here I might speak of that entire religious system (miscalled religious) which makes Christian faith consist, not in the honest and plain practice of what is right, but in the luxury of excited religious feeling, in a mere meditating on our Blessed Lord, and dwelling as in reverie on what He has done for us;–for such indolent contemplation will no more sanctify a man in fact, than reading a poem or listening to a chant or psalm-tune… I call all formal and intentional expression of religious emotions, all studied passionate discourse dissipation,–dissipation the same in nature, though different in subject, as what is commonly so called; for it is a drain and a waste of our religious and moral strength, a general weakening of our spiritual powers… and all for what?–for the pleasure of immediate excitement. Who can deny that this religious disorder is a parallel case to that of the sensualist?

Now, just as in the case of the Apostle Paul, one needs to know a little bit of Newman’s context. He was no spiritual slouch. He wrestled with great joy and sorrow in his experiential relationship with the Holy Spirit. Yet in his younger days, before he came to champion the renewal of the catholic faith within the Church of England for which we modern Episcopalians have much to be grateful, Newman found himself an outcast among outcasts. Unsatisfied with the “high and dry” church of the early Nineteenth Century, Newman found himself a part of the evangelical renewal within the church – a movement known for its seriousness and championing of important, Gospel issues in this country as well as in England: abolition and women’s suffrage, and temperance in an age when women and children had no recourse against husbands and fathers who spent their livelihoods on gin and came home surly and violent. This was the religion of the Wesleys and William Wilberforce, the religion of Amazing Grace, and Newman took great lessons from his experience practicing it.

But there was an underbelly to this kind of religion, not necessarily endemic to it, but at least close enough in concept to infect its less humble practitioners- namely an overemphasis on intensely emotional spiritual experience, a precise definition of what the nature of that spiritual experience must be to be salutary, and an attendant underemphasis of both social engagement and ordinary Christian living. This was the gift of 18^th Century evangelicalism and religious enthusiasm more broadly being thrown back in the face of its forefathers in the 19^th Century by folks with more charisma than theological grounding and, in many cases, more ambition than sense.

So the young John Newman never had the experience he was supposed to have. He believed in the Grace of God in Christ Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit as much as any of us, but he kept being told that he had to get knocked upside the head by Grace, to have some very specific, emotional experience of redemption or he could not be confident in his salvation. But Newman just wasn’t wired that way, and besides, maybe that could make some people better Christians and maybe, if that emotional moment were taken as the end-all and be-all of faith, it might even make some worse.

So Newman, like the apostle, is not saying that spiritual experience is bad or that we ought not feel deeply for Christ and the sisters and brothers we have through him. Rather, he too is providing an argument against unbridled, selfish enthusiasms, attempts to achieve spiritual highs (as if the Holy Spirit were a drug) rather than a holy life, to believe that one can have a passionate love affair with the godhead without caring a whit about his people or even the most basic obligations of corporate worship or Christian mission or even just simple human compassion.

Listen, I get pretty moved sometimes when I’m at that altar. I never understood really when people said things like “that experience [of doing something amazing] humbled me,” meant until the first time I stood at the altar, holding bread in my hands, and saying the words of Jesus which make it his body. I guess I had to become a priest to become humble, and that’s an emotional thing. But, I’ve not ever seen a literal burning bush or heard the voice of God as if he were standing right in front of me. Maybe that’ll happen someday, maybe not. I honestly don’t know what I’d want if I had the choice of having some mystical experience; I’m glad that’s up to God.

What I really think, for what it’s worth, is that some people do have honest-to-God, “Road to Damascus” experiences. I believe some are taken up into third heaven or see a burning bush, or talk to God as if he’s on the other end of the phone line. I believe it because people I love and trust have told me as much and I choose to believe they are neither liars nor delusional. It is not a very scientific, modern historical critical view to take, but I feel I must take it. But I also believe that this is a dangerous thing to happen to a person, because it means they sure as heck had better do something about it rather than just enjoy what they’ve taken as God’s special favor or use it to see themselves as somehow superior. If I take the joy and peace and holy terror (all three of which I assure you, can be experienced at once) that I feel at the altar and I’m not more loving, more giving, more tolerant, more committed because of it, then, my friends, I’ve thrown a tremendous gift back in the face of God and convinced myself he wanted it that way, convinced by the elemental spirits, no doubt, the base spirit of pride and selfishness which I still fight despite having been freed of its stain in Baptism, that I should be puffed up rather than sharing light and life and the Spirit of God with friend and stranger.

Wherever you are on the spectrum between spiritual desolation and ecstasy, know that God accepts that, and will give you what you need to mediate his Grace to those around you so long as you’re willing to give that which you receive, for it is only in dying to ourselves, to our own need for affirmation both spiritual and social that we are able to give an offering of our lives, risen and renewed, to share that gift with others.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

About six months ago a poll was conducted by Lifeway (the Southern Baptist Convention’s publishing company) ant the Reformed Christian discipleship Ligonier Ministries, of American Evangelical Christians’ views on a number of theological questions. The results were shocking to me. 71% of respondents agreed with the statement “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God.” Perhaps some proportion of the respondents stopped reading the statement after “first and greatest” and didn’t realize that they were agreeing that Jesus was a creature rather than the preëxistent, second person of the Trinity. However, 59% also agreed with the statement “the Holy Spirit is a force, but is not a personal being.” The upshot is that roughly 2/3rds of American Evangelical Christians are either poorly catechized or knowingly heretical with regard to Trinitarian theology. I suspect it is the former, but it’s hard to know.

Now, lest you think I’m just ragging on Evangelicals, I suspect the numbers would probably be similar if Mainline Protestants or Roman Catholics were the subjects of the poll. Forgive me for complaining about this yet again, but our use of the Revised Common Lectionary (developed within the halls of American Mainline Protestantism’s former glory) has now hoisted upon us a very poor Old Testament choice for Trinity Sunday. I mean the lesson from Proverbs is beautiful, but I would have to spend this whole sermon exegeting it in gruesome detail to explain that it’s not anti-Trinitarian because it’s not about the Trinity to begin with. Again, I suspect this is more a function of poor catechesis than of willful heresy, but it’s troubling either way.

Today we celebrate this sadly little understood, but critically important dogmatic truth (dogmatic not in the commonly used sense meaning inflexible, but in the proper sense of having been defined by the Councils of the Church and enjoined on believers). Today we celebrate the mystery of the Trinity. It is a mystery (or μυστεριον) not in the “Scooby Doo” sense, where you get the answer by unveiling the masked antagonist at the end, but in the sense that it is ineffable, beyond our human capacity to fully grasp. This is not to say that one would be justified in answering a systematic theology final exam question asking you to define the Trinity by saying “it’s just a mystery.” You’d get an “F” for that answer. But it is nonetheless impossible to fully express without imperfect analogies, and in the final analysis, we claim it is a truth which is revealed rather than deduced, and thank God for that because it means we need not be great philosophers to affirm the faith handed down from the Apostles in the Scriptures and the Creeds.

I want to discuss why this doctrine itself matters, but first a story about why the fact it’s a mystery matters, too. Back in the early twentieth century, during the period of the British Raj in South Asia, a Hindu prince converted to Christianity, and this so angered his Father that he was made a Dalit, an untouchable or outcast according to the Indian caste system. A missionary later asked him why he would do such a thing, give up his wealth and position and social status in order to become a Christian, and he said “I’ve come to the belief that I cannot believe in immortal gods with mortal characteristics. I need an immortal God with immortal characteristics.” A colleague of mine once said “if you can figure out God, you may not want to worship him,” and this rings true, to me at least as somebody naturally disposed to feeling as if I have to have everything explained to my satisfaction.

So this is why mystery matters, but why does this mysterious doctrine itself matter. There are a number of reasons, of which I’ll limit myself to three.

First, this may be the most strident thing you’ve ever heard me say from this pulpit, so “trigger warning” as the youngsters say. Jesus Christ was not primarily a wisdom teacher or a moral prophet or a spiritual guru. It seems to me that Jesus Christ was one of three things: he was either a crazy person or he was an evil person or he was true God the Son of God, the preëxistent Word of God through whom all things came into being. If you believe as I believe that the Scriptures are reliable in reporting to us that Jesus of Nazareth went around ancient Palestine claiming to be the Son of God, then either he was telling the truth or he wasn’t. If he wasn’t he either had a mental illness of the sort that leads people to claim to be Napoleon or be made of glass or else he was a charlatan who happened to establish the most successful con job of all time. If however he was telling the truth–the conviction that he was telling the truth being that which I would stake my whole life on if God willed it–permits us to see all the other claims about him (his role as mediator between us and the Father, his status as the great moral example, his role in imparting wisdom and enlightenment during his earthly life and then after by his pouring out the Holy Spirit) are thus trustworthy and true.

Second, and perhaps only slightly less strident than the first claim, either the Holy Spirit is a person with whom we can have a relationship or we can never have confidence that our religious experience and motivation is anything more than our brain synapses being fired and dopamine being pumped through our system. This, I claim (and it is a bold claim), is born out empirically. There is a great irony present in Christian history in the last century-and-a-half or so, which is oft overlooked and which I believe somebody (not me) should use as the basis for a monograph. Those segments of the Christian movement (whether or not they be part of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church) which speak most often and sometimes even most-compellingly of the action of the Holy Spirit in fact have the lowest view of that same same Spirit’s ontological status.

What does that mean, in simple English and put more bluntly than is comfortable in our age of ecumenism and pluralism? Those movements which claim the necessity for salvation of the expression of certain charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit are less likely to view that same Holy Spirit as God; about a tenth of Pentecostalists belong to denominations which are explicitly non-Trinitarian. New religious movements which place a high importance on continuing revelation (an act of the Holy Spirit) are almost universally non-Trinatarian- Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses being the most well-known of such sects.

Like I said, this is ironic and peculiar, and I don’t know exactly why this should be the case. I could speculate, and my speculation would go like this: if the Holy Spirit is not God, he can be manipulated, used as a tool for some agenda or to receive some spiritual benefit at the discretion of the adherent rather than by God’s will alone. I do not mean that this is done in malice, but rather by some subconscious impulse. If the Holy Spirit is merely some spiritual force, no problem. If the Holy Spirit is indeed God, though, then such act would fit the classical definition of superstition- to place oneself above God in order to manipulate him.

Now, I don’t want to reject outright the possibility that charismatic gifts and private revelation are possible through the action of the Holy Spirit in our midst. You all know my own piety is rather “high and dry”, but I don’t discount the possibility of genuine experiences of this sort. I do believe the discernment of a community and the larger church are necessary to determine what is of God and what is not in this regard. Paul implies as much in his lengthy discourse on spiritual gifts in his First Epistle to the Corinthians and John makes this requirement explicit in his First Epistle General. This concern for discernment does not seem to be shared by many in these non-Trinitarian movements.

Anyway, we can see based on plain old empirical evidence rather than some theological proof that recognizing the Holy Spirit as a co-equal person within the Godhead rather than some spectral force or demiurge, seems to stand as a bulwark against emotionalism and radicalism and their concomitant abuses.

Thirdly, and finally, and most importantly, we are reminded in this morning’s Epistle that salvation itself is Trinitarian in shape. Paul tells the Christians in Rome and us that Jesus Christ has justified (or δικαιωθέντες, literally “vindicated”) us, making peace on our behalf with God the Father and making his love take up residence in us through the Holy Spirit.

I went back and read my sermons from the last two years, and realized that there was a sort of inherent progression in my argument, quite by accident, which is hard to recognize when we have a full year between each time we’re called upon to consider the doctrine of the Trinity. A very quick summary then: two years ago I introduced you to the Greek term περιχώρησις which suggests the circumincession or interpenetration of the members of the Godhead, whereby the relationship of perfect love within the Godhead makes Father, Son, and Holy Spirit indistinguishable except insofar as we can recognize that relationship itself being definitive. This is what theologians call an immanent model of the Trinity, that is, one that attempts to define who God is in himself. Then last year I introduced you to the Greek term κένωσις, or “emptying out”, getting at the activity in which the God is eternally active, in the pouring out of himself in creation, the emptying out of his Grace in the sacrifice on Calvary, and the teeming down of the Holy Spirit upon the earth at Pentecost. This is what theologians call the Trinitarian Mission, that is, what God does for us and for the whole world.

This year, since it’s become a tradition, I’ll give you one more little Greek lesson. The word of the day today is οἰκονομία. It might sound familiar because it’s where we get the English word “economy.” It literally means something like “housework” which means “home economics” is a redundant phrase. It has, of course, come to mean handling or management, now narrowly defined as financial resources and their management. But in theological terms it means God’s divine management of our fallen world. The Economic Trinity, then, is how Salvation is wrought and how we are brought to participate in it, by means of the Trinitarian mission (as opposed to the Immanent Trinity I’ve already mentioned, which deals with how God coheres in himself). The Eastern Orthodox tend to draw a distinction here between theology and economy, which is a useful distinction, if a bit confusing considering how these two words ave evolved in common use in the West.

So all God does, he does with one will as his whole self, indivisible. With regard to theology proper, the only distinction, as affirmed by both the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, is the Father’s status as Source of Divinity, the Son’s being eternally begotten from the Father, and the Holy Spirit’s proceeding from both. With regard to the economy of salvation, however, God is revealed to us as, we might say, “the ‘by whom’, the ‘through whom’, and the ‘in whom’.” The Father, our righteous judge; Jesus Christ our mediator and advocate; and the Spirit, our subsistence in holiness. With regard to substance, will, incomprehensibility, eternal existence, uncreated nature, there is no distinction. With regard to the Economy of Salvation, the distinction exists through what Augustine and Hilary of Poitiers and others called “appropriation.” That is to say that the whole of God saving us with his whole self can be understood in terms of the divine relationship described in our lesson from Romans, but at the fundamental level of Being, God has all within himself to delight himself, but has by the great immensity of that defining love, made us and called us to himself in terms we can start to get our heads and hearts around.

The point is this… We are not the ones saving ourselves. We cannot do that, and the belief that we can is idolatry of the highest order. We are not working toward perfecting ourselves or the world around us; trust in our own ability to do so is idolatry of the highest order. God has done this work and is doing this work and will do this work, because within the Godhead exists the relationship of perfect love which along can effect it. Not that he had to, but that he chose to, so great was that love. Because the “by whom” the “through whom” and the “in whom” is sovereign, and through that preëxistent relationship of unity in trinity and the pouring out of the same on humanity, we have been given a sort of grammar by which we can participate as recipients of Grace and even the capacity to serve as vessels, broken as we may be, of that Grace for the world, so long as we recognize it is not we ourselves but Christ, sharing the love of God, in the power of the Spirit who acts through us for the salvation of the world. In short, it’s not about us, it’s about the Lord God Almighty, who has within himself all that is needful, but for love’s sake has brought us in, made us inheritors of the Kingdom, and given us this brief time to come to know and love Him above all things in preparation for eternity.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.