This homily was preached in the Morning Prayer service at the Trinity School for Ministry Chapel on Thursday, September 25, 2014.
Why do you love God? Why
did you choose to devote your life to him? As seminarians, it's
important that we ask this question of ourselves continually. Why do
I love God? It's very easy to forget why we are here and what we are
doing here. In the midst of our studies and conversations, we can
find that we have fallen in love with the idea and the topic of God,
but are slowly forgetting our love for God himself. Likewise, we can
be overcome by doubts and questions, forgetting that his love is
never in question. So, the answer to why we are here depends on our
answer to that question: Why do I love God?
In Psalm 116, the
psalmist begins, “I love the LORD
because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy.” However much
we learn about God, it all rests on this point: that God sent his
only Son to die on a cross for our sins. Everything we can ever know
about him is encompassed in the incarnation, crucifixion, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. The vastness of his knowledge and depth
of his mystery are only magnified by the fact that he came to dwell
among us and took our sins upon himself so that we might live in him.
If God is so far beyond our understanding that we cannot hope to
grasp even a whisper of his truth by our own efforts, how then can he
love us enough and desire to be with us enough that he would take on
flesh and the full penalty of sin on our behalf?
The perfect
being, above all thought and imagination, which we call God, is
beyond what we can fathom. He is above all human reason and is
himself the fullness of truth which no human life can comprehend in
all its years. But it all still comes back to the fact that “while
we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The more we think about
that fact, the more it exceeds our understanding. We continue our
studies not because we have moved beyond the basics of the Gospel,
but because we are still seeking to understand the fullness of this
truth: that “God so loved the world.”
We shouldn't
think too highly of ourselves because we know big words and can name
important people. All of what we do here is still only for the sake
of looking deeper into what has already “been proclaimed in all
creation under heaven.” After all of our studies and all of our
training; after the years of hard work for our degrees and accolades,
the only answer we have to give to those struggling in our midst, we
learned in Sunday school: Jesus. That's the root of why we're here.
“The LORD
preserves the simple;” the psalmist writes, “when I was brought
low, he saved me. Return, O my soul, to your rest; for the LORD
has dealt bountifully with you.”
The genius
of the Gospel is that it is so accessible that the most simple person
can understand it, but it is so complex that the greatest thinkers
can spend a lifetime examining it. It's simplicity preserves God's
people by grace through faith. It's complexity reveals the fullness
of God in all truth. In this tension, we must remember to rest our
souls in the God who has dealt bountifully with us. When we become
overwhelmed by doubts and confusion, as inevitably happens the deeper
we go into the study of God, we must remember the truth of who God is
and what he has done.
Our psalmist
writes, “for you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from
tears, my feet from stumbling.”
What we know
is that God is true—not as a theory or a proposition—but as one
who loves us. So we can say with the psalmist, “I believed, even
when I spoke: 'I am greatly afflicted'; I said in my alarm, 'All
mankind are liars.'”
We cannot
trust in our own wisdom but must turn to the knowledge of God in
Christ. There, we see the fullness of his being and his love. He has
chosen to reveal himself to us in this way. What other reason do we
have to be here? What other reason is worth the time, money, or
effort that we put into our ministries? It's not only the study of
God or the shepherding of his people. It's falling in love with him
day by day, more and more inching closer to an understanding of that
love, only to find that with each step, we are able to see that his
love goes so much deeper. And we have an opportunity here to share in
that love with those around us. We can “lift up the cup of
salvation and call upon the name of the LORD,”
and “pay [our] vows to the LORD
in the presence of all his people.” Let's rejoice together in his
love and seek his love more fully in our studies and in our lives.
