Text:  2 Corinthians 13:11-14 (Deut 4:32-34, 39-40)             Sunday after Pentecost: Holy Trinity

A God Like No Other

In the name of our Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, dear friends in Christ:

Recent polling data on the religious beliefs of people in this country confirm that about 84% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. In one sense, if we’re running comparisons, that’s pretty good, since this is far and away higher a percentage than in any other developed nation in the world. On the other hand, the same poll revealed that the percentage of Americans claiming to have no religion or who adhere to various nonchristian faiths is growing exponentially. We are rapidly becoming a much more theologically diverse society. How diverse? Well, though Judaism is in slight decline, it still has over five and a half million adherents in the U.S.; and there is substantial growth in Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Baha’i, and, of course, Islam, which is the fastest growing religion in our country today. Believe it or not, if you are an American citizen, you are more likely to be a Moslem than a Presbyterian. And thus far I’ve only mentioned the larger religions. Several less organized, less familiar faiths are also growing: Scientology, Ekankar, Theosophy, Wicca, Spiritism, and a host of New Age cults to name just a few.

So there’s no question that Christianity is losing ground in this country. And if you think that 84% Christian is still a pretty solid number, let me suggest that you have to be careful about how you read the data. Under the umbrella of "Christian", the poll included such groups as the Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Christian Scientists, and even the Unitarian Universalists (a.k.a. the Moonies) because their leader, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, claims to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ - "and hey, if Jesus is the leader of your church, it must be Christian, right?" So, anyway, that 84% needs to be adjusted down a ways because none of the groups I just mentioned teaches anything close to the Christian Gospel that saves people.

And then you should further adjust the percentage downward for what might be called the "wishful thinking" factor. It’s a simple fact that when answering a poll, a lot of people report what they’d like to be true about themselves rather than what is true. Just for example, over half of those who claimed they were Christians also said that they attend church at least once a week. The truth is that a church is considered doing pretty well if about a third of its members show up weekly. Most churches don’t do that well; which says that a lot of people who called themselves Christians didn’t tell the truth about their attendance record. Which goes to show that a lot of the reported "Christians" are liars. And I don’t think that’s the only thing they lied about: a lot of people who say they are Christian really haven’t the foggiest idea what that means.

In any case, this much is certain: we are living in a society with an increasingly wider spread of religious faiths and practices. We are becoming more religiously pluralistic; and that means that the life-giving Christian message that we proclaim is becoming increasingly drowned out by a confusing babble of strange voices. And unfortunately, one virtue that our modern culture esteems above all others is being "tolerant". And don’t get me wrong, toleration, in a traditional sense, is a good thing. It means that people should try to get along in spite of their differences, and not persecute others because of their beliefs and customs. That’s great - it’s as things should be. But that isn’t what people mean by "toleration" these days. Now to be tolerant means not just living in peace with those who have different religious views, but also actually accepting their beliefs and holding them to be as equally valid and true as your own. In our society it’s scandalous to say, "Here is truth. If you disagree with this or don’t believe it, you are wrong." That’s considered the height of arrogance and intolerance.

But however our society looks at it, the claim to exclusive truth is a fundamental tenant of the Christian faith. Jesus said to his disciples, "I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except by me." When he was being tried, he said to Pontius Pilate, "I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of the truth listens to me." St. Peter, speaking to the Jewish high court some weeks after Pentecost said of Jesus, "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." In these and in many other Scriptures, the point is made crystal clear: There is one God who alone is to be worshipped, there is no other, and the only way to approach him is through Jesus Christ. The same thought is summarized in the Athanasian Creed, which is one of the three creeds all Christendom holds to be true, and which we also confessed together just a short time ago: "This is the catholic (that is, the Christian) faith which, except a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved."

The disciples of Jesus believed that. That’s what drove them to face persecution, and hardship, and threats, and ultimately death by torture: the certainty that they had the only truth of salvation and that the souls and eternal fates of others depended upon them getting that truth out into the world. Sadly, most of those who say they believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ no longer believe that. The cultural value of tolerance has taken its toll on the church of the Apostles. The same poll I referred to earlier indicated that a piteous19% of Christians, less than one in five, believe that Christianity is the one true saving faith.

And here’s a classic example of what’s more acceptable in our society and what many Christians are falling for: it’s an ad that was run in a paper inviting people to attend an Easter service at a Unitarian Church. Let me read it to you. "Celebrate a World View of Easter. Whether you believe as the Hindus, that you must strive to find God through one of the four yogas... or as the Christians, whose Bible says, ‘If we love one another, God lives within us’... or as the Muslims, whose Koran says that there is just one God, the One and Only... or as the Buddhists, who follow the principle that walking the path to enlightenment is paramount for a well-lived life... or even if you believe none of the above... you can celebrate Easter with our Flower Communion. This Unitarian celebration symbolizes the unity of life and humankind, and the rebirth that is possible for all of us through sharing, caring, and an earnest search for our own Truth...".

Hmmm ..."Flower Communion"... I don’t even want to know what that’s all about. (They’d probably give me a dandelion.) But why is it that I’m guessing that here was an Easter service at which the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, the central truth of the Easter story, was not even mentioned?

And do you see what’s going on here? By attempting to include all religions as equally true, you end up with no truth at all except what you decide is true to you. People simply pick and choose articles of faith as if filling a shopping cart with items off the shelf. When they have what they want, they all head up to the cash register, look in each other’s baskets and say, "Oh, I like what I’ve picked, but you know, you’ve made some good choices too. Let’s have a potluck and we’ll share."

But it’s wrong to think of religious truths as items of personal preference. We would laugh at someone who built an idol in his back yard of mud and sticks and anything else he found lying around that he wanted to include in his project and then started worshipping it, thus creating his own religion. And yet this is exactly what they are doing. When each person decides what to believe about God - when each person "earnestly searches for his or her own truth" - each one is simply creating a god in his or her own image to match what they want to believe. They want to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to their relationship with God. They want to define who and what he is rather than let him tell us. Makes you wonder who really is the god of such a faith. Then again, we don’t have to wonder: it’s pretty clear.

And something else we find is that all gods created by the minds of humans tend to be a reflection of the people who make them. This was certainly true of the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Babylonian gods of the ancient world. Sure, they were powerful and immortal (at least to some degree); but they basically acted like people. They had the same passions and foibles. They ate and drank and slept; they were always being unfaithful to their spouses or stealing each other’s wives; they kept fighting among themselves and plotting revenge: they were just bigger, longer lasting versions of their worshippers. And for the most part they didn’t care about people. Oh, sometimes they meddled in human affairs, usually with disastrous results; and there were times when their favors could be purchased at a price - maybe, because you could never be certain. But usually they took little or no notice of people. And the same things are true of the gods manufactured by human minds today. Those gods will always be limited to the desires and the imagination of the person who thinks them up him. And you will find that, except for rare instances, those gods are basically uninterested and uninvolved with humankind. You are left pretty much on your own - which I think is the main reason people create their own gods: they want to be in charge.

Well, hopefully it’s clear by now that if we work theology from the bottom up, that is, if we start with ourselves and seek our own truths and try to imagine what God is like, the only thing we will accomplish is to make gods of ourselves. That, of course, is the original temptation: to be as God. And we all have succumbed to that temptation and continue to do so. But if we are honest about seeking truth, we have to admit that we don’t make very good gods - and that’s saying it as charitably as possible. Knowing what I do about myself, I’d be horrified to think that my life and my eternal destiny rested in my own hands. And please don’t take this personally, but I wouldn’t want to entrust it to any of you either. I’m sure the feeling is mutual.

So, if we can’t start with ourselves and guess what or who’s up there, the only other thing to do is look for God’s disclosure of himself. We need to do our theology from the top down. If we are to know God and about him, he has to reveal who he is to us.

And that’s one of the things that’s unique about the God we worship. He’s not a product of human imagination. He is a God who reveals himself to us. And what he reveals is completely different than anything we might have imagined about him. We hear Moses reflecting on this in today’s Old Testament reading. He asks the people of Israel, "Have you ever heard of a God like ours? A God who reaches into human history? Who chooses people to be his own? Who speaks to them from above and does wonderful things to save them? No. No other god has ever done such things." The God of the Christian faith is like no other.

Now, somebody’s going to ask, "Isn’t he also the god that Jews and Muslim worship?" To answer in a word: no, he’s not. We define who someone is based on their personal characteristics and their actions. If I began talking about someone who was born in 1847 in Ohio, and who later had a workshop in Menlo, New Jersey, where he invented the light bulb, the motion picture camera, and the phonograph, you’d assume I was talking about Thomas Edison. But if I went on to say that this same person had parents named Byron and Gertrude, that he was raised in China, and also invented the hot air balloon, you’d know that I couldn’t be talking about the same guy because those things aren’t true of Edison. I’m either talking about someone else - or someone who never existed.

The same is true of the gods worshipped by Jews and Muslims. Though these gods share certain characteristics with the God we worship, and parts of the history of their interactions with people are the same, their worshippers, by either deleting important parts of the truth or by adding other alleged facts, show that they are not talking about the same God we are. The things they believe do not belong to the God we know. They are talking about somebody else - somebody who doesn’t exist.

There is no other God like ours. And I’d like to spend the rest of our time focusing on a few important things that make him unique. We’ve seen already that he reveals himself to us; but unlike any other god, he reveals things about himself that we cannot fully understand. That actually makes sense: created gods are subject to the limits of human imagination; but our God transcends human imagination and so reveals truths about himself that go beyond our ability to comprehend. On this day specifically, we observe the fact that he reveals himself as a Trinity of persons in one Divine Essence. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each truly God. They are not three Gods, nor are they each a third of God, nor are they simply three different manifestations of the same person of God. There’s a lot we can say about what the Trinity is and isn’t, as we proved when we confessed the creed earlier; but ultimately we have to admit that we do not understand it, nor can we. But since God has revealed it to us, we can confess it as the truth about him.

And we can also confess three other things about him that are shared by no other god. These things appear in the benediction that St. Paul gives in today’s Epistle lesson as he signs off his second letter to the church of Christ at Corinth. He blesses the congregation there with these words: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all". We see that grace, love, and fellowship belong uniquely to our Triune God.

First there’s grace: grace is unmerited favor. It’s a predisposition toward kindness and goodness that originates in the giver rather than in the receiver. Many other religions claim they have a god a grace - but in fact they do not. Jews, Mormons, Muslims and many others all say that their god is gracious; but if you ask to whom is their god gracious, they will tell you it’s to those who serve and obey him. That is to say, their god’s grace depends on what you do for him. This is simple legalism. To get on God’s good side you must do such and so. And these religions are very good at telling you what the "such and so" is that you have to do. The point is that if God’s grace has a price attached to it, a price you must pay either before or after the fact, then it really isn’t grace he has given you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is shown in that he became our brother in flesh to bear our sin and die for us when there was and remains nothing that we can do to earn God’s favor. We are saved by God’s grace alone, the grace he gives to us freely in Christ Jesus. That’s unique.

Second, there is the love of God. Again, other religions will talk about their god’s love: how he cares for his people and provides them with food and health and family and so forth. That’s all very nice, and we are grateful that our God shows his love for us in these ways as well. But let me suggest that our God’s love involves so much more than that. True love is a self-sacrificial commitment to do good for another and to maintain a relationship of harmony and oneness despite the cost to self. As someone observed, "to love is to be vulnerable." But a god who loves merely by providing created blessings to his created beings, blessings that are provided at no real cost to himself, is showing a love that is anemic and meager compared to the love of God we know in Christ. The true God’s love is shown in his great sacrifice: that he gives his Son as a ransom for the world’s sin. He surrenders what he values most in order to satisfy his eternal justice and to redeem lost mankind. No other god makes that claim. No other god shows that kind of love. No other god could.

And then there is fellowship, which we have with the Triune God by his Holy Spirit. Again, other religions talk of being in fellowship with their god; but what they mean by fellowship is barely a faint shadow of what the True God wants to establish with people. For Jews and Moslems and most other religions of the law, the Deity will always remain first and foremost a divine dictator who proscribes the way to live. There will always be a tremendous gap between the Creator and the creature. On the other hand, in most eastern religions like Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, the ultimate goal is to be subsumed into the divine essence. By becoming one with whatever they call god, the individual is supposed to disappear. You’re like a raindrop falling into the ocean.

Again, our God is unique in that he does not remain aloof and unapproachable like Allah, nor does he overpower us and absorb us into his being in the state of Nirvana; but instead he bends down to us to unite himself with us in our humanity in the person of Jesus; and then, having redeemed and sanctified us, he dwells within us. What’s formed is a family relationship of interaction and mutual appreciation and enjoyment. The fellowship of the Holy Spirit preserves the identity and importance of the individual and at the same time unites the individual into a wonderful companionship with God and with all others who share the same Spirit. This relationship is found in no other god.

And that’s because we worship a God like no other. In his essential Trinity, his grace, his love, and his fellowship with us, he is like no other god ever imagined by mankind. And that’s another thing that makes him unique: his origin is not in the imagination of mankind, he’s real. And because we worship the God who is both real and unique, we are people like no other. Our faith is real, and so are the grace, love, and fellowship we have in God through Jesus Christ. And all of that gives us an awesome responsibility: to make him and his great salvation known; to reveal to others what he has revealed to us without compromise or equivocation. So may he, through his grace, love, and fellowship empower us to do it – to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them everything he has commanded us. In his Holy Name. Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!