Trinity Sunday. For me, it’s been a fool’s
errand when I thought to explain the Holy Trinity during my sermon. Feels more
like a classroom exercise to me. In preaching, I hope to embody something I
witnessed back in a Div school talent show. Students were invited to
impersonate professors, and the crowd had to guess whom was being impersonated.
My friend Pat walked on stage, spoke a complete sentence or two about the
Trinity, then he fumbled into incomplete sentences, then took off his glasses
and grimaced as he pressed his hand to his brow. We all rightly guessed Tom
Langford, theology professor who did what preachers should do more of: embody
the fact that we are speaking of something too vast, too complex - knowable,
adorable, but mind-boggling.
Isaiah
6:1-8. “In the year that King Uzziah died.” Hmm. 742 BC? That had to be a
year of upheaval, turmoil, jockeying for power, anxiety – maybe like 2020. Or
2021. I love the way the architecture, the fixtures, the art of the sanctuary
came to life. I wonder if I can tease that out for my own sanctuary, helping
people imagine such a miracle that just might be the unseen reality. I love
Amos Wilder’s thought on worship: “Going to church is like approaching an
open volcano where the world is molten and hearts are sifted. The altar is like
a third rail that spatters sparks. The sanctuary is like the chamber next to
the atomic oven: there are invisible rays and you leave your watch outside.”
For us who preach, we may find ourselves properly
humbled, discouraged, and then encouraged to find ourselves in great company.
God says Go, tell them. Isaiah says (or sings?) “Here I am Lord.” God, not
leaving well enough alone, clarifies that they won’t understand, their hearts
are fat, their ears heavy, their eyes are shut. It will turn out that they
won’t get your message – at least not for a very, very long time. Such is
the preaching life. We preach, maybe, not to get results, not to grow the
church, not to gauge my worth or their worth, but because God says Preach. It’s
for God.
Romans
8:12-17 pokes around in the intimacy that is the Holy Trinity. Not
ineffable, infinite beings but Jesus the child in the Spirit’s arms calling God
the Father Abba. Lovely. Recalling the Rublev icon: that loving fellowship of 3
has room at the table. We are invited into that eternal fellowship, to rest in
the love, and to share in that threesome’s labor over all of creation.
Nikondeha
offers a picturesque retrospective on what being adopted was about: “A woman
scooped me out of the white-wicker bassinet in the viewing room of the adoption
agency and claimed me as her own. Her physical emptiness prepared the way for
my fullness.” Then, pondering the woman who bore her, she tries to fathom
if her giving her child up was a rejection? or rather a relinquishment? Some
might rush to condemn a mother who “abandons” her baby. But isn’t there a
wrinkle in the story – that a woman who did not have to carry the child for so
long actually did, at considerable physical cost. What if being surrendered at
birth was a loving relinquishment, not rejection, a humble acquiescence in the
face of crushing circumstance? What does God relinquish for us – and we for
God?
With
adoption, we get a glimpse of a different kind of belonging, not inferior,
maybe superior, or maybe not. Nikondeha wonderfully suggests that adoption is
“like a sacrament, that visible sign of an inner grace. It’s a thin place where
we see that we are different and yet not entirely foreign to one another. We
are relatives not by blood, but by mystery.”
John
3:1-17. A beloved text. John 3:16 was never the verse until the
modern American revival movement – so chalk it up to Billy Graham I suppose. People
adore it – so why not explicate it carefully? The verse isn’t a problem,
although it diminishes the breadth of the Bible’s vision for us and creation.
Or does it? If we read it slowly, we see it’s better than we dreamed. It
doesn’t say “For God so loved you, you religious person, that he gave his son –
that is, had him crucified in your place – so that whoever believes in him,
that is, whoever confesses his sin and agrees Jesus saves him, will not perish
but go to heaven.” Instead it says God so loved – the world, the kosmos, the whole thing! He
gave his son – but he gave him when the Word became flesh, at Christmas, and in
his healing and teaching, and in his crucifixion and resurrection, which for
John is way more about the glorification of God than me getting off for my
sins. Belief, for John, is way more than mental assent or repentance and
feeling forgiven. It’s following, it’s union with the living Christ, it’s being
part of the Body.
In that same Birth:
The Mystery of Being Born book, I spent a section ruminating on John 3.
So I’ll close this blogpost with this excerpt:
The
famous evangelist George Whitefield was once asked by a woman, “Why do you go
on and on about being born again?” He replied, “Madam, I do so because you must
be born again.” B
illy Graham travelled to every corner of the
globe preaching this “new birth,” which for him was accepting Christ as your
Savior, commencing a personal relationship with God. The emotional wave was
experienced at the close of every revival meeting when the crowd would sing
“Just as I am.” People in stadiums, and those watching via television were
always invited to bow their heads, right on the spot, and pray the simple
prayer of faith. In that moment of acceptance, “You become a child of God,
adopted into His family forever. He also comes to live within you and will
begin to change you from within. No one who truly gives his or her life to
Christ will ever be the same.”
Nicodemus
approaches Jesus at night. Does the darkness symbolize ignorance, untruth or
evil? Is it stealth so he won’t be observed? The longest darkness any of us has
ever been in was in the womb, waiting to be born. When you were born, the first
time, wasn’t it true that “God called you out of darkness into his marvelous
light. Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people” (1 Pet. 2:9). How
is this new birth like the first?
Jesus
speaks of being born of water and the spirit. Recall your first birth. You were
in water. Then you emerged, gasping for air, for a breath – or we can say
“spirit,” as the Hebrew ruah, and the
Greek pneuma both mean air, and then
by extension, spirit. It’s always water, and then the spirit when getting born.
That
you “must” be reborn intrigues. The Greek, deĩ,
implies throughout John’s Gospel something of a divine necessity, a holy
compulsion. Jesus “had” (deĩ) to pass
through Samaria – not because it was the shortest route, but because he was on
a saving mission to the Samaritan woman. You must be born again. It’s not must as in You must do your homework, or You
must report for jury duty. It’s more like You must come to my birthday party! or You must come with me to the hospital to see Fred before he dies.
It’s love, it’s a deeply personal, can’t-miss-it necessity. And yet, you might
just miss it.
You
can’t grit your teeth and get born the first time, and you can’t when it’s “again” either. Back in October of 1955, I
didn’t think, Hmm, nice day to get born,
let’s do it. An entirely passive, unchosen event. Even the mother has zero
ability to turn a microscopic zygote into a breathing, squawling person. Birth
happens to you, and in you. Rudolf Bultmann, reflecting on Jesus’ reply to
Nicodemus’s search for salvation, clarifies that “the condition can only be
satisfied by a miracle… It suggests to Nicodemus, and indeed to anyone who is
prepared to entertain the possibility of the occurrence of a miraculous event,
that such a miracle can come to pass.”
Jesus
didn’t ask Nicodemus to feel
anything. There are, of course, intense feelings at birth. The mother giving
birth may be overwhelmed with an intensity of joy, or anything else along a
broad spectrum of emotion. The one being born though: is birth an emotional
high for the baby?
Of
course, the feelings mother and child share in childbirth are the pains, the
excruciating squeezes, the tearing of flesh and sometimes the breaking of
bones. Could Jesus have imagined such agony when pressing us toward a new birth?
Jesus courageously embraced pain, and invited us to follow. Paul, imprisoned
and beaten multiple times within an inch of his life for following Jesus, wrote
that “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness
with our spirit that we are children of God… provided we suffer with him” (Rom.
8:15-16). No wonder we prefer a happy emotional kind of rebirth at a revival,
over against the costly discipleship that is the new life Jesus has in mind for
us. It isn’t the feeling, but the fact of the new birth, and the hard facts of
union with Jesus in a world puzzled or hostile to his ways.
Jesus
wasn’t asking Nicodemus to behave a little better. Bultmann explains it perfectly:
“Rebirth means… something more than an improvement in man; it means that man
receives a new origin, and this is
manifestly something which he cannot give himself.” My first birth defined my
origin as a Howell. I have the DNA, I favor my dad, I am who I am. How could I
come by a new and different origin? Let’s look to St. Francis of Assisi.
Nothing
individualistic when Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be born again” – as the
“you” in verse 7, interestingly, is plural – so Jesus isn’t speaking just to
this one man but to his people, even to us. Y’all together must be born again.
