What can we say May 26? Trinity Sunday

    As a young preacher, I would take a stab at explaining the Holy Trinity during my Trinity Sunday sermon. A fool’s errand. This is a classroom exercise.  I teach sometimes on the Trinity – but in a class setting.  Mind you, there are texts that assume God’s Threeness and the lovely, moving interrelatedness that is the heart of God.  Romans 8:12-17, our epistle for the day is one of them.  The Spirit leads and speaks in our spirit so we know we are, just as Jesus was, children of the heavenly Father – whom we are invited to speak to intimately: Abba!

   For the sermon, we do as we always do, explicating the text. The Holy Trinity is there, same as every Sunday. I think, during my sermon, I'll ask my musicians to help me with the best "explanation" I've heard, which isn't words but musical notes. Jeremy Begbie points out that if you sing a C, the note fills the whole room, no more in one place than another. If you add the E and then the G, each note fills the room, one doesn't crowd out the other - and the chord they form together are far more lovely than the single note. God the Trinity is like that. Same 3 first notes, by the way, of the hymn we'll sing, "Holy, Holy, Holy."

   One other memory I can play on: when I was in seminary we had a talent show each year. A favorite moment came when students would do impersonations of professors, and we'd guess who was being impersonated. My friend Pat walked on stage, spoke a complete sentence or two about the Trinity, then he began 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.

   Clergy are rightly fond of showing and talking about the lovely Rublev icon.  Once I spoke of it and imagined three bridge players very much wanting to play, waiting for a fourth – you, me, the church, maybe the stranger.  Makes me a tad uncomfortable, but hey – it’s better than a three-leaf clover!  I wonder about inviting people to imagine a family of four, but one is missing. They aren’t content, like Hey, we got 75%! That’s pretty good.  No, you crave the whole family being together – especially is one of the four is never coming… God’s Threeness yearns for the one who’s not yet there, maybe like that shepherd leaving 99 sheep to seek out the one.

   And then, to complicate everything, it’s Memorial Day weekend! – which creates a kind of pressure you may or may not enjoy. A while back, after dodging, coping with and responding to criticism for being… insufficiently patriotic? I preached a whole sermon I’d commend to you explaining a Christian viewpoint on Memorial Day, which was semi-well-received. If it helped no one else, it helped me to work through what I will do and won’t do on Sunday morning regarding patriotic holidays. How do we own it, honor our people, but not enfranchise an excess of patriotism and a hawkish spirit? Sometimes simply an illustration from the theater of war will suffice – if carefully chosen.

   Isaiah 6 is tabbed for the lectionary surely because the seraph called to the other seraph, not crying “Holy!” but “Holy, Holy, Holy!”  I once heard a sermon where the preacher bore in on this for a 3-point sermon on the three aspects of holiness: being set apart, being pure, and then social holiness (a profoundly Wesleyan emphasis! – works of mercy, advocating for peace and justice, visiting the prisons, etc.).  Tempting and a helpful trellis on which to grow a sermon! – but not what the seraph was thinking.  The preacher could paint some personal images of what holiness looks like – and I’d look for the non-traditional, not-so-pious examples from people I’ve known.

   A marvelous guide to the holiness of God is A.W. Tozer’s less well-known little book, The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God, Their Meaning in the Christian Life.  Chapter by chapter (23 of them in just 117 pages) he explores some holy attribute of God, from God’s mercy to God’s incomprehensibility, from wisdom to justice, from self-existence to omniscience.  Like turning a precious diamond in your hand, holding it up to the light, awestruck: we ponder God’s holiness. That alone would make a terrific sermon.

   Isaiah resonates in so many ways.  The text seems ethereal, metaphysical, this report of being transfixed and transported into the utterly unspeakable presence of God – and yet it is entirely nailed to a moment in history: “In the year that King Uzziah died” – a time of political uncertainty, confusion, threats within and without.  At such time, God still speaks; God is still God.  Do we not suffer from political chaos and instability?  What does the Holy God speak to us during such a time?

   The hotness, the unfathomable mind-blowing that is God’s presence in the holy place elicits awe – which we don’t know much about.  I admire what Amos Wilder tried to help us see about 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.”

   And then we have Annie Dillard’s suggestion (in Teaching a Stone to Talk): “The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” Mind you, no one will walk in the door looking for the sparks or wearing crash helmets… But somehow, naming it may foster some dim realization in at least a few who’ve shown up.

   Isaiah 6 is yet one more of the Bible’s call narratives that all fit the same pattern: God unexpected calls, the one called explains why he or she is insufficient, then God reassures – not that he or she is sufficient, but that God will use whom God will use.  In Isaiah’s case, he senses his unholiness, rendering him unfit for holy use.  When we interview candidates for ordination, they generally speak of their abilities, education and cool experience; not many speak of their unworthiness, their unholiness – which seems to be what this God is looking for, not ability but availability, and maybe even disability.  These thoughts and others led me to write Weak Enough to Lead – which explores the Bible’s thoughts on leadership, which are vastly different from, and almost antithetical to ours.

   And for anyone preaching, the bizarre interaction at the very outset of Isaiah’s ministry should humble us, discourage us, and bequeath to us great company.  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.  And so it is with preaching.  We preach, not to get results, not to grow the church, not to gauge my worth or their worth, and certainly not to roll up big numbers.  We preach because God says preach.  We preach, not to see if they like to respond to our preaching, but to please 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. Paul loves the theme of Adoption. In my book on Birth: The Mystery of Being Born, I had some fun pointing out that Leonardo da Vinci, Babe Ruth, Edgar Allan Poe, John Lennon, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Baldwin, Steve Jobs, Leo Tolstoy, Lafayette, the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian, Aristotle, Confucius, and Nelson Mandela were adopted. Queen Esther and Superman were adopted, and so was Buddy the Elf, and Harry Potter. 

Kelly Nikondeha, in her thoughtful and theologically profound book Adopted: The Sacrament of Belonging in a Fractured World reflects on her own quest as a grownup to seek out the parent who gave her up for adoption: “We want that dark corner illuminated. We imagine our own transformation at the revelation of our true origin. What goodness might be unlocked, what possibility unleashed?” Isn’t church a question to discover our true origin?

   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. An 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.” John Wesley worried about the tepid to vapid responses to Baptism in people’s lives. “Justification implies only a relative, the new birth a real change. God in justifying us does something for us; in begetting us again, He does the work in us.” What fascinates here is that the men talking about being born again rarely if ever link it to birth itself. How is discipleship like birth? 

   Let’s look to the words of the writer Anne Enright, who shows no evident interest in religion:  “A child came out of me. I cannot understand this, or try to explain it. Except to say that my past life has become foreign to me. Except to say that I am prey, for the rest of my life, to every small thing.” Isn’t this what being with Jesus, a child who came out of his mother, is like? The past is laughably past. Every small thing, devoted to this Jesus, matters.

   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, deî, implies throughout John’s Gospel something of a divine necessity, a holy compulsion. Jesus “had” (deî) 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.

   After fitting in and even excelling as a child and youth, enviably popular, chic and cool, Francis heard the call of Jesus. Taking the Bible quite literally, Francis divested himself of his advantages, including his exquisite, fashionable clothing, which he gave away to the poor. His father, Pietro, a churchgoing, upstanding citizen, took exception, locked his son up for a time, and then sued him in the city square. Giotto’s fresco in the basilica where Francis is buried shows a stark naked Francis, handing the only thing he has left, the clothes off his back, to his father. But his eyes are fixed upward, where we see a hand appearing to bless him from up in the clouds. At this moment, Francis declared, “Until now I have called Pietro Bernardone my father. But, because I have proposed to serve God, I return to him the money on account of which he was so upset, and also all the clothing which is his, wanting to say from now on: ‘Our Father who are in heaven,’ and not ‘My father, Pietro di Bernardone.’” A biblical moment, if we have regard for “You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet. 2:23), or “I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother” (Matt. 10:35).

   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.

   Parenthetically, there is a powerful word at the heart of the Trinity.  In our culture, we are wise to lean into Jürgen Moltmann's perspective in The Trinity & the Kingdom.  Some excerpts: "The triune God reveals himself as love in the fellowship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. His freedom lies in the friendship which he offers; his freedom is his vulnerable love, his openness, the encountering kindness through which he suffers with those he loves." If we reduce God to a single, absolute personality, we wind up with "justification for the world's cultivation of the individual" - an individualism God grieves and counters. And there are political/social implications as well: "It is only when the doctrine of the Trinity vanquishes the monotheistic notion of the great universal monarch in heaven that earthly rulers, dictators and tyrants cease to find any justifying religious archetypes any more." Wow.