God Revealing: Born anew, born from above

Icon of the Trinity
By Andrei Rublev

My sermon for today, Trinity Sunday, is based on Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 29,  Romans 8:12-17 and John 3:1-17. Here is the sermon:

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Today is Trinity Sunday, the day the Church sets aside for preaching about that ancient and obtuse doctrine of the Trinity.

It is perhaps no accident that the Church saves this teaching moment for the start of summer vacations. And we are already in trouble. Listen to the opening words of Psalm 29: “Ascribe to the LORD, you gods.”

 We’ve arrived quickly at the doorstep of multiple gods. As many a preacher has tried to do, my task is to make what sounds like three gods fit back into the package of one god.

Usually the senior pastor in a big church assigns this preaching task to a seminarian or an intern. But ours, Joe Lenow, took off last week just in the nick of time.

 So it comes to me.

You may fairly ask, though, why we should care? What difference does it make if we understand this ancient doctrine?

And it must be fairly said that a great deal of blood has been spilled over many centuries by those fighting to the death over the finer points of the doctrine. Was Christ of one mind with God or of two minds melded into one? Was the Son subordinate to the Father or co-equal? Was Holy Spirit of the same substance with the Son or different, or both at the same time?

I know that these questions are not exactly high on the list of topics that command your attention. And how would anyone really prove any of this anyway?

Yet these questions once consumed people. We might ask why? We might start by reminding ourselves that those who came up with the concept of the Trinity were maybe not that different than us. They faced hardships and untold calamites, and life was certainly more precarious for them than it is for us. They tried very hard to grasp how God could be present in the world but feel so distant at times.

 At its core, the Trinity is fundamentally a statement of the infinity of God and God’s infinite ways. It is a statement about how to experience God and who God is. The God of the Trinity is the Infinite One who is the spark that creates all things, and calls it good; the Infinite One who came in a particular time and place as a man called Jesus to show us how to love one another; and the Infinite One who is a holy spark living still within us and going infinitely where she will.

In both Hebrew and Greek, the word for “spirit” is a female-gendered word, so it is perfectly appropriate, and biblically correct, to speak of the Holy Spirit as female. In fact, I’ve heard people recite the Holy Spirit section of the Nicene Creed using the female pronoun.

The Trinity gives us God as male, God as female, God as a living breathing being who is capable of reaching all people everywhere infinitely. The Trinity is another way of saying that all people are capable of experiencing God, each in our limited way, yet God is bigger than any of us can experience in only one way.

Yet it is also true that the idea of the Trinity solidified – some would say fossilized – into a rigid doctrine with hard religious boundaries. The seed of that religious rigidity is still with us in the Nicene Creed, that fourth century statement of religious doctrine that was written primarily as a loyalty oath for bishops.

I would hope you would hear the Creed as a prayer, but I realize that is not always so easy to do because it can sound like a doctrinal trap.

There is a way out of this from the depth of our tradition. We need look no further than, for example, William Temple, who was the archbishop of Canterbury in the darkest days of World War II. William Temple* once wrote that “Christianity is not first and foremost a religion; it is first and foremost a revelation.”

By that he meant that Christianity is defined by experience – a revealing – of the Risen Christ in our daily life as individuals and in our collective life as the people of God.

“It comes before us chiefly not with a declaration of feelings we are to cultivate, or thoughts we are to develop,” Temple wrote in a short book published in 1936. “It comes before us, first and foremost, with the announcement of what God is.”

This revealing of God’s self is not about the nature of God in heaven – the stuff of doctrine. Rather, this revealing of God’s self is about the nature of God in the world – the stuff of human experience.

And we experience this revealing of God not once, but many times, all through our lives, and every single day. If we can be aware of these experiences of God’s revealing, we might grasp more deeply our connection to God, to each other, and to every living thing.

If we are open to these experiences, much else in our life will open up and we will come to the central purpose of our life. We will discover how God calls each of us uniquely as individuals and collectively as the people of God.

Jesus himself talks of this revealing as almost as a riddle. “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above,” he is quoted as saying in the Gospel of John.

Those words have been much misunderstood, translated by some modern people as a test of being “born again.” The words have become, for some, a badge of being doctrinally correct. But that is not what Jesus is getting at.

The phrase is a play-on-words with the double meaning of being both “born anew” and “born from above” or “born of the Spirit.” Jesus talks about an experience of God that happens over and over again, that transforms us in such a profound way that we become new people – changed – literally born anew every single day.

That kind of experience transcends rigid doctrines and creedal formulas, and nurtures us into becoming servants of each other and the world – the people we were created to be. As we grow into our own true selves, we might just find that other ancient words will ring true for us as they did for the prophet Isaiah:

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

* William Temple, Christian Faith and Life, MacMillan, 1936, p. 34By James Richardson, Fiat Lux

Beginnings and endings: The circle of the Holy Trinity

My sermon marking Trinity Sunday is based on Genesis 1:1-2:4a , Psalm 8, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, and
Matthew 28:16-20:

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“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

Sometimes first things go first. Sometimes first things go last. 

Think of the lessons we hear today as circles – with endings and beginnings that circle back to beginnings and endings. 

We hear the opening verses of the Bible: the Genesis story of how God created all that there is and will be. God said, “let there be light” and called it good. 

And we hear the closing lines from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus tells his disciples to go forth and baptize “all the nations” – all the peoples of the earth – and that he will be with them “to the end of the age.” 

The creation story of Genesis continues in the new creation of story of Christ, the story circling back to the beginning. 

And in the middle is a farewell from Paul to the community in Corinth, imploring to keep their circle alive by living in love and peace. 

All of this is wrapped inside of the circle of the hard-to-understand concept of the Trinity.
This is Trinity Sunday, and on this Sunday preachers like me are supposed to explain the Trinity. 

Some will compare the Trinity to a tree with roots, a trunk and leaves, or to water, ice and steam, or to a three-sided diamond. 

We will recite the ancient Nicene Creed in a little while, that formula of the Trinity written in the 4th century. We will hear again the Trinity proclaimed in the words of our Eucharistic prayer. 

Many words and much blood have been spilled over explanations and defenses of the Trinity, and truthfully most of it leaves me very cold. 

What is often lacking in this talk of the Trinity is an explanation of why we should care a wit about it. It gets awfully abstract in a hurry, kind of like 9th grade algebra. 

We may fairly ask, what does understanding the Trinity – or algebra – possibly have to do with my daily life? 

What does the Trinity have to do with war and unrest, climate change and a tottering economy, or a friend who is in the hospital? 

It is important to know that those who came up with the concept of the Trinity were trying very hard to grasp how God could be present in the world with them yet feel so distant at times. They, too, faced warfare and plague, and life was perhaps more precarious for them than it is for us.

At its root, the Trinity is fundamentally a statement of the infinity of God and God’s infinite ways. 

To hold the idea of the Trinity is to grasp that God has infinite ways of being understood.
Among my favorite ancient symbols of the Trinity is three circles that interlock. Circles, after all, have no end and no beginning and are symbols of infinity. 

The God of the Trinity is the Infinite One who is the spark that creates all things, and calls it good; the Infinite One who came in a particular time and place as a man called Jesus to show us how to love each other; and the Infinite One who is still a holy spark living within us and among us and going infinitely where she will. 

God as male, God as female, God as a living being who is capable of reaching all people everywhere infinitely. 

Instead of a God who is a monolithic stone distant from us, we hear and see expressions of God who is dynamic, relational, here with us, and has infinite love for us. 

I can’t see all of God and neither can you. The Trinity is another way of saying that all people are capable of experiencing God, each in our limited way, yet God is bigger than any of us can experience as alone. 

These lessons today bring us full circle to our own beginnings as individuals and as a faith community by touching once again on our baptism. 

In this final passage of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus calls us to go forth and baptize the people of the world in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the name of this infinitely knowable God. 

The passage is known as “the great commission.” 

Jesus’ great commission is a preposterous notion on the face of it. 

There he was with his handful of disciples one last time, telling them to leave their hiding places and get out into the world and change it. 

Heal the sick, feed the hungry, and baptize them in water and spirit into the good news of God’s kingdom bursting forth all around us and inside us. Go into lands that are foreign to you. Get out of your comfort zone, big time. Go to all the nations of the world and I will fill them with love and grace and healing – and baptize them into this new life. 

They must have said, who us? There are only a handful of us. How can we possibly do anything of the sort? 

Yet they did, and could because the Christ who they knew sustained them and was with them to the end of all ages. 

It is important we see baptism as something more than the milestone of “christening” of a baby. Baptism is foundational to all that we do as a faith community. 

Baptism is a starting line in the circle of faith for us as individuals and for the faith community with us. 

Baptism is the initiation into the Church and that makes it about all of us. And once you are in, you are in, and nothing can take your baptism away from you. That is why we baptize someone only once. In the words of the Prayer Book, you are “Christ’s own forever.”
You are not just in the body of Christ in one locale, or in one parish, or even in one branch of Christianity. You aren’t baptized an “Episcopalian” or a “Catholic” or “Lutheran.” 

You are baptized in the name of the father, son and Holy Spirit, and like the Trinity itself, that makes your baptism infinitely large. 

You are a member of the entire body of Christ, all over the world, in every place and in every time. It doesn’t matter whether you change locations or even change church brands. You are Christ’s own forever, no matter where you go. 

Think of baptism as the center of the circle. Think of Jesus, standing at the center of the circle, at the water, pointing us in new ways to reach beyond this circle and into the world. 

The symbol of our baptism is the font at center of this house of prayer. It is a reminder to us every time we come here of our own baptism, and it is our gateway to this Holy Table to be sustained with the bread and wine of our Holy Eucharist. 

And there is one more thing: Our baptism compels us to leave here, and do those things Jesus called those first disciples to do: Heal the sick, be with the lonely, work to repair this broken earth, and proclaim the good news of God’s kingdom bursting in the open for all to see, and baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
AMEN

The paradox of The Holy Trinity: Freeing us from rigid religion

I am not in the pulpit today, but am taking a break. Today is a major feast of the year -- Trinity Sunday -- and so I thought I would brush off an old Trinity Sunday sermon and share it with you. No doubt there is a heresy or two in here, that seems inevitable on this topic. The readings for today are Romans 5:1-5, and John 16:12-15. May you have a blessed Sunday. . .

The Trinity: Think of a perfect diamond

One God in Three Persons. If you aren’t sure how that works, welcome to Trinity Sunday, the Sunday set aside by the Church to consider the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity, the concept of One God in Three Persons, as it is classically stated.

It is also the Sunday that many churches commandeer a seminarian and make them preach on this – basically say, Ok smarty, you have all this fancy theological education, you explain it.

But, alas, we don’t have a seminarian. So I am going to take a crack at this. I am going to try to take the doctrinaire out of the doctrine.

The doctrine of the Trinity: if we admit it, many Christians find incomprehensible, or polytheistic, or simply a curious but irrelevant appendage to their faith.

So let me suggest this to you: engage with this concept because it is in the experience of the "Holy Trinity One God" that we might find a place of hope and the promise for a better place for us and all whom we know and love. And it is in the Trinity that we can find a place to embrace all people of every faith, or no faith at all.

As odd as this sounds, the Trinity can free us from rigid doctrine. Let me give you an image of the Trinity to hold and take with you:

Think of a perfect diamond.

Or, for you kids, imagine the most perfect piece of rock candy you have ever seen. And then think of this diamond, or this perfectly clear piece of rock candy, as having three sides. You can shape such a crystal by rounding the sides and connecting it at the points.

Then, think about each side as one side, or person, of the Trinity. One side is the Father – the Creator; one side is the Son, the God who comes to us as a human being in the person of Jesus; and one side is the Holy Spirit who dwells with us always.

All are distinct sides, yet each side of the diamond is connected as One.

No matter which side of the diamond you look into, you see the center, you see God.

Now consider this: If you look into just one or two sides, aren’t you still seeing the center?

I believe to the core of my being that the Trinity is a profound expression of the infinity of God, the infinity of God’s creation. No matter where we stand, or how we might feel, we are still capable of seeing into the center of the diamond or this perfect piece of rock candy.

There is one truth, one God, but an infinite number of angles to see the one God. There are as many angles as there are people to see God, and as viewpoints as there are moments in a day. As long as we are looking at the center of the diamond, no matter what religion we label ourselves, aren’t we all looking upon God?

As the apostle Paul puts it in his Letter to the Romans we hear today: “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.”

Jesus in the Gospel of John 3:1-7 today reminds us that God is infinite, and goes everywhere like the wind: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

Or look at this another way:

This diamond called the Trinity is no ordinary diamond. It doesn’t reflect light, it radiates light. No matter where you stand, no matter what is going on in your life, no matter what good or bad befalls you, the light of this Holy God will still shine upon you.

Today we are bathed in the light of the Trinity. Expressions of the Trinity are everywhere in our worship – the prayers, in the creed, in the Communion prayers, in the blessing, in the music and the words and symbols that evoke the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sustainer.

All of it reflects new life. Listen and watch for it.

This danger with this concept of the Trinity is it can get too abstract, so we do well to remember that the concept springs forth from the historic event of Jesus of Nazareth, and his call to us – his followers – to take care of each other, to serve the poor, the sick and those who are in any kind of trouble. And it comes from his promise to be with us always.

This precious diamond, this Trinity One God who has no beginning or end, comes to bring us healing and salvation. That is our birthright, that is the gift of the Trinity, One God. AMEN.