Trinity Sunday, Year B, May 27, 2018; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God ‘increation,’ incarnation, inspiration, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.

This morning our Gospel lesson contains one of the most misappropriated and misunderstood passages of scripture in the whole Bible, in my view. “For God so loved the world that God gave the only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” John 3:16 has fueled some of the most damaging and unloving impulses of those who have taken the name Christian, from the Crusades to the destruction of conquered indigenous peoples, to the Holocaust, and to our present day, where the idea of the common good is endangered. If folks would just focus on what comes next, multitudes might have been spared. Verse 17 says: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (or by him or because of him or for the sake of him. Being saved here means healing, integrity, and dignity. Being saved means being rescued from danger, liberated from oppression, being restored to right-relationship.

For me, the incredible irony is that this passage, so often used as a yardstick for measuring who is inside and outside of the saving grace of God, is in the most symbol-loaded Gospel of the four, a story rich with all kinds of literary devices: metaphor, rhetoric, poetry, hyperbole, prolepsis, figurative language, of all kinds. This is not a passage to take literally. The Gospel of John is a love story. John was writing about relationship with the divine – about renewing a way of relating with the Holy One illuminated by Jesus – the Light and Love of the World according to Jesus’ followers. Note well: it’s not the Church that God so loved. And it’s not “our” world that God so loved. It’s the world. Actually it’s the cosmos! And for John the Evangelist, as far as I can tell, believing meant beloving. Biblical believing is all about beloving. It’s not about thinking; it’s about entrusting one’s heart to Loving.

Nicodemus, this Gospel tells us, was a highly moral seeker who felt like he was in the dark about his relationship with God. Coming out of the honorable tradition of the Pharisees, we can understand that he was well educated and most attentive, but he felt he was unable to “see” the Realm of God to enter it. He came to Jesus in the night – in the dark – and Jesus knew that Nicodemus couldn’t see the realm of God. In John’s Gospel, the realm of God is not a place to get to after death; it’s a way of being. And it’s not as much about past or future as it is about now. New Testament scholar, Gail O’Day explains that “judgment and eternal life as present tense are at the theological heart of this Gospel.” [1]

In fact, I think that State might be a better translation for us: State of God. That conveys the space as well as the mode of existence. Nicodemus was smart and observant, but he wasn’t seeing – wasn’t entering, experiencing — the State of God. Jesus is telling him about being born anew or born from above and Nicodemus is taking Jesus literally and asking, “how is that possible?” I want us to hear this story and know that we are represented by Nicodemus. We are so often smart and observant, and we are the ones who so often fail to see the realm of God or experience the State of God. We are like the student who asks the spiritual teacher to show us where God is. The spiritual teacher replies, “I cannot show you where God is any more than I can show a fish where the water is.” We are in God and God is in us. God is in and all around us like the air that we breathe.

Nicodemus was searching (in the dark) for a deeper connection with God. He called Jesus, “Rabbi.” He wanted Jesus to teach him. Jesus said, “okay let’s take it from the top.” “It’s mysterious,” Jesus says. It’s as mysterious as the water that gives life and washes us clean. It’s as mysterious as the wind — the breath – the breeze – the Spirit – and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. It’s indiscriminate and unpredictable. You don’t control it. You can’t contain it. You can’t see it, but you know it when you feel it and you can see its effects. It’s for the whole world, not for those who are somehow determined by people to be “worthy.” The wind, the breath, the Spirit moves over and through the just and the unjust, like the rain, as Jesus said.

You know, it’s a curious thing for us to observe Trinity Sunday at Emmanuel Church. Trinity Sunday is the only Sunday in the church year entirely devoted to a doctrine – that’s the good news I guess (that there’s only one). Even though it is the most beautiful of doctrines because it attempts to describe the Divine relationship in terms of Who God is for us. I doubt if it’s possible for me to preach on Trinity Sunday without accidentally tripping over some orthodoxy and falling headlong into heresy. Most of you who know me have already figured out – I’m not much of a philosopher of religion, and I don’t carry ready reference ideas of classical theology in my head. I read those ideas, but I’ve never known where to put those ideas so that I can find them later on. So one of my prized possessions is a big fat book called The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. I look things up in it. Here’s what it says about the doctrine of the Trinity: “The central dogma of Christian theology, that one God exists in three Persons [capital P] and one substance…God is one, yet self-differentiated…three distinct modes of existence, yet remains one through all eternity.” [2] (Then I put it back on the shelf.)

You may know that the word for trinity doesn’t appear in scripture, or anywhere else in Christian literature before the end of the second century of the common era. Yes, there’s the baptismal formula in the Gospel of Matthew at the end, and other passages like our Gospel lesson today that people look at through a special Trinitarian spy-glass that appear to point to the idea of a three-in-one deity. Of course the Unitarians way back in the 17^th century declared that lens defective. I love to tell the story of our first rector at Emmanuel, Boston, Frederic Dan Huntington. He was a Unitarian minister who became an Episcopal priest a full year after being called as our rector, and later was bishop of Central New York. He was ordained at Trinity Church, by the way, but I don’t think it was the doctrine of the Trinity that called to him as much as his love of liturgy. I like to say that Emmanuel Church has always been kind of Episcotarian in its theology.

The language defining the doctrine of the Trinity was nailed down in outline form by Church councils in the 4^th century, when it had become very important to people in power to control the message of Christianity. The Church began in earnest to propagate a message that said, “tell me what you think and I’ll tell you whether you belong.” [3] Tragically, it often wasn’t “belong” in the sense of a particular community, it meant, whether you belong alive on the earth. It’s quite hard to tease apart the development of the doctrine of the Trinity from the practice of military and political power of the late Roman Empire, once the emperors were persuaded that putting crosses on army shields helped them to win battles. So, while there are many beautiful and true aspects of Trinitarian beloving, I do think we best hold the doctrine lightly and loosely. (See what I mean about heresy?) If we are going to bind the Trinity to ourselves, let’s not bind so tightly that we (and others) can’t breathe or move.

Holding theological doctrine loosely really is essentially Anglican, it seems to me – essentially Episcopalian. We are not a doctrinal denomination. Our governing principle is lex orandi, lex credendi – as we pray, so we give credence or credit – that is, our convictions can be discerned through our communal prayers and actions, as opposed to being expressed primarily in theological treatises. Other traditions have founding theologians or agreed upon confessions of faith that systematically define communal understandings. Systematic theology is a disciplined, orderly, rational, coherent account of Christian thinking. We don’t have that. What we have is a cacophony of voices, languages, perspectives on the meanings of lived communal experience, which is dynamic rather than static. What we have, in my view, is strongly creative, incarnational, and inspiring – which sounds quite Trinitarian, doesn’t it? Or maybe what we have is a way, a truth and a life, to call upon the words of Anglican Divine, George Herbert. Oh how I wish we baptized in the name of a Way, a Truth, and a Life.

If I were to choose a guiding systematic, it would be Process Theology, which emphasizes the changing nature of the Divine in relationship with a changing universe, in which Jesus was the full disclosure of what had been discerned only in theory before he lived his life to show that “love and persuasion are more significant and effective than power or coercion,” and in which the definition of sin is “deviation from creative advance…[of the Spirit of love-in-action for] the wider shared [or common] good.” Process theologian, Catherine Keller, writes in her book called On the Mystery that “theology is never anything but an open-ended interactivity between many voices, living and dead.” [4] My theology teacher, Fredrica Harris Thompsett says, “We are all theologians” with the capacity to think about essential principles and values, teachings and traditions, and relate them to our communal and individual lives. [5] And my theology teacher, the late great Verna Dozier, said, “Don’t tell me what you believe. Tell me what difference it makes.” [6] I’d add, “and then show me how you are leaving the world better than when you found it.” So instead of arguing about definitions and mechanics, let’s continue to be Trinitarians who live into, lean into, the mystery of One God in Three Persons while we do what we can and must to participate in the creative, embodied, inspirational dream of God for the well-being of all people.

Listen to this poem by the 14^th c. Hafiz, called “We Have Not Come to Take Prisoners.”

We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender ever more deeply
To freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.

Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend
Those aspects of obedience
That stand outside of our house
And shout to our reason
“O please, O please,
Come out and play.”

For we have not come here to take prisoners
Or to confine our wondrous spirits,

But to experience ever and ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom and
Light! [7]

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