Trinity Sunday, Year B, June 3, 2012

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.

If you’ve been to a professional football game or a similar event in a large venue, you might have noticed banners that say, simply, John 3:16. Or maybe you’ve noticed bumper stickers or billboards that say John 3:16. “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.” It is, in my opinion, one of the most misappropriated and misunderstood passages of scripture in the whole Bible. 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.

For me, the incredible irony is that this passage, so often taken literally, is in the most symbol-loaded Gospel of the four, a story rich with all kinds of literary devices: metaphor, rhetoric, hyperbole, prolepsis, figurative language, and on and on. And that’s how it should be because the Gospel of John is a love story. John was writing about relationship with God – about renewing a way of relating with God illuminated by Jesus – the Light and Love of the World for Jesus’ followers. 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.

It’s also incredibly ironic because, in this very passage, Jesus is arguing against a kind of literalism with Nicodemus. Nicodemus, this Gospel tells us, was a highly moral seeker who felt like he was in the dark about his relationship with God. He was most obedient and most observant, but he couldn’t “see” the Kingdom of God to enter it. He came to Jesus in the night – in the dark – and Jesus knew that Nicodemus couldn’t see the kingdom or realm of God. In John’s Gospel, the realm of God is not a Never-neverland kind of place, it’s a way of being; and it’s not only in the future, it’s also now. In fact, it occurs to me 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 — 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?”

It reminds me of the story, perhaps you remember it, of a student who arrives after traveling a long time, to study with a spiritual master. The student says, “I want you to show me where God is.” The master replies, “I cannot show you where God is any more than I can show a fish where the water is.” You are in God and God is in you. God is in and all around you like the air that you breathe.

Nicodemus was searching (in the dark) for a deeper connection with God. 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 — which blows where it chooses, 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 don’t even know where it comes from or where it ends up. 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 to be “worthy.” Jesus spent his life and expended his life showing people who God was, and who and whose they were. And how did he show that? Jesus showed that by demonstrating three things: 1) the importance of life in a community of faith; 2) the importance of life in service to others; and 3) the importance of being open to the movement of the Spirit – the breath and the breeze of God.

So I’m wondering this: How are we like Nicodemus as individuals, as a Church, so often obedient and so often observant, but in the dark when it comes to “seeing” the State of God in the world? How can we get beyond how literal we are? Because even if we are sophisticated enough to not take every word of the Bible literally, we are literal people. We create word definitions and limits for ourselves and for others that declare what is possible. We imagine limits for God that declare what is possible. And those limits are especially clear when it comes to who’s in and who’s out – who really deserves mercy and who doesn’t – who deserves to be served and who doesn’t. We do it. I do it. You do it. The Episcopal Church does it. But here’s the good news: God blows through our limits (sooner or later) every time, because, as Bishop Nedi Rivera says, “Self-giving love trumps everything.” The self-giving love of God trumps everything. The spirit of God – the Holy Spirit – like the wind – sooner or later, trumps everything.

You know, it’s a curious thing for us to observe Trinity Sunday. Most preachers know that trying to explain or defend the Trinity will get you in trouble faster than 5^th grade recess! It’s a feast day only observed in the Western Christian churches – in the Roman, Anglican, and mainstream Protestant traditions (or as my beloved teacher Suzanne Hiatt liked to call them, the “malestream traditions”). Trinity is much more pleasant to sing about than to sermonize on. Holy, holy, holy was hymn number 1 in the hymnal of my childhood and it was the first hymn I knew by heart. I love singing it!

Even though we wouldn’t dream of excising our Trinitarian hymns, as a parish, theologically we tilt heavily in the direction of Unitarianism at Emmanuel Church – that’s been true since our founding in 1860. Our first rector, Dan Huntington, was a Unitarian minister when he was called to Emmanuel Church. He wasn’t ordained in the Episcopal Church until six months later, when he was ordained to the transitional diaconate. Probably not coincidentally, the ceremony took place at Trinity Church, Boston! He became an Episcopal priest a full year after the founders of Emmanuel Church decided to hire him as rector! Our sixth rector, Phillips Osgood, left Emmanuel Church and became a Unitarian minister. (We got one and we gave one back!) We’ve often been referred to as being Episcotarian.

The word “trinity” never appears in scripture, although there are two moments in the Christian testament which particularly inspire Trinitarians. The Gospel of Matthew includes the post-resurrection instructions to baptize all nations “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” and the apostle Paul concludes his second letter to the Corinthians with: “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the sharing in the Holy Spirit be with you all.” What became Trinitarian doctrinal in Christian development was centuries later and it’s been a mixed blessing ever since. But what if we imagine the idea of Trinity as loving and dynamic divine energy in which relationship is essential? What if we imagine the idea of Trinity not so much as a doctrinal wall to bump into, but a mysterious ocean to swim in?

Perhaps you know that this past week award winning illustrator Leo Dillon died.
[1] Very early on in what became a life-long collaboration with his wife Diane Dillon, they created an artist who they called “It.” “It” was the name of their combined art. In an interview that they gave in 2000 to Locus Magazine, they talked about “It.” Diane Dillon said, “we hit the ‘Third Artist’ concept, it helped us a lot, because we could look at ourselves as one artist rather than two individuals, and that third artist was doing something neither one of us would do. That lifted the work away from reflecting either one’s personal viewpoint. We let it flow the way it flows when an artist is working by themselves and a color goes down that they didn’t quite expect and that affects the next colors they use, and it seems to have a life of its own…. If a piece takes on a certain look when I’m doing it, and I hand it to Leo, it flows into something else, and he goes right along with it. Then when it comes back to me I pick it up from that point and carry it on.” And then Leo added: ”People often comment on the ‘Dillon style.’ I think that someplace, the two of us made a pact with each other. We both decided that we would [offer]… up the essence of ourselves, that part that made the art each of us did our own. And I think that in doing that we opened the door to everything.”
[2]

I read that and I thought, “hey! That sounds like evidence of Trinity if Trinity is loving and dynamic divine energy in which relationship is essential. That sounds like a description of the kind of Godding – my verb form for the divine – I wish for all of us: increation, incarnation, and inspiration.

To return to your place in the text click on the number of the footnote you read.

← Back to sermons page