Knowing or Known (Sermon May 31)

Scriptures:  Isaiah 6:1-8              

        Romans 8:12-17               John 3:1-17

Today is Trinity Sunday.  We’ve had three festivals of the church in three weeks – Ascension Day, Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday.  But one of these things is not like the other.  Ascension Day and Pentecost, like Advent and Christmas and Lent and Palm Sunday and Good Friday and Easter, commemorate incidents in the life of Christ, with the exception of Pentecost, which commemorates the coming of the Holy Spirit – all actions of God.  But Trinity Sunday is a commemoration, not of a person or an event, but a doctrine – the doctrine of the Trinity – one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or in gender-neutral language, Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit.   And doctrines are man-made things, human attempts to explain the nature and workings of God; in essence, human ways to get our minds around that which is beyond comprehension..  The word Trinity appears nowhere in the Bible.  The most explicit inclusion of the concept of the Trinity is in Matthew 28, in which Jesus commands his disciples to baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Doctrines give shape to our faith, and the doctrine of the Trinity is perhaps the defining difference between Christianity and the two other Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam.  Both Judaism and Islam conceive of God entirely in terms of unity.  Deuteronomy 6:4 is the opening verse in the Sh’ma, a defining section of Scripture used in worship by Jews:  “Hear, O Israel:  The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.”  And the Quran, Surah 112, begins with these words, “Say, He is Allah, who is One, Allah, the eternal refuge. He neither begets nor is begotten, nor is there to Him any equivalent.”  

For Christians, the Trinity is our tradition’s way of explaining our own experience of the divine – God, the Father, the creator, the eternal one – affirmed by all three Abrahamic traditions.  Jesus, whom Christians believe is more than just a really awesome human teacher and healer, but God in human form, God who walked among us to free us from the power of sin.  And the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God within us and among us, calling the church into being, empowering us for ministry in this world, empowering us to continue the work of Jesus in our own day.  Some Christians see the Trinity as three modes of God’s action – God as creator, redeemer, and sustainer.

But the doctrine of the Trinity in its fullness proclaims not just one God in three modes of operation, but one God in three persons, each of whom is fully divine in its own right.  What this understanding adds is a sense of God as community, an eternal, self-giving community of love.  According to the tradition, the three persons of the one Trinitarian God relate to one another in what is called perichorisis, from two Greek words that mean something close to “dancing around”……in essence, dancing around one another and even within and through one another – an eternal self-giving dance of love among the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each constantly giving and receiving – a self-giving dance of love into which we as Christians and as human beings are invited.  And so, as dry and technical as the doctrine of the Trinity may seem, the reality is lifegiving – that we as human beings are made to be in community with one another, because we are created in the image of a God who exists in community; that we are made to give to one another, because self-giving is at the essence of the Trinitarian God’s very being.

Doctrines give shape to our faith, but are not the essence of our faith.   As any child opening Christmas presents knows, it is important not to mistake the box for the contents – though indeed some children have more fun playing with the box than the toy it contained, and some Christians are long on doctrine and short on lived experience.  The essence of our faith is not a doctrine worked out by the church fathers many hundreds of years ago, but the reality of a living God who truly cannot be defined, a God whose name not only means “I am what I am” but also “I will be what I will be”– and our Old Testament and Gospel readings this morning portray this in vivid form.  Our reading from Isaiah describes Isaiah’s vision in the Temple that came to define his call and ministry.  We might imagine that Isaiah went to the Temple to worship – and in that sacred space was granted a vision, not just of the liturgy of the Temple in Jerusalem, but a vision of a liturgy in heaven – “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the Temple.  Seraphs were in attendance above him, each had six wings; with two they covered their faces and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD of Hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’  The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.” 

And at this moment, Isaiah is conscious, not only of God’s holiness, but of his own sinfulness….he feels himself caught up in a liturgy in which he had no business being:  And Isaiah said, ‘Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!  The contrast between God’s glory and his own unworthiness was too much for Isaiah to bear; he felt not only like a bum at a banquet, but perhaps more like a grease spot on the carpet.

But God intervenes:  “Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said, ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’.  Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?  And Isaiah said, ‘Here I am, send me.’   This very sequence – adoration of God, confession and absolution from sin, thanksgiving for being cleansed, and sending for service – defines the shape of our worship service, including today’s worship service.  We begin with a call to worship and a hymn of praise, we confess our sins and the pastor on behalf of God proclaims pardon, and the remainder of the service is in essence our thanksgiving in response to being pardoned, and ends with our being sent into the world to serve.  Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Service – which we can remember by the acronym ACTS – is the shape of what we do here on Sunday morning in preparation for our lives the other six days of the week.

Isaiah was caught up into a vision of the heavenly liturgy, became immediately conscious of his own limitation and brokenness, and was restored and prepared for mission.  Our Gospel text gives us the greatly-contrasting account of Nicodemus’ meeting with Jesus.  In the Isaiah account, there’s no doubt whatsoever who’s in charge, as Isaiah cowers before God’s glory.  In our Gospel text, it is Nicodemus, whom we’re told is a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews, who takes the initiative to approach Jesus, though after nightfall, so that he wouldn’t be seen. And it’s telling that after addressing Jesus as Rabbi, the first two words out of his mouth are “We know.”  “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  Nicodemus’ confidence in his knowledge doesn’t last very long, as Jesus tells him that “No one can see the kingdom of God without having been born from above” and Nicodemus says, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?; as Jesus tells Nicodemus “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.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” and Nicodemus responds by saying “How can these things be?” , and Jesus responds to Nicodemus by saying “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?”

Nicodemus approached Jesus with confidence, and left in confusion.   Isaiah was called into God’s presence feeling terrified, was prepared and empowered, and became a prophet among his people.  We may think that Jesus is being a bit hard on Nicodemus, but I believe Jesus was doing the very necessary work, the essential work, of breaking through Nicodemus’ preconceived notions of how God works, to make space for the work of the Spirit within Nicodemus’ life.  It’s the same ongoing work that the Spirit is trying to do within each of us.  We all approach worship with a certain box of expectations – ideas about God and church that we learned from our parents, or from Sunday school or confirmation class, or from our pastor, or from this or that televangelist or this or that news commentator, or wherever.  God is like this.  God isn’t like that.  Music in church should sound like this, and not like that. People should behave like this in church, and not like that.  And at any given time in our lives, these ideas and expectations may be enough to get us faithfully through the day.  But they’ll never, ever suffice to get us through our lives as faithful followers of the Risen Christ.  At any given time, God is calling us from what we know to what we don’t know, from places of comfort to places of challenge – and preparing us so that we are ready to say “Here I am! Send me!”

“Here I am! Send me!”.  On this Trinity Sunday, our  Scripture readings remind is that are saved, not by what we have but by whose we are; not because of what we know, but because we ourselves are known and loved by God.    When God calls, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” May our answer always be that of Isaiah, ‘Here I am.  Send me.  Here we are.  Send us.’   Where Christ calls, may we follow.  Amen.