Scriptures:
Isaiah 6:1-8 Psalm 29
Romans
8:12-21 John 3:1-17
Today is Trinity Sunday, when we lift up the doctrine of the
Trinity, of one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Gender-inclusive formulations of the Trinity
include Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, or alternately, Earth-Maker,
Pain-Bearer, Life-Giver. The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the
fundamental beliefs separating Christians from Jews and Muslims, who believe in
God’s unity, but do not recognize the Risen Christ as divine or the Holy Spirit
as an entity distinct from the Father. I
have a fond memory connected to Trinity Sunday, as it was on Trinity Sunday of
maybe 2005 or 2006 that I preached my very first sermon. I was Moderator of the Philadelphia
Association of the UCC at the time, and at that time we had seven independent
congregations seeking to join the UCC – and as moderator, I was expected to
visit them and learn about them, and to tell them about the United Church of
Christ. One of them was an independent
Liberian congregation, where I met our member Isaac Nyantte. I contacted their pastor – his name was Tubman
Sarpe, if my memory still serves, and Isaac was Pastor Sarpe’s right-hand
man. We agreed on a date, and I asked
permission to bring greetings on behalf of the United Church of Christ. Isaac said, “You will preach.” I said, no, I’ll just say a few words of
greeting; I’ll be done before you know it and you can go on with the rest of your
service. Isaac said, “You will
preach.” I told him, “I’ve never
preached a sermon in my life; I would hardly know how to begin to put a sermon
together.” And Isaac said, “You will
preach.” So I shrugged my shoulders,
said, “Oh, all right, I’ll do what I can,” and set out to look up the
lectionary texts for the day. And, dear
God, it was Trinity Sunday. Jesus
wept. But I went ahead and cobbled
together something that from a distance could pass for a sermon on the
Trinity. Following the sermon, the
pastor did an altar call, and a woman came forward to be saved – altar calls
aren’t part of my tradition, so I insisted that Rev Sarpe join me in praying
over her. And then they asked me to
bless the building where they were worshipping, an Ethiopian church which had
allowed them to rent space, to which I agreed.
Two circumstances followed.
Sadly, the church did not join
the UCC, even though later on I assisted the congregation in several matters,
including helping them find new worship space when they could no longer afford
the rent at the Ethiopian church where they had been worshipping. I found them a wedding chapel, reasoning that
not too many weddings happened on Sunday mornings, and the rent was much
cheaper than what they’d been paying….and so henceforth they had hearts and
cupids adorning their Sunday services. At this point, more than ten years on, I have no idea whatever became of them. But, more happily, Isaac followed me into the
UCC, first to Old First Reformed, where I was a member at the time, and later
Isaac came here to Emanuel. And so I
guess at least one person liked my Trinity Sunday sermon.
We should note that the word “Trinity” is nowhere to be
found in Scripture, though the persons of the Trinity are named in Matthew
28:19, in which Jesus issues the Great Commission: “"Therefore go and make disciples of all
nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded
you." However, in our New Testament
readings, the persons of the Trinity make an appearance. In his letter to the Romans, Paul speaks of
the Spirit bearing witness that we are children of God – and it is God whom we
call “Abba! Father!” who hears that prayer, and Christ with whom we are joint
heirs to God’s grace. And so we might think of God above us, Christ beside
us, and the Spirit within us. And in our
Gospel reading, Nicodemus recognizes that Jesus is sent by God, and Jesus in
return tells Nicodemus of the crucial role of the Spirit in helping us to be
born from above or, in more familiar language, born again. In
both readings, the three persons of the Trinity act in distinct ways, and yet
all that they do is God’s work. Indeed,
it is by observing their working, their actions, that we come to understand the
persons of the Trinity, just as we understand wind by observing it, by
listening to its sound and feeling its movement as it rustles through the grass
and the trees.
The doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that the God we
worship is ultimately beyond our understanding.
And we need that reminder; without it, we try to domesticate God and
turn God into “Buddy Jesus”. Even
reminded of God’s incomprehensibility, God’s total “other-ness”, we still try
to understand and define, perhaps in an effort to control and limit. Over the centuries, many attempts have been
made to define the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. I included the Athanasian Creed on an insert
in the bulletin as a historic note of one very detailed attempt. Feel free to ponder it, but have some
Excedrin nearby – preferably extra strength.
Disagreements on such matters led to splits in the church which persist
to this day. So the Nicene Creed, which you can find in the maroon hymnal in
the middle of page 24, says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and
the Son – but the eastern or orthodox churches believe and teach that the Holy
Spirit proceeds only from the Father.
The phrase “and the son”, called in Latin the filioque clause, was a late addition to the Nicene Creed, and its
addition is one of the reasons for the split between the Eastern and Western
churches in 1054 AD. Such divisions and
controversies have caused many to look on the doctrine of the Trinity as an
argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and toss it
aside altogether as some archaic, unhelpful, irrelevant relic from the distant
past, which is unfortunate.
It’s ironic that church statements about the Trinity have
caused controversy and division – because the reality of the Trinity is relationship
and unity. The three persons of the
Trinity are said to be united in a state of perichoresis,
a Greek word indicating a kind of circle dance. The Latin word “circumincession” has the same meaning. And so the persons of the Trinity are said to
exist in a kind of circle dance of mutual self-giving. We see some of this in Jesus’ words in John
14:10 that ‘I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” In his high priestly
prayer in John chapter 17, Jesus invites his disciples – invites us – into this
relationship of self giving, when he prays that “As you,
Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us,[f] so that
the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that
you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I
in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world
may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”
So relationship and unity are at the heart of God’s
nature. As persons created in God’s
image, we likewise are created for relationship, are created to love and to be
loved. As believers in the risen Christ,
Jesus’ prayer that his disciples may all be one, as he and the Father are one,
is a prayer for us.
Our readings remind us that the unity of the church, the
love that exists between believers, is a gift from God. In our reading from John’s Gospel, Jesus
tells Nicodemus, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from
above”, or in more familiar language, “born again” – the Greek word, anothen, can mean “from above” or
“again”, so both meanings are possible, and likely both are intended – the
writer of John’s gospel was fond of double meanings. For us, the phrase “born again” comes loaded
with a lot of baggage, not all of it helpful – we have images of what it means
to be born again, similar to the lady who came forward at the end of my first
sermon. And yet many people experience
the new life of Christ without coming forward in church to be prayed over. And we may have images of how born-again
Christians are supposed to act, and often these images are not very helpful – I
can say that some of the least Christ-like people I’ve ever met loudly proclaim
themselves to be born again. I prefer
the translation “born from above” is that it reminds us that the new life
Christ offers is God’s doing, not ours, on God’s schedule, not ours. That is to say, we can’t force ourselves or
others to be born again, any more than a fetus can decide when it is to be
born. It comes from God. It’s in God’s hands. In fact, God help me, when Rev. Sarpe did his
altar call at the end of my sermon, I actually hoped nobody would come forward,
because if someone came forward, I had no idea what to do. So the woman’s response wasn’t about my excuse
of a sermon, but a result of God acting in her life.
Our reading from Isaiah reminds us that, although the new
life in Christ, being born from above, is a gift from God, God still wants us
to spread the message. As he worshipped
in the Temple, Isaiah was granted a vision of God’s glory, and the words he
used are attempts to describe the indescribable – the Lord on a throne, the hem
of his robe filling the temple, angels singing to one another “Holy, Holy,
Holy!” Faced with that glory, he was
overwhelmed with a sense of his own unworthiness, and he confessed his sin –
“Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of
unclean lips” – as we do here every
Sunday. An angel of the Lord proclaimed
that his guilt had departed and his sin was blotted out. And then Isaiah heard those words, “Whom
shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah said, “Here I am! Send
me!” This scene in the Temple, Isaiah’s
encounter with God’s mysterious glory, is the pattern for our worship. We come, sing praise to God, confess our sin,
hear the assurance of pardon – and at the end of worship, we are sent to
proclaim the word.
May God grant us a vision of his glory, a vision of the love
God has for us, a vision of the lives of love to which God calls us. May the Triune God – Father above us, Christ
beside us, the Spirit within us – grant us power to resist the unholy trinity
of racism, materialism, and militarism that dominate our culture. May our lives be a testimony to the glory of
God, our God who is mysterious, never fully known, yet overflowing in love for
us and for the world God created. Amen.
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