First Sunday after Pentecost (Trinity), June 7, 20009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Isaiah 6: 1-8,
Psalm 29, Romans 8: 12-17 and John 3: 1-17

John Updike tells a very sad story about a suburban, upwardly mobile Massachusetts family. As a young man, Brad Schaeffer was attracted to his future wife Jeanette at a Christmas party. He overheard the office Romeo telling her the only thing that really mattered in life was making money. She responded announcing that more important to her was the salvation of her soul. Brad was smitten, the two eventually married, moved to a large home in Newton, raised four children, joined a church with he more involved than she. The decades passed all too quickly and eventually Brad retired. Their hopes were largely rewarded in conventional ways until when at the age of 71 Jeanette was diagnosed with terminal cancer. When Brad encouraged a visit by their minister, however, she turned him down. “He makes me tired,” she said. And when he recalled her remark at that Christmas party so many decades before about the salvation of her soul and her life of faith, all she had to say was, “Oh darling, doesn’t it just seem an awful lot of bother?”
(God: Stories: Curtis, ed. 1998)

My suspicion is that Trinity Sunday also seems “an awful lot of bother” and goes mostly uncelebrated in most liberal Protestant congregations. During my many years of pastoral ministry, I may have discussed this revered but complicated Christian understanding of the Godhead a few times, but mostly I did not. It’s been my experience that the subject lends itself to not producing the most exciting or interesting of homilies — or blogs! For while our Trinitarian understanding of God has evolved in the life of the church “from reflection on biblical witness and Christian experience,” (Breuggemann et.al.) for many it is a “bothersome” mystery. And so we tend not to talk about it very much either within our more intimate circles or with those more distant to us, perhaps for fear we may have to attempt an explanation.

Fortunately, this week’s lectionary assignment from the Gospel of John, which predates later controversies and claims concerning the Trinity, can help in this effort.

SPIRIT: In our gospel lection Jesus announces that the only way to enter God’s realm comes from above. He tells Nicodemus that “flesh can give birth only to flesh.” (3:6) In other words, there is in human life the freedom to be completely separated from the presence of God. Yet all through the ages, human beings have experienced the unpredictable activity of God that disrupts the purely human and which allows for new insights and fresh, renewing perspectives. John’s gospel is teaching that such winds of the Spirit can actually change the personal and social structures that presume to get along very nicely, thank you, without God. So that aspect of God we name as Spirit is essential to our understanding.

SON: A friend shows us a picture of herself climbing the rock face of a mountain and tells us it can be done, and we say to ourselves, “I believe you.” We accept the proposition. We give our intellectual assent, but that doesn’t interfere with the way we live our lives, because it’s all in our heads.

But there’s another level of faith that’s much more visceral. Instead of showing us the pictures, that friend invites us to go rock climbing with her. And as she checks the knots on our harness and runs a safety line through the mountaineers’ catch on the belt around her waist, she assures us that everything will be all right. The proper response at that point isn’t “I believe you,” but “I believe in you.” The reason for that trust is by that time we’re way past anything like intellectual assent. We’ve set ourselves in a relationship with that person and we’re trusting her with our very lives.

Nicodemus was halfway there. He came by night to interview the Son of Man. He knew Jesus was a good teacher, but he wanted more information. He wanted the teacher to say something that would take away his doubts and make it easy for him to say yes, but the teacher wouldn’t cooperate. Nicodemus was puzzled. “How can this be?”

Here’s how, says Jesus. Watch me. Put your hand here. Now bring up your foot. Don’t think about it too much. Just do as I do. Believe me. Believe in me, and when you get to the top, you’ll know what it’s all about.

That’s an interpretation offered in Christian Century article by Barbara Brown Taylor. She’s helping us understand that in order to fully engage in living life now we need to participate in Jesus’ way. The Son of Man is the link between heaven and earth. Just as the ladder in Jacob’s dream at Bethel enabled the angels of God to go back and forth between heaven and earth, so the Son of Man is the ladder making possible communication from the opened heaven to earth. (John 3:13)

GOD: Finally, John’s reference in 3:16: “God so loved the world.” Here God becomes the subject, the one who out of love for the human family initiates the redemptive activity so essential in our world. In the words of my lectionary commentary, “God refuses to remain content with a world in the process of self-destruction, a ‘flesh’ futilely trying to maintain itself.”

A bothersome mystery is our Trinitarian understanding of God — but oh, how essential!

Ralph Ahlberg

~ by Immanuel Congregational Church on June 2, 2009.