Year B
Isaiah 6:1-8
Canticle 13
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

The image on our bulletin cover…  doesn’t represent any event in biblical history…  or story in scripture…  it’s doesn’t refer to the Garden of Eden…  or allude to Noah’s Ark… it’s not a picture of Wise Men…  there are no angels…  no jugs of water turned into wine…  there are no Samaritans rescuing anyone from a ditch…  there are no lost coins being found…  it doesn’t capture the words of Jesus…  or the foot washing at The Last Supper…  and that’s because…  there are no Biblical passages which discuss the peculiar Christian understanding of God…  as three persons…  and that’s because Trinity Sunday represents something deeper…

Those who arranged today’s lectionary…  tried to convey that deeper something by including passages about God…  the Holy Spirit…  and Jesus…  our first reading from Isaiah…  contains majestic images of God in God’s Temple…  the hem of God’s robe filling the room…  flying seraphim glorifying God…  and we can imagine angelic choirs singing God’s praises…  the passage from Romans talks about how we are adopted by God through the Spirit…  and the passage from John’s Gospel has Jesus the Teacher instructing Nicodemus about being born again of water and the Spirit…  the Three Persons of the Trinity in three of today’s readings…

Aside from God and the Heavenly Host…  the first passage features the Prophet himself…  who says…  Woe is me…  I am lost…  for I am a man of unclean lips…  and I live among a people of unclean lips…  but then one of the seraphim…  takes one of the live coals…  and touches it to Isaiah’s lips…  and proclaims…  your guilt has departed…  and your sin is blotted out…  and that makes me wonder…  what would it mean for any of us to speak…  not only after all of our sin was blotted out… which it has been in Christ…  but after our guilt has departed… because too many of us hold on to that by ourselves…

I wonder what words would come out of our mouths…  with what spirit would we speak…  and would those words break relationships or mend them…  and among what kind of people would we then live…

Our passage from Romans talks about adoption…  now we’re all familiar with adoption…  some of us know those who have adopted or who have been adopted…  and we’ve heard stories about how some adopted children couldn’t feel any more a part of the family than their biological siblings do…  and adoption provides a home…  and security…  and love…  but in the ancient world…  adoption was so highly prized…  that fantasy stories about adoption were written…  and they were as popular as our modern romance novels…  because in the Roman Empire…  you were either a citizen or you were not…  and citizenship came with certain honors…  and privileges…  and these fantasies allowed people…  ordinary people…  to imagine what it would be like…  to not only be citizens…  but to be adopted for example…  by a respectable Roman Senator…  and become a member of that household…  a member of that family…  and the wealth that would be passed down…  but being adopted through the Spirit…  being adopted as God’s own children…  makes these adoption fantasies pale by comparison…  because it removes our guilt…  and blots out our sin… 

Jesus asks Nicodemus…  Are you a teacher of Israel…  and yet you do not understand these things…  if I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe…  how can I expect you to believe if I tell you about heavenly things…  it would be comparable to Jesus asking…  if I tell you about Newtonian mechanics and you do not believe…  how can I expect you to believe if I tell you about quantum physics…  or…  if I tell you about family systems theory and you do not believe…  how can I expect you to believe if I tell you about the dysfunctional baggage you’re carrying around…

Richard Rohr reminds us…  that long ago…  the Greek mystic Plotinus [205–270 CE] wrote…  If we are in unity with the Spirit…  we are in unity with each other…  and so we are all one…  the words of this ancient sage are suggestive…  because they call attention to the underlying unity of all life…  which recognizes the unifying principle of all life as the Spirit of God…  and which becomes the most crucial experience of all humanity…  it says that whoever is aware of the Spirit of God in themselves…  passes through doors that lead into the lives of their fellow women and men…  the same idea is expressed in ethical terms in 1John 4:20…  which says that…  if a person says they love God…  whom they have not seen…  and does not love their brother or sister who they have seen… they are a liar…  and the truth cannot be in them…  

But this path is difficult…  and sometimes feels like it’s uphill all the way…  and it can be so comforting to withdraw from others…  from the responsibility of unity with the rest of humanity…  and enter into the solitary contemplation of God…  because then we can have solitary communion without the risks of being misunderstood…  of having our words twisted…  of having to be on the defensive about our true or alleged attitude…

And then…  in the quiet fellowship with God…  we may seem to be relieved of any necessity to make headway against heavy odds…  and this is precisely why we can encounter people of deep piousness and religiosity…  who are either intolerant or actively hostile toward their fellow citizens…  and some of the most terrifying hate organizations in the country are made up in large part of people who are very devout in their worship of their God…

In our country…  we have one government…  made up of three co-equal branches…  the Executive…  Legislative…  and Judicial branches…  and in theory at least…  no one of them has more authority than any other one…  the image on our bulletin cover… doesn’t represent our government…  but what we see…  are three separate patterns…  three separate impressions…  three separate Persons as it were…  the same but different… separate but intertwined…  no one of them has more prominence than the others…  no one of them has any more power than any other one…  no one of them dominates any other one…  yet they are all part of the same whole…  they sit in perfect balance…  in perfect relationship…  in perfect harmony…  and it may well be the deepest lesson God wants us to not only know…  but to own…  that we are made and meant to be in this same kind of dynamic and fluid relationship with each other…

A Lutheran seminarian wrote…  In three persons…  God stepped out of eternity…  and into human history…  to interrupt the course we had set for ourselves…  because it was through the power of the Holy Spirit that Jesus became incarnate…  it is through power of the Holy Sprit that Jesus remains in contact with us…  and it’s through the power of the Holy Spirit that we remain in contact with God…

So how do we respond to being called by God…  summoning us…  forgiving us…  loving us…  and sending us…  and are we able to simply remain in awe…  of the utter transcendence of God…  because trying to measure God’s transcendence…  is like trying to measure the ocean with a cup…

You see…  the Kingdom of God is not a place…  but a description of our relationships…  which are born of the Spirit in baptism…  and the point is that we can’t understand the mystery of the Holy Trinity…  any more than we can understand the Mystery of Love…  but as we grow into this something deeper…  perhaps we can simply name when and where…  we experience it…  and for that…  say…  Thanks be to God…  Amen…