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Trinity Sunday
May 30, 2021
John 3:1-17
INTRODUCTION
I asked my retired pastor dad what his favorite way is to preach on Holy Trinity Sunday, and his answer was, “Go on vacation and find a sub to do it.” It is not an easy Sunday to preach, especially for people who like to understand things, because well, the Trinity is impossible to understand! So, as you listen to the readings today, I urge you NOT to try to understand them. All of the readings will mention some or multiple persons of the Trinity, so notice that but don’t try to understand. Instead, listen with a spirit of curiosity. In fact, as you listen, instead of seeking answers, try to come up with at least one question you have about each text. Let’s listen.
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Grace to you and peace from God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I’ve been thinking these past couple of months, as we start to emerge from some of the restrictions Covid brought upon us, about St. Paul’s future. We’ve had a whole lot of change the past five years – a complete staff turnover and a pandemic, to name a couple! And looking ahead, we are just about to pay off a $1.3 million mortgage for a building project that allowed us to open our hearts and our space to some new ministries and outreach. So… what will be our next big thing? Whenever there is so much change in an organization, whether good or bad, it warrants taking the time to take a step back, taking a bird’s eye view, and asking, “Who are we now? What are our values? What is our story, our unique St. Paul’s story, and what is the best version of ourselves? And finally, how do we sense God is calling us into being that best version of ourselves?”
After weeks of reading, praying, talking and listening, we have begun a process of answering some of these questions. Last weekend, I met with 7 members of St. Paul’s – a representative sample of the congregation – to talk about our individual values, experiences, important people and events, and then to find some common themes. Because, there is something about St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Pittsford that has drawn each of us here, as opposed to any number of other churches in the area. What is that specific something that makes us unique?
Our findings so far likely won’t surprise you. We discerned that people of St. Paul’s are generous and eager to serve others. We are accepting of people, however they self-identify, and wherever they may be on their journey of faith. Many of us have been seekers at some point in our life story; many in fact still are – we all come to faith with questions, not unlike Nicodemus in today’s Gospel reading! We all are searching for a place to find safety and peace, to be filled up, in a world that often demands so much of us; to be centered, grounded, and strengthened for the week ahead. And perhaps most of all, we long to make meaningful, authentic connections with one another and with God.
Does any of that resonate with you, and your own story of faith and life?
But here’s something else we noticed, that may also resonate with you: that while we do all long for those connections, we don’t always have a very easy time talking about it, at least not in faith terms. Several people last weekend struggled somewhat to talk about their lives in the context of the biblical story, for example, or to discern specifically how God was acting through the mundane moments of our lives as well as the significant ones. Though we long to find that life-giving connection with both God and community, the community connection is much easier to come by, being concrete and, although messy, at least clearly accessible to us. But discovering God’s action in our daily lives is much more elusive.
To be clear: if this describes you, there is no shame to be had in this. I suspect this is the case for many mainline Christians today. Lutherans especially have a long-valued tradition of being very good thinkers and educators. Our faith is often largely in our head, and consequently I fear Lutherans by and large have done a poor job of equipping people to notice and articulate how they encounter God with their hearts. Not all Lutherans – some people do this with ease, and in a way that is authentic and accessible, and these folks are a gift to us, and a model, but many of us struggle to articulate that heart connection. I also wonder if being a mainline Christian in Pittsford, a community filled with highly educated, professionally successful, high powered and high achieving people, makes this even more of a challenge.
Which brings me to Nicodemus, and the Holy Trinity. Nicodemus was a highly educated, black and white thinker who was adept at experiencing life through the concrete, not so much the spiritual. As a Pharisees he was a keeper of the law – it was his job to know scripture and know what was right and what was wrong, and according to the Pharisees, Jesus was doing things wrong. Yet something about Jesus is cracking Nicodemus’s certainty. So, in the cover of night, he goes to talk to Jesus, to ask him some of his questions. And his encounter with Jesus begins to soften his need to know things. Instead, he is pulled into conversation, into relationship, with Jesus, into relationship with the living God.
Nicodemus’ experience can enlighten us as to how to approach our own engagement with the Trinity. The Trinity, by definition, cannot be explained or understood. We can sure try, but finally we cannot approach the Triune God with our heads. Christians have been trying to to explain it for 2000 years; after all that, what we are ultimately left with is that the Trinity is not something to be understood. It is a mystery.
And, my friends, that is a good thing. If we could understand God, what kind of God is that? As soon as God can be grasped and explained by our feeble human minds, God has ceased being the ultimate, omniscient, omnipotent being we know God to be. The assumption that everything can be explained and understood necessarily limits the essence and power of our God.
So if God is a vast, ineffable, paradoxical mystery… then what are we supposed to do with that? This, too, can be answered in part by looking at Nicodemus’s story. Nicodemus leads with his head, something we are familiar with. But notice, he goes in with a statement, but then, he doesn’t stop asking questions. I heard a great quote this week about how when you think you are right, when you think you already know the answer, you stop taking in new information. So what if we cultivated a willingness to let down the armor of knowledge, the assumed certainty about how things are, and instead asked questions with a spirit of curiosity? Curiosity then becomes a sort of spiritual practice, a way of remaining open to possibility, and, essentially for our faith, open to transformation.
When we approach the Trinity not with a desire to know and understand, but rather, with this spirit of curiosity, then we allow ourselves to be invited – invited by our living, dynamic and ineffable God, into worship and praise. In a moment we will sing (meditate on) a hymn called “Come, Join the Dance of Trinity.” I love this image, of the Trinity as a sort of circle dance into which we are invited. As the hymn says, “the Three, in love and hope, made room within their dance” – made room for us, to see ourselves as a part of God’s story, and God as a part of our story, of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and all of creation moving and breathing and loving together.
And that invitation, received and accepted with curiosity instead of knowledge, is where we can experience that deeper connection that we crave. It’s when we stop trying to figure God out, to understand, and instead just open ourselves up to the relationship, to listen, to ask questions, to pray alone and with one another, or simply to sit and breathe deeply of the Spirit – not knowing where it comes from or where it goes, but hearing its sound, nonetheless.
This sort of vulnerable, heart openness to God does not come easy for those accustomed to approaching God head-first, like Nicodemus, and if I’m honest, like myself! We can almost feel Nicodemus’ discomfort with it in this short passage as he struggles to find understanding. I feel that same discomfort and frustration at times! I hope and pray that over the next months and years, St. Paul’s might find some ways to support people in this effort, to normalize not-knowing and question-asking, to approach God not just with heads but also with hearts, and I hope you will take advantage of it. After over a year marked by an experience of disconnection, the time has never been better to invest our energy into finding a sense of connection once again to God and to one another.
As we try and fail in this effort, we can also find comfort in knowing that the invitation to join the dance of the Trinity is never revoked. God has every desire to be in relationship with us, and has gone so far as to become like us to achieve it. And God does this not to judge or condemn our failed efforts, but so that we might all be saved and transformed through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Let us pray… Holy Trinity, we long to understand you, to grasp you with our heads. Help us instead to experience you with our hearts, to accept your invitation into worship, praise and transformation, to join your joyous dance, that we would find you in our story, and ourselves in yours. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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