05.27.2018 - Trinity Sunday Sermon

Scripture - John 3:1-18

The scripture passage that we’ll be hearing today is one appointed for Trinity Sunday - the day we pay particular attention to the doctrine of the Trinity - God in three persons, three in one and one in three (as I shared with the kids). Interestingly enough, the word Trinity never appears in the Bible. The doctrine of the Trinity evolved over centuries of conflict and controversy as an attempt to understand how Jesus was fully 100% God and the Holy Spirit was fully 100% God and yet there is only one God and how can Jesus be God’s Son and still 100% God and have co-created the world and how can God send the Holy Spirit into the world and so on and so on.  It’s often pointed to as one of the deep mysteries of the Christian faith - and many passages in the New Testament mention all three aspects of this Trinue God without going into detail explaining how they all work together. This passage we’ll be hearing from the Gospel of John is one of those places in Scripture where we see God, Jesus, and the Spirit all at play.

The text contains some verses that I suspect are familiar to many of us here - that of John 3:16 - and we’ve all got a lot of thoughts about what that verse means to us. So to allow a fresh perspective, I’ve chosen to read these verses from a different translation, which may open us to other meanings of the text.

As we hear these words, I invite you to take a moment, to breathe, to perhaps close your eyes, and to notice what catches your attention as we hear about this encounter that Jesus has with Nicodemus - one who has sought out Jesus - for this conversation.

John 3:1-18 (The Message)
3 1-2 There was a man of the Pharisee sect, Nicodemus, a prominent leader among the Jews. Late one night he visited Jesus and said, “Rabbi, we all know you’re a teacher straight from God. No one could do all the God-pointing, God-revealing acts you do if God weren’t in on it.”
3 Jesus said, “You’re absolutely right. Take it from me: Unless a person is born from above, it’s not possible to see what I’m pointing to—to God’s kingdom.”
4 “How can anyone,” said Nicodemus, “be born who has already been born and grown up? You can’t re-enter your mother’s womb and be born again. What are you saying with this ‘born-from-above’ talk?”
5-6 Jesus said, “You’re not listening. Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original creation—the ‘wind-hovering-over-the-water’ creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life—it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom. When you look at a baby, it’s just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can’t see and touch—the Spirit—and becomes a living spirit.
7-8 “So don’t be so surprised when I tell you that you have to be ‘born from above’—out of this world, so to speak. You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it’s headed next. That’s the way it is with everyone ‘born from above’ by the wind of God, the Spirit of God.”
9 Nicodemus asked, “What do you mean by this? How does this happen?”
10-12 Jesus said, “You’re a respected teacher of Israel and you don’t know these basics? Listen carefully. I’m speaking sober truth to you. I speak only of what I know by experience; I give witness only to what I have seen with my own eyes. There is nothing secondhand here, no hearsay. Yet instead of facing the evidence and accepting it, you procrastinate with questions. If I tell you things that are plain as the hand before your face and you don’t believe me, what use is there in telling you of things you can’t see, the things of God?
13-15 “No one has ever gone up into the presence of God except the One who came down from that Presence, the Son of Man. In the same way that Moses lifted the serpent in the desert so people could have something to see and then believe, it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up—and everyone who looks up to him, trusting and expectant, will gain a real life, eternal life.
16-18 “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him.

*Hymn - He Came Down (FWS 2085)

Sermon     

Water and rebirth. God’s love of the world. Salvation. Eternal life (as many translations would note it). This story of Nicodemus’s encounter with Jesus is rich with metaphors and symbols and ideas that are central to our understanding of the Christian faith - from the movement of God’s Holy Spirit to the impact of God’s kingdom to what it means to have a whole and lasting life in Christ. We see the dance between Nicodemus and Jesus - one a prominent religious leader within an established religious sect, and one a virtual nobody from Nazareth… one who speaks literally and concretely, and one who speaks in parables and metaphors… one who can’t seem to move beyond the tangible, material world, and one who sees the stuff of the Spirit, who points to the reality of God’s kingdom.

In this conversation we have one of Christianity’s most beloved verses - some of us may be able to recite it by heart. “For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” I learned it in Sunday School - King James Version - with that beautiful poetic cadence that sticks in your memory. It’s a verse appears to state fairly plainly and straightforwardly what God sent Jesus out to do and what our response should be - believe in Jesus and in return you get everlasting life. Simple, right? Everlasting life - meaning your ticket to heaven - based on a personal acceptance that Jesus is who he says he is - the son of God - sent here to save sinners one by one from eternal punishment.

Yet it’s a bit more complicated than that. I remember the first time I learned that verse 16 was followed by a verse 17. It wasn’t due to negligence on the part of my early childhood Sunday School teachers - I mean, John 3:16 is pretty memorable on its own. I was in high school and part of the adult choir at my home church, and the anthem was John Stainer’s “God So Loved the World” - which gorgeously sets these two verses to music.  “16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”

And then came the realization that these two verses - two verses that we place so much weight and meaning upon - are part of a whole conversation that Jesus is having, and that you can’t fully appreciate the complexity of these statements without taking into consideration the context out of which these famous lines come.

Nicodemus comes to Jesus under the cover of night. He is struggling to fit Jesus into his worldview and can’t do so publicly because of his prominent social standing within the Jewish community. He clearly understands that God’s presence is uniquely with Jesus and that Jesus himself reveals and points to God in his teaching, in his acts, and in his very being. But there’s one key component missing - this nature of rebirth -- a process that Nicodemus can’t help but think literally about even as Jesus spells it out in spiritual terms - being born from above, submission to the life of the spirit, being reformed and reshaped from within into a life that we live in the present moment...into the reality of God’s Kingdom all around us, not just for an afterlife removed from this world, but for the sake a world in the process of redemption. But to see it and be a part of it? Rebirth is part of the package.

This spiritual rebirth - it’s not something that you can get right, or earn, or work yourself into, probably much to Nicodemus’s dismay. After all, he’s the model religious figure - a devout man, who knew the right prayers and could say the right things and perform the right rituals - and even recognized many right things about Jesus - but couldn’t quite make the leap with what Jesus was saying. This all leads up to the moment where Jesus declares: “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed...that those who believe are not condemned….that anyone can have a whole and lasting life.”

Walter Bruggeman has this to say about that moment:

“Nicodemus - and his whole people - are invited into a second birth where they are not condemned, but beloved, redeemed, reconciled, made whole. Being born again is to learn to live with the staggering freedom of being fully the beloved. That birth in turn entails love of the light, to be pulled out of the world of calculation into utter gospel-given, peaceable freedom and well-being. The birth is a shock because Nicodemus never dreamed of who he could yet be.”

This….this is the invitation for the whole world. For the cosmos. For the whole universe which God created.

For God so loved the world.

This is why we can’t assume that 3:16 only refers to a person’s individual quest to gain this everlasting, eternal life -- which, by the way, the hearers of John’s gospel would have taken eternal life to mean a full life in the present.  Belief isn’t about intellectual assent to a set of statements, it isn’t about ascribing to a rigid set of rules or even about confidence in God’s promises. It’s about relationship - about rebirth in the spirit - about that inward transformation of the heart that comes from God’s radical love incarnate through Jesus Christ. Nicodemus draws near to Jesus only to discover that in the cosmic scheme of things, Jesus is the one who draws near to him...to all of humankind...to all of creation, to offer the knowledge and assurance of being fully loved by God - not because of right statements or correct beliefs or good acts...and not despite the uglier parts of our reality like violence, hatred, apathy, fear and sin. God draws near to us in Jesus out of love for our actual world...for our actual lives…broken and messy and beautiful and wonderful as they are. God draws near to us in Jesus and embraces us in love not for anything we do or don’t do...or for anything we aspire to be...but simply because we exist.

What good news that is for all of us Nicodemuses of the world - and we good religious people are like that….wanting to do the right things, say the right things, show our devotion to God in the proper way. What freedom there is in knowing that we can’t work our way into greater favor with God, that we can’t earn God’s love, that we can’t checkmark our good Christian to-do list and think that it makes any bit of difference for our place in God’s great kingdom.

John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Movement, had this to say about being born again, from his sermon The New Birth. He says, “Be you baptized or unbaptized, "you must be born again;" otherwise it is not possible you should be inwardly holy; and without inward as well as outward holiness, you cannot be happy, even in this world, much less in the world to come….Go to church twice a day; go to the Lord's table every week; say ever so many prayers in private; hear ever so many good sermons; read ever so many good books; still, "you must be born again:" None of these things will stand in the place of the new birth; no, nor any thing under heaven.”

God loves the world so much to offer this birth into new life - to each and every one of us - to offer us this birth into restoration and wholeness, into creation as it was intended, into life transformed by the Holy Spirit so that we become those who are fully alive - fully ourselves - fully the people God created each of us to be.

Is this new birth true for you? Some of you may be able to point to a moment in time as to when you decided to claim God’s love for yourselves...for some of you it was more of a journey of slow, incremental change...and perhaps even for some of you, you aren’t there yet...you may not even be fully aware of the path ahead...or may not know you want to be on the path all together. But God’s love for you is unchangeable - it’s constant and abundant and will never waver or falter.

This week, lean into God’s love for you. Take time to sit and remind yourself that the creator of the cosmos loves and cares for you. Take time to remember Jesus who came so that all may know and experience that love for themselves. Take time to invite the Holy Spirit to lead you to the heart of that love, and let it transform your spirit and make you more whole - so that the world may know more fully of God’s great deep and abiding love. Amen.

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