Trinity Sunday - Complexity
Complexity
Rom 8:12-17; John 3:1-17
Rom 8:12-17
So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh— for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
John 3:1-17
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? “Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Prayer - God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, come among us we pray in all of your radiant, complex glory. Shine into our world. Reveal yourself and your ways to us. Save us from the tendency to attempt to remake you in our own image. Give us the wisdom to worship you appropriately in the many dimensions of your glory. Teach us how to let go of our attempts fully to understand you, to define you, and to confine you so that we may know how to love you better. Amen.
It’s no surprise that for Trinity Sunday the common lectionary should assign to us this well-known passage from John because it is one of those rare moments in the Gospels in which there is discussion of all three persons of the Trinity. While it is not a theological discourse on the Trinity—none of the Gospels are much interested in that enterprise—it does narrate how Jesus Christ considerably complexifies our notions of God.
John portrays Nicodemus as a learned man, describing him not only as a Pharisee but as “a ruler of the Jews.” Jesus calls him as “the teacher of Israel” (verse 10). By speaking in the first person plural (“Rabbi, we know…”) we wonder if Nicodemus is a representative of other the religious leaders. Jesus seems to confirm this by telling Nicodemus, “we testify to what we have seen; yet you (plural) do not receive our testimony” (verse 11).
Nicodemus is confident that he really knows who Jesus is. He begins the conversation almost bragging about what he knows: “We know” Jesus is a teacher come from God. How do we know? Jesus’s miraculous signs show that God is with him. Nicodemus is almost right about Jesus’ identity. Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, perhaps indicating that he is worried about others seeing him, or perhaps implying that this presumed wise man is in the dark.
Jesus initiates an awkward conversation by blurting out that no one can see God’s reign without being born again (or maybe “born from above”—the Greek word anothen can mean either “again” or “from above”). Nicodemus has to be willing for his entire presumptive world to be overturned if he is going to be able to understand Jesus. In this nocturnal conversation Jesus refers to all three persons of the Trinity. The Creator of the world, unwilling to let the world perish, gives the Son. God sends the Son not to condemn the world, but to rescue and restore (the Greek word translated as “save” or “saved” in John 3:17 is sozo, to rescue, heal, make whole). Somehow Jesus is not only the Son of God but also, at the same time and in the same person, the Son of Man. He has descended from heaven and shall ascend too, thus connecting heaven and earth. The Sent is in intimate relationship with the Sender, revealing God by bearing witness to what he has seen and known.
We have the doctrine of the Trinity because we have Jesus Christ. Many people thought they had a good grasp of who God was and what God is up to. Then came Jesus. And listening to Jesus and watching him work, die on the cross, and rise from the dead, people had to immediately start revising and complexifying their notions of God.
Everything we believe about God flows from what we’ve seen of God in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, God gets personal, relational, available and virtually unavoidable, too close for comfort and too multifaceted, complex, and challenging for our simple explanations for God.
Sometimes people say things to you like, “I’m Hindu, you’re Christian, but we all believe in God, right?” While we certainly believe that there is only one God, when you asked someone, “Well tell me what you believe about God,” you often quickly realize that whatever God they are believing in doesn’t seem to be the God who meets us in Jesus Christ.
In his first Advent among us, Jesus as the “Son of God,” the “Messiah” (that is, “anointed one of God”) challenged how people thought about God. Lots of people looked at Jesus, listened to his teaching, witnessed his work, saw his death and said, “That’s not God. God is powerful, distant, high and lifted up, God is ___________.” (Fill in the blank with whatever high and noble attribute God simply must have if God is to be worthy of your worship.) Jesus failed to measure up to their preconceptions of who God ought to be and how God is to act if God is really God. The church had to come up with the idea of God not only being one but also at the same time being Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to do justice to Jesus as God’s self-definition.
When we say the words of the Apostle’s Creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty….and in Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son…. [and] I believe in the Holy Spirit....” We assert a considerably more complex and challenging view of God than that which prevails among most Americans. You would think that we would say, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,” and leave it at that. After all, nine out of 10 Americans would probably affirm that. But the Creed goes on to affirm that God is also the Son, Jesus Christ. And then the Creed says that God is also the mysterious, dynamic, revealing Holy Spirit. And yet, we say that there is only one God.
To say that God’s triune is to say more about God than many people want said. Most people in our society appear to want God to be generic, abstract, vague, distant, and arcane. “God? Oh, can’t say anything too definite about God. God is large, indistinct, vague.” “God” for many of us is this big, blurry concept that we can make to mean about anything we like, something “spiritual,” someone (if we have any distinct notions about God) whom we can make over so that God looks strikingly like us.
In Jesus of Nazareth, God got physical, explicit, peculiar, and came close— too close for the comfort of many. Jesus Christ is God in action, God refusing to remain a general idea or a high-sounding principle. Jesus Christ is God in motion toward us, God refusing to stay enclosed in God’s own divinity.
Many people think of God as a vaguely benevolent being—who never actually gets around to doing anything. A minimalist, inactive, unobtrusive, noninvasive, detached God is just about as much of a God as we moderns can take.
Or we attempt to render Jesus into a wonderful moral teacher who was a really nice person who enjoyed lilies and was kind to children and people with disabilities. Jesus, from the first, wouldn’t stay manageable by us. From the first, his followers came to the conclusion, “Jesus is not only a human being but also God.” They started saying things like, “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19). This was saying more about Jesus than that he was a really fun person who set us a good ethical example.
God is One; but not simply One, not merely One. We baptize in the name of the Trinity, thus signifying that baptism relates us to the fullness of God. We are monotheists (belief in one God) but not mere monotheists. We believe that the God who is present to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is One. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three distinct yet unified, interactive, relational, and loving ways in which God is one. The Trinity is God in three ways being the same God. We believe Jesus is God, Holy Spirit is God, Father is God, only one God!
Unitarianism is always a bit easier on the brain than Trinitarianism, but we find no other way for us to do justice to the God whom we have met in Jesus Christ without believing in three persons in one God. Here again, in my experience, in order to keep God distant and vague (and irrelevant), many people want to keep God simple, uncomplicated, and abstract. These are the dear folk who say, “Well, I’m not sure that I’m very religious, but I do believe in God and, after all, isn’t that what it’s all about?”
The problem is that once we discovered that “God was in Christ,” things got complicated not because the church wanted to make the simple faith of Jesus complex and confusing but rather because we discovered in Jesus that God was at once much more demanding and much more interesting than we had first thought. After being met by Jesus, we could never again think of God in the way we had before.
First, God is the creative, caring Father, but not simply at the beginning of Creation. The same darkness-to-light, nothing-worked-up-into-something of Genesis 1 continues every day of our lives. God keeps creating, bringing something out of nothing, making a way when there was thought to be no way. God keeps caring, keeps reaching out to us in active love, constantly watches over us in vigorous providential care.
Second, God is the redeeming, loving, seeking Son who ventures forth like some Prodigal Son (Luke 15) to search out and to save lost humanity in the “far country” where we live. When God decisively, revealingly came to us God came to us as one of us, God got incarnate as a Jew from Nazareth who was born in a most embarrassing way to a young peasant woman, grew up to be a man about whom we know next to nothing save his three years as a young adult in ministry, and was tortured to death by the government. That one is God among us.
The Gospels don’t tell us everything that Jesus said and did. They appear to limit themselves only to those words and events that are related to our redemption. The Gospels tell us only those things about Jesus that directly relate to God doing something about the problem between God and us. The name Jesus (in Hebrew, “Joshua”) means “God saves” and the Gospels depict Jesus as God’s answer to what’s wrong between us and God, God saving the world, “for God so loved the world…” (John 3:16).
As the writer to the church at Ephesus put it, “You who were far off have been made one by the blood of Christ. He has broken down the dividing call between us” (Eph. 2:14). Here is a living, active, loving God who makes union and breaks barriers. When the far-off one who has been brought near is you, when the wall that has been kicked down is the wall that you built in a vain attempt to keep God out of your life, you really know that God is not just “God.” God is pro nobis, God for us.
It’s easy to stress only the first person of the Trinity—God the creative, ordering, providential Father—rather than God the redeeming Son or God the relentlessly reaching Holy Spirit. The more chaotic and confusing our world becomes, it seems the more we need to stress God the Creator (“God has a plan for your life!”) However, because of the work of the reaching, seeking, redeeming Son, the second person of the Trinity, we are given a lively view of Christ as Savior of the World.
And third, God is the present, dynamic Holy Spirit who is God near to us, God empowering us to do those things that we could never do on our own, God constantly revealing God to us, God talking to us about God. We know the Holy Spirit chiefly by the effects in us of the Spirit as “the cause of all holiness in us; enlightening our understandings, rectifying our wills and affections, renewing our natures, uniting …. assuring … leading …. purifying and sanctifying” us to “full and eternal enjoyment of God” (John Wesley, “Letter to a Roman Catholic”). In God the Son we have God’s atoning and reconciling work for us; in God the Holy Spirit we have God’s sanctifying and redeeming work in us, now, here.
All three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are the truth about the identity and being of the one God who reaches out to us. Will you agree with me when I say that one of the great challenges of the Christian faith is to honor persons of the Trinity, to keep connected to and to keep working with the one God who comes to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? The Christian life become a long process of discovering that the name “God” means so much more than we first thought, that God is infinitely rich and varied.
Christians are those who not only are attempting to stay in love with God; we are being loved by and attempting to return love to the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – in all of its complexity – thanks be to God – amen. (adapted – William Willimon, Complex, One God)