Sermon for Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021
Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-17
OK, let’s start with some congregational
participation: Raise your hand if you
feel authorized and prepared to speak on behalf of God.
That’s sort of what I thought. You may notice that I didn’t raise my hand,
either.
Today is a good day to be suspicious of our
ability to speak for God. In fact, it’s
a good day to be suspicious of our ability to understand God, which
might be a prerequisite for speaking on the deity’s behalf. Today is Trinity Sunday, when we try to wrap
our minds around the mystery of God being simultaneously both unity and diversity,
Three in One and One in Three – Father, Son, and Spirit in constant
relationship, eternally creating and redeeming and sustaining together.
We got some stirring glimpses of God’s
mystery in our readings this morning. The
first one gave us more than a glimpse, actually. Isaiah gets up one morning, planning to do
whatever he did as a court official and perhaps a temple priest. But instead, he encounters the Lord, up close
and personal. Yahweh’s presence is overwhelming,
the hem of the deity’s robe filling the temple.
Seated on the throne, God is attended by seraphs. We may hear that and think of angels, but artistic
representations of seraphs show them as giant flying cobras.1 No wonder Isaiah said, “Woe is me! I am lost!” (6:5). My language might have been a bit more colorful
that that. In Isaiah’s tradition, mortals
who saw God face to face didn’t live to tell about it; so, Isaiah was sure that
his profaneness, in the presence of God’s absolute holiness, was a chemical
reaction he wouldn’t survive. But one of
the giant flying cobras takes a hot ember off the altar, touches it to Isaiah’s
lips, and cleanses him of his impurity. Then
Isaiah hears the voice of the Almighty ringing in his ears: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah – despite how ill-prepared he is to
speak for God – Isaiah says, “Here am I.
Send me.” (6:8)
You may have noticed that pronoun at the
end of God’s one line in this reading: the word us: “Who will go for us?” That’s a glimpse of divine mystery all by
itself, potentially even more stunning than giant flying cobras. Now, the people of Isaiah’s time would have
heard this plural pronoun referring to the heavenly court – the royal attendants,
and angels, and maybe even demigods over whom Yahweh ruled. For us, we hear it differently, much like we
hear that line in Genesis, in the first story of humanity’s creation, where God
says, “Let us create humankind in our image, according to our
likeness…” (1:26). For Christians, it’s
a glimpse of the reality we name as the Trinity, which to me is all about relationship. God is relationship, and a model of “three
in one, and one in three” tries to capture that – though maybe about as
effectively as a two-dimensional character trying to describe the concept of “up.”
Then, the Gospel reading fleshes out God’s
mystery a bit more. Jesus is talking
with Nicodemus – a Pharisee, supposedly a religious expert. Nicodemus comes to Jesus because he’s seen miraculous
signs. He knows that Jesus “has come
from God; for no one can do these signs … apart from the presence of God,” he
says (John 3:2). On some level, Nicodemus
understands that, when he looks at Jesus, he’s seeing divinity itself. And I think that gives Jesus a chance to open
up this deepest of mysteries. He tells
Nicodemus, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (3:3)
– in effect saying, You’re right. And
just as I have come to earth from the realm of God’s reign and rule, so those
who see God’s reign and rule must be born from above, too. If you see the signs of the kingdom, Nicodemus,
then you’re more than halfway there already.
Just believe it and connect the dots, and eternal life is yours, now and
forever.
In this present chapter of eternal life,
we’re not going to be able to explain the nature of God. The best we can do is describe and reflect on
some divine attributes. Here are some I
feel pretty sure about. First, love – in
fact, scripture tells us, love isn’t just something God does; it’s what God is
(1 John 4:16). Here’s another: relationship. The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that this
is how God functions, partners who together form a living, dynamic entity that’s
both greater than, and reliant on, each individual. Here’s another: movement, both in terms of
how God works and in terms of what God seeks from us. Our God does not sit still, impervious to the
joys and the suffering of creation. Instead,
our God is a deity who goes, who comes, who whispers and cajoles and reproves
and inspires. And who sends.
Fundamentally, God wants two things from us,
I believe. As Jesus tries to explain to
Nicodemus, God wants relationship with us: “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” (John 3:16). And that
means not just existing forever but living in God’s kingdom on earth as it is
in heaven. So, that’s number 1: God
wants relationship with us. And then,
number 2: God wants relationship from us, asking us to care for our neighbors
and for one another. Our God is Love
that sends us out to love.
We know that, right? I’m convinced we know it because, over the past
several months, I’ve heard it over and over again, from you – the people of
this church family.
The story begins with a Vestry resolution,
of all things – not typically the source of deep reflection on our relationships
with God and one another. Many of you
have heard this before, but here’s the short version. Last summer, a resolution came to Vestry that
we should fly the LGBTQ pride flag from the church’s flagpole. St. Andrew’s is not a place with a history of
wearing social advocacy on its sleeve, so we created a process for gathering
input to discern what to do when questions like this arise. That involved creating an Advocacy
Discernment Committee made up of progressive, conservative, and radical-middle
parishioners, and that committee put together several opportunities for us to
learn to talk about divisive issues. We
had a Lenten study of our presiding bishop’s book Love Is the Way, which
drew on his personal history, as well as our nation’s history of the struggle
between exclusion and embrace. We offered
a class on how to do civil discourse – how to share and listen in love when different
perspectives are guaranteed. Now, we’re
offering a class called, “What’s the Role of Our Church In….” I actually made a mistake with the name; the
class is really, “What Should Be the Role of Our Church In…” because that’s
what we’ve been talking about over the past four weeks. And one of those topics was the inclusion of
LGBTQ people in the Church and the question of flying a Pride flag.
As Jesus observed to Nicodemus, the Holy Spirit often moves in ways we can’t predict and maybe can’t even see directly, like watching the wind blowing through the trees. In the April Vestry meeting, we were discussing the issues before us – not just the Pride-flag resolution but how we’re learning to have civil discourse on hard topics. And I had a Holy Spirit moment. I know this because I felt the urge to sketch something. Now, my artistic abilities pretty much stop at stick figures; so, if I felt the urge to sketch, it wasn’t coming from me. Listening to the Vestry members talking about just how hard it is these days to share our passions without cutting ourselves off from each other, I sketched a set of three banners. Not banners to go inside the church but to go outside, banners to share with the neighbors we’re called to love. Lauren Richardson, our communications manager, who has much more artistic ability than I do, took my ugly idea and turned it into something. If you’re here in person this morning, you’ll find these images on the next-to-last page of the bulletin. You’ll also find them hanging on the front and the back of HJ’s, and they’ll be there for the foreseeable future.
For those of you at home, here they are: “God loves all. All means all. Pass the peace.”
And then, God sends us out in love. In our tradition, we practice this during
worship every Sunday, training ourselves in the way God wants us to live the
other 99 percent of the week. We call it
passing the peace. We learn it here so
that, when we go forth in the name of Christ at the end of the service, passing
the peace just becomes what we do.
These banners came from discussions about
social advocacy, but I’d say they’re about something else. I’d call it divine advocacy. I’d call it following the heart of the God
who loves all, and welcomes all, and sends us out to do the same.
So, some of you will be looking for the
rest of the story. That Vestry resolution
from last summer was about putting something new on the church’s flagpole. So, let’s close that loop. The church’s rules, our canons, indicate that
the rector has final say in matters of the buildings and grounds. So, here’s what’s going up on the church’s
flagpole. You’re looking at them – the flag
of our nation and the flag of our church.
And, I guess, we could put the flag of our state up there, too, if we
want to thumb Missouri’s nose at the half of us whose hearts and taxes belong to
the other side of the state line. But that’s
it in terms of what goes on our flagpole – nation, maybe state, and church.
Even though God is deeply mysterious, God’s
call to us is not. We worship a God who
is love and who sends us out to love. Let
that be our fundamental understanding, our litmus test. As our presiding bishop likes to say, if it’s
not about love, it’s not about God. That
God looks to people even such as you and me and says, “Whom shall I
send, and who shall go for us?” And like
the prophet Isaiah, despite our failings and our fears, we come back with, “Here
am I; send me.”
Well, consider this your deployment: God loves all. All means all. So, pass the peace.
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