June 3, 2012 – John 3:1-17
John 3:1-17
Loving Community of Persons
The Holy Trinity – June 3, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
As most of you know, my wife Sue left this week for a six-week trip to the UK.
All seemed to be going well.
I received an e-mail from her the day after she arrived in Dublin noting that
she had just happily lunched on a Harp beer and fish and chips.
Later she went to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral for Evensong.
She got there a little early, so she wandered around the astonishing gothic structure,
which is a real beauty.
An exchange with a priest started out promisingly enough.
He came up to her and said, “Are you visiting?”
And she said, “Yes. I’m here for Evensong.”
So then he asked her, “But why are you walking about?”
So Sue says, “Because it hasn’t started yet.”
At which point everything comes to a crashing halt when the priest says,
“No no no no no. We can’t have that.”
It turns out you can walk about in the spacious interior of St. Patrick’s only between the hours of
9:00 and 5:00 – if you pay.
Sue wrote to me, “Imagine if I were a first time church goer, curious about this guy Jesus.”
Well, imagine if you were, say, Nicodemus, who really is curious about Jesus.
Imagine you were Nicodemus, a privileged religious leader who knows about God,
or who thinks he knows about God, but who is actually in the dark about God,
and who seems to know it.
Who seems to want more God in his life.
So one day he screws up his courage and comes to talk to the one guy he thinks can help him
get more God in his life.
Fortunately for Nicodemus, he doesn’t first encounter a rude priest.
He deliberately goes to encounter Jesus.
Yes, John portrays Nicodemus going at night to show that
he’s in the dark about God at this point in his life.
But he also goes at night because he doesn’t want anybody to know he’s gone.
It’s just not respectable for a respectable religious leader to be seen in Jesus’s company.
But there’s something about Jesus. Something different that leads him to take the risk.
And while what he gets is better than a conversation with a rude priest,
it is a strange and difficult conversation.
Essentially, as the preacher Tom Long notes, what Jesus tells him is that
what he needs is not more God in his life.
What he needs is to enter into God’s life. (http://day1.org/3823-the_start_of_the_trail)
What he needs is to be altogether re-born into God’s life.
What he needs is to enter a whole new way of life that is offered to him as a free gift.
Nicodemus has, in a sense, walked past the cathedral every day of his life.
He knew every buttress and every gargoyle.
And one day he wanders up to the doorway to have a look about.
And Jesus tells him what he needs is to come on in and get to know God from the inside.
And have an actual relationship with the living God.
The word “God” is thrown about rather easily these days.
People tell me frequently that they believe in God.
So I invite them to tell me about this God they believe in.
Sometimes it is a God who never challenges us but gives us what we want if we believe enough
and pray hard enough, who simply wants us to be happy and comfortable.
Sometimes it is a God who judges us and lays on us a heaping load of guilt.
Sometimes it is a God who created everything in the beginning and who now just
watches everything unwind from a distance.
Often it is simply a God who’s there when you need him, who you won’t bother with otherwise.
Sometimes it is an angry God who gets us to do what he wants by threatening us.
Often it seems the concerns of this God are very narrow, and rarely extend beyond the
personal life of the speaker.
But the God into whose life Jesus invites Nicodemus today is someone much richer,
much larger, much more profound, and much more full of life.
Jesus invites Nicodemus into the life of the Triune God.
According to this view, God is not really like any of the above.
According to this view, God is, rather – get ready for it –
this God is most like a loving community of three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Since ancient times, Christians have thought of God as a loving community of
three equal but different and distinct, persons:
equally giving love, equally receiving love, and equally working as one.
I sent around on the e-mail list this week the very first depiction of the Trinity known to exist,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dogmatic_sarcophagus.JPG
the Dogmatic Sarcophagus, which shows three more or less equal figures,
very similar in looks and stature,
working closely together to create Adam and Eve and, along with the other saints depicted,
working to bear the one in the sarcophagus into the fullness of resurrection life.
It’s a lovely portrayal of these three distinct persons working as one with one will.
What Christians believe about the trinity is that the love the three persons have between them is
so great, that it overflows them into the world – in Jesus.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son Jesus.
God didn’t send a rude priest, thank goodness.
God sent Jesus, so that the world, and every person in it,
could be invited into the life of this God.
So that we could come to know the divine life from the inside.
So we could come to know what love truly is.
And so we could come to reflect this divine loving life in community in our own life together.
Different and distinct persons, giving love equally, receiving love equally,
working as one, with our love overflowing into a sometimes dark world.
Having come to know who God truly is on the inside of the cathedral, then
taking that love outside the cathedral into the alleys and byways of our neighbourhood.
Sent, even as the loving Son was sent.
To invite others into the triune life of God.
Jesus welcomes us into this life in our baptisms, when we are baptized into . . . what?
Right: the name, the life, the character of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
It’s a whole new life there.
Nicodemus found out that living a life in the life of the triune God was not for sissies:
it meant leaving behind a life of privilege as a religious leader and
entering into a much more challenging life.
It meant his family was no longer just his biological family, but
the family of the church that dwelt in the triune God’s life with him.
It meant he was called to live in the way of the affirmations in our baptismal liturgy:
To proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed.
To serve all people, following the example of Jesus.
To strive for justice and peace in all the earth.
And he was called to live in a way that reflects the constant giving and constant
receiving in love that goes on in the dance-like life of the Trinity.
I can tell you that life in the triune life of God is pretty amazing, but it can seem abstract.
So let me root what life in the Triune God looks like in something very earthy and mundane.
I first got involved in the Food Bank many years ago to more faithfully live out
those very baptismal vows I just mentioned that we re-make several times every year.
I share in the triune life of God with my sister Rose, who is a Roman Catholic, and
whom it is my pleasure to serve at Food Bank.
Every other Wednesday I lovingly hand Rose a nice bag of flour.
Two weeks later, it comes back lovingly presented to me as a beautiful, fragrant, warm bannock,
just out of the oven.
Yes: that’s sharing, but it is not quite yet the Trinitarian life.
In order for it to become Trinitarian, it needs to overflow into the world beyond itself,
just as the Son was sent into the world by God.
So, this morning, for our Holy Communion, Rose and I share with you this bannock,
and it represents the body of the one sent into the world who is given to us in love.
The grain it was made with was grown by God in love,
the flour it was made with was given in love,
that hands it was fashioned and baked with were motivated by love.
In it may you find the life of the Triune God.
Strengthened by its grain may you be of service to all people.
Strengthened by the love with which it was made, may you with love strive for
justice and peace in all the earth.
May we together reflect the life of this God into whose life Jesus invites us:
this God who is most like a loving community of three persons,
into whose life we are invited to walk about, and live in, our whole lives long.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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