May 26, 2024. Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17.
I went to have a talk with Jesus. And it didn’t go well. We were alone under the cover of nightfall. A useful thing in those times when being seen with a certain person might not serve your interests very well. But to be honest, I may have had other motives too.
As a Pharisee I’m highly educated and trained. People look to us for help when they run afoul of the commandments. We sort them out, give them instruction. You might say righteousness and holiness is our business. All for God’s sake, of course.
I wanted to find out more about this Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. He talks a lot about holiness and righteousness. And he’s got a following that’s worrisome. Competition we don’t need or want.
I know how to talk to people – begin on common ground. He’s a teacher, I’m a teacher (though I’m a lawyer too, of course). He says he serves God. Well, Pharisees were God’s servants first.
I couldn’t imagine what he could teach a Pharisee. But you never know. At the very least, I’d find out if he’s a threat to us, or to the people that we’re responsible for guiding and correcting.
I approached Jesus with praise. Rabbi, we know you come from God… An effective way of getting people to trust you. Right? I figured, he’d be impressed by my words. I speak for Jerusalem’s Pharisees and represent God’s holy Temple, after all.
But Jesus, he’s a wily one. Didn’t take the bait at all. Came right back at me with a line about only seeing God’s reign through being born out of the heavens.
I quickly realized what Jesus meant. That we Pharisees could only know if he was from God if that insight was revealed to us from heaven. The man returned my praise with an outright insult!
But I’m a reasonable person. I wanted to be really sure of what he was saying. So I asked if Jesus was saying he was born in a way that I wasn’t.
His response was clear: we are all woman-born, but to see God’s reign it is necessary to be born of God’s Holy breath too. Nothing of our learning, training, and hard-earned religious authority can ever accomplish this. The skills we celebrate and highly respect are dust in the reign of God.
It made no sense to me. I said so. Jesus looked at me, and I saw something in his eyes. It looked like pity. You don’t get it, he said. Even you, a teacher of Israel. Then he reminded me about Moses and the serpent impaled on his staff. How the people had to look up and face the source of their pain and death to be healed. So, this Jesus knows his scriptures, and he’s no fool.
I was intrigued. Amazed. I kept studying Jesus. Incredibly, I became a secret follower. All the way to the cross. Then I finally understood as I looked at him impaled and dying. We are all complicit in the ways of hatred and violence. Live and learn it’s said. Learn and live says Jesus.
It’s Trinity Sunday, a day typically given to defending the monotheistic theology of God as three in one and one in three. This can be fun. For a theologian or a biblical scholar. Or for the genuinely curious.
However. To be completely fair, God does not need our defense. God simply is as God is. We experience God to know God. It’s a journey.
Today’s lessons can be used as evidence to construct a theology of the Trinity. But none of them was written for that purpose. They are stories of lived experiences with God.
Isaiah’s prophecy recorded a lived experience. His call to serve God arrived in a vision that made him marvel. And though God’s presence was fearsome, Isaiah said yes. There was no doubt in his mind that God is, and God is greater than anything else in all creation.
Paul the apostle had lived experience with God. He shared with the Christians of Rome his realization that God creates the community of Jesus by adoption through the Spirit. Our oneness is in God. Which means we are never alone whether in pain or joy.
Nicodemus had his lived experience of Jesus as opponent, then as teacher and mentor. Through Jesus, God invited him to enlarge his understanding of God’s love. God judges, yes. Not for the purpose of condemnation, but in order that the world might be saved. God’s end game in Jesus’s teaching is to restore our relationship to God and to one another. Learn and live indeed!
Circling back to the Trinity. The lesson of the Holy Trinity, is that God is, and always has been, best expressed in the lived experience of community and relationship. Three in one and one in three. An indivisible community mutually indwelling in holy love into which all are welcome, without exception.