Scripture: Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17; Isaiah 6:1-3 Series: After Pentecost
A Trinity Sunday sermon (also Memorial Day weekend) on Romans 8:12-17 and John 3:1-17 arguing that the Trinity, like the unspeakable losses of war recalled through the preacher’s two grandfathers, is real yet ineffable—participated in rather than fully understood. Using the Augustinian Lover/Beloved/Love and McCabe’s eternal parent/child/joy images, Pruitt frames the Holy Spirit as the divine love that conjoins heaven and earth and makes reconciliation possible. We are all ‘little Nicodemi’ questioning Jesus’ hard commands; new birth by the Spirit is conversion. Drawing on Wesleyan prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying grace and Augustine’s ‘love what deserves to be loved,’ he calls hearers to examine their time and budgets and to make space in their hearts for the Spirit’s new work.
Illustrations: grandfather-huebel-iwo-jima, grandfather-pruitt-death-camp, memorial-day-decoration-day-origins, marriage-vows-better-and-worse, evolutionary-parent-child-love, lover-beloved-love-trinity-image, mccabe-eternal-parent-child-joy, little-nicodemi, all-things-considered-age-ten, budget-reveals-desire
May 26, 2024
Trinity Sunday
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17
So then, brothers and sisters, we are obligated, 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 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 we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. - Romans 8:12-17
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 unless God is with that person.” 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 the 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. - John 3:1-17
One of my grandfather’s, John Huebel, used to tell funny stories about what was happening on Iwo Jima during World War II. He was an officer in the Army, an Aggie Class of 1940, the last and only time A&M won a national championship. His degree was officially in chemical warfare, a department that was changed to chemical engineering soon after the war.
He wasn’t in the thick of the fighting at Iwo. He landed two days after the initial Marine invasion and worked at the airport. The purpose of Iwo Jima was to be an emergency landing site for B-29 bombers. It was also an active battlefield for over a month. The invasion happened on February 19, 1945. The famous flag raising picture took place on February 23 and the island was clear on March 26. My grandfather arrived around February 21.
He told funny stories about foxholes and defecation and pranks. There were other stories he didn’t tell.
My other grandfather, Mack Pruitt, was an enlisted man in the Army Air Corps. He landed in France right after D-Day. He drove a truck. He didn’t tell stories, not to his family. He didn’t speak of what he saw to us. Sometimes, later in life, he would talk to non-relatives, but only with brevity. He helped evacuate a death camp, but he didn’t talk about it.
Today is Trinity Sunday. The week after Pentecost, we remember and acknowledge the three-fold nature of God this day.
The Trinity is one of those notoriously difficult concepts to understand. There is no pithy answer to the questions around it. Trinity has been a stumbling block for many people over the centuries. Many Jews and Muslims have called Christians tritheists because of our insistence on the Trinity. Many atheists called Christians polytheists for the Trinity.
Trinity, is something else.
Trinity is a way to to seek to understand who God is, but not fully. You can never fully understand who God is. The nature of God is always beyond our grasp because God created everything from nothing. What theologians call the creator/creature distinction keeps a limit on what we can know about God.
There are different levels of understanding things. Because of our experiences, we have different ways of understanding who God is.
Today we also celebrate Memorial Day. Memorial Day began after the Civil War when people were noticing military graves being forgotten and vandalized. It was originally called Decoration Day as a way to honor the graves of fallen soldiers. Memorial Day Weekend usually doesn’t fall on Trinity Sunday, and yet there is a connection between the two.
I never served in the armed forces. I never saw battle or had friends die next to me. Those are not my own experiences nor my stories to tell. What I do know, from the experience of my grandfathers especially, is that the loss of friends in battle is difficult to talk about. There are different levels to it.
Veterans can tell different stories to fellow veterans than they cannot tell to civilians like me. No matter how much you speak about it, though, there is an ineffability to these forms of loss. No amount of words capture it fully and there are some stories that are nearly impossible to speak aloud.
Just because it is hard to talk about it, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. This also works with talking about the Trinity.
The Trinity is worth thinking about expressing even when we can’t fully capture it. There are different levels of understanding God’s nature as triune. Sometimes we admit to things; we see things and we say things and don’t quite understand, yet we still do them.
This also works for marriage. When two people are married, they don’t really understand what is going on. We try to prepare them for it. When I do marriage counseling, I try to prepare people for the vows they are about to take. Some people have an idea of what ‘for better’ looks like, some have an idea of what ‘for worse’ looks like, but I would imagine for all of you who have been married, the ‘better’ was very different from what you thought it would be. As well, the worse was very different than you thought it would be. When you made those vows, you did not know what you were getting into, but that does not mean that they were false.
With the Trinity, rather than a language which we can learn to find the right words, we need to admit that we will never find the right words. In this, the Trinity is more like love. It is something in which we participate without fully understanding.
The love of a child for a parent or a parent for a child goes beyond our understanding. We can have an evolutionary rationalization for it. We can say, okay, according to evolutionary theory parents should look after children because that is how the race survives, but that is a very surface level view that does not seem to describe my relationships with my kids and my relationships with my parents.
There is so much more there than just survival of the fittest.
Love is central and key to our understanding of the Holy Spirit. My favorite illustration of the Trinity is Lover, Beloved, and Love. The Lover being God the Father, who brings all into being. The beloved of the Father is the Son through whom all things came into being. And the love between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit. Or another way to say it is, as Herbert McCabe does: God the eternal parent. God the eternal child. God the eternal joy. All of these illustrations break down, but we see in this description something essential to why we believe that the Holy Spirit is God. That it is not just because it is written in a book or is taught in confirmation classes, but because it describes how we experience God to be. How we experience God as truly found in the love between neighbors and the love between spouses and the amazing possibility of love between enemies and reconciliation taking place.
In the Gospel of John for today, we see the story of Nicodemus. It is one of my favorites stories of the New Testament. We have Nicodemus the Pharisee taking Jesus literally. This is a literal interpretation of Jesus when he says you must be born again. And Nicodemus, quite earnestly, like a child says, “do you mean that I must go back into my mother’s belly?”
And Jesus says, “No.” Jesus says that you must be born again by the Spirit. We must be ready for the change that happens when love enters our life. The change that happens is what we call conversion. The change when life is going one way and our life turns and goes another direction.
We often want control of any change we make in our life, but there are many factors outside of our control: factors external and internal. There are some things we want to turn away from.
A life of self-destruction, a life of pride or indifference that turns, that turns around. We are all, my friends, little Nicodemi (the plural of Nicodemus). We are all little Nicodemi coming to Jesus in the night.
Any of us who have ever called Jesus Lord have had these little questions, we have had these little clarifications. “You know you say this, but do you really mean it, Jesus? You know, you tell me to love my enemy, do you really mean it? You know Jesus, you tell me to give to the poor, do you really mean it? Do you know it is hard to do some of the things you ask us, Jesus, don’t you realize it’s hard?”
How do we see that big picture? How do we see that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is for us. That is by the Holy Spirit, God with us. Heaven and earth are conjoined through the Spirit. We see this in the reading from Isaiah 6 and the Holy, Holy, Holy, the Sanctus. The Heavens and the earth coming together. The Spirit is what draws the heavens and the earth together and makes the possibility of reconciliation, the possibility of friendship and love available to us. This is what we are opening up when we talk about the Holy Spirit as God. That this preparer, this comforter, this advocate is also coequal with the Father and the Son. God is here. God is here. The consequence of believing that the Holy Spirit is God is not just this one time awareness. Like that time when I was 10 and realized that All Things Considered meant that all things were being considered. It is not this one time just like faith is not this one time thing. Faith is not this one time decision. In the Wesleyan tradition, we believe in a continuum of grace. In the grace that comes before. In prevenient grace, the preparer. In the grace that makes us righteous, in the grace that makes us just, the grace that makes us right with our neighbor. Justifying grace, the grace of the moment. And the grace that continually shapes us and conforms us, Sanctifying grace. The grace that allows us to be holy.
In the words of Saint Augustine, the grace that lets us love what deserves to be loved. This is what holiness is. This is what we are being prepared for. By living the Christian faith. By becoming disciples of Jesus Christ. By having our heart set on Christ, we are learning how to love what deserves to be loved.
Love and desire are part of all human interactions. We always do what we think is good whether or not it is good. If we look at how we spend our time, we will see what we desire to be good. If we look through our week, if we look through the 24 hours of each day, we will be able to see what we value. What matters to us. Some of us don’t like to think about it. Some of us are in positions where we may not have a lot of choices about what we spend our time on or what we do. Or we may not be in the place we think we need to be, how frustrating that is. We long to be in a better place.
We see this when we look at our own personal budgets. Yes, the Holy Spirit has to do with our budgets, too. We see when we look at our own individual budgets, where we spend our money, where we don’t spend our money. Where we are generous. Where we are scarce. Whether or not we practice a philosophy of generosity or of scarcity. A philosophy of hope or of fear. Because the Holy Spirit is God. Because God is Father Son and Spirit, there are consequences for how our lives can be led. Not in the sense of guilt or fear in what we are doing, but in the possibility that you, even you, and I, even I, can love what is deserving of love. That the relationships that I have made can be sanctified. That we can have true friendship with each other. That we can have true fellowship with one another. That we can be a household of God. That we can offer to God what we have out of hope and faith and belief that God really is with us. Not only is God going to take care of us in the future but God is taking care of us right now. How large a space do you have in your heart for the Holy Spirit to start something new. How large a space do you have in your heart for that fire of pentecost to catch on you. The Trinity is not about big words or complex thoughts. It is about who you are and whose you are. You are a beloved child of God. In loving our neighbor, in loving our Lord, God is with us. Let us turn to our Lord. Let us become more of what we can be and show this world the possibilities of love.
Let us pray, Loving God, you sent your son Jesus to lead us in faith to everlasting life. Give us new birth by water and the Spirit so that we may enter your eternal realm; In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.