Sermon

The other evening I was standing in my kitchen, shucking corn, and listening to the news on the radio, as I usually do when I'm making dinner. I heard an interview with a reporter who's working in Iraq. He described daily life in Iraq as living in constant fear, not knowing where the next violent attack will come from, just knowing that it will come.

There was more news about war and violence in Israel and in Afghanistan and in this country and the news was overwhelming. And it wasn't just that the news was so bad -- it was that while I was hearing it, I was doing something so completely ordinary. I was making dinner for my family. It's an incredible luxury to get to do ordinary things.

And it made me angry - angry that we humans cause one another so much suffering, and especially angry because I felt powerless to do anything about it. It also made me profoundly uncomfortable - how come I get to shuck corn when other people are living in a war zone?

What I don't know could fill many librarys' worth of books. I've spent a lot of years in school, but I'm keenly aware that there's a whole lot more I don't understand than I do understand. So right now I'm feeling particularly sympathetic towards Nicodemus. In today's reading from John's Gospel, Nicodemus is something of a hero for the bewildered. He's an educated man, a leader, a man of position and authority in the Jewish community. All of which makes his sneaking out after dark to see Jesus a very strange thing for him to do.

Whatever he thought he'd find, it's pretty obvious that's not what he ends up finding. In response to Nicodemus' polite and respectful opening, Jesus tells him that to see the kingdom of God, one must be born from above.

Jesus elaborates by saying one must be born of water and the Spirit and then he adds that bit about the wind blowing where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but don't know where it comes from or where it goes, and so it is with everyone born of the Spirit.

And then Jesus asks him, "Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you don't understand these things?"

You don't understand these things? Well, no, actually. Today is Trinity Sunday, so we're especially mindful that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all at work in what Jesus is describing, but I'd be lying if I said I really understood how God, who is One, can be all three at once. I do know that God is both Father and Son, and the Father and Son are also Spirit, so those who are born of the Spirit are born of the Father and the Son, and Jesus is in God and with God and is God, who is the Father and the Holy Spirit along with the Son, so, whatever else it is, the Trinity is quite a crowd.

And that, actually, is something to hold on to: that at the heart of the mystery of God's Trinitarian Oneness is a loving community.

Later in John's Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that in his Father's house there are many dwelling places and that he's going to prepare a place for them. Shortly thereafter Jesus prays, "As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us. . . ." The theologian Jürgen Moltmann writes,

A habitable God. A God whose house has many dwelling places. A God who invites us to move in, take up residence, and abide with Him. A God who allows us to become one within Him. There's a lot we don't understand, but we do know that God invites us into His loving community.

So I can't help wondering if maybe Jesus was trying to jolt Nicodemus out of thinking he did understand, because sometimes thinking we have the answers, or even that we should have the answers, is a way of holding ourselves apart from God. There are certainly a lot of carefully thought out, orthodox answers about what it means that God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is One. But until we recognize that the Trinity is ultimately an unknowable mystery, we run the risk of making God too small. Our language isn't big enough to hold God.

So maybe anger, discomfort, and bewilderment all have a role to play in the life of faith. Maybe feeling those things can shake us loose from trusting in ourselves and forgetting that we're not called to have answers, but faith. Maybe the hugeness of the world's problems teaches us to recognize our own smallness and our complete dependence on God. Maybe hearing the cries of our fellow humans teaches us to listen for God which, in turn, helps us to respond to the cries of those who need help.

All of which leads me to believe that Jesus is trying to lead Nicodemus out of the dark and into the light, even if he sounds more cryptic than helpful. If he sounds frustrated, it's probably because he is. After all, it's frustrating to keep holding the door to his Father's house open for people who won't understand they're invited in.

You'll notice that I haven't come up with answers to the problems of war and violence or to the problem of going about a happily ordinary life while other people are living extraordinarily unhappy lives. What I can offer is something Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, that "only the person who, in the darkness of guilt . . . has felt herself touched by the love which never ceases, which forgives everything and which points beyond all misery to the world of God, only such a person knows what God's goodness means...[and] the more deeply we recognize what God's goodness is, the more lively our answer will be ...."[2]

Our answer is our prayer: Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, to God who is, and who was, and who is to come." Amen.

[1] Jurgen Moltmann, 'The Triune God: Rich in Relationships.' The Living Pulpit, April 1999.

[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 'God's Loving Care and Human Suffering,' in G.B. Kelly and F. B. Nelson, eds., A Testament to Freedom (Harper 1990), 208.

Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

6/11/06 (8AM and 11AM) - Trinity Sunday (Year B)

The Rev. Sarah Ball-Damberg