Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; John 3:1-17; Romans 8:12-17
I hear Trinity Sunday is one of the hardest preaching slots to fill, just because so many preachers would rather tackle anything else apart from trying to make sense of God as Trinity. But I look forward to this Sunday, because it's one example of how we Christians make sense of God through what happens to us, and of our experience through what we know about God.
Is that clear? If not, you're in good company. In our Gospel reading today Nicodemus, one of the academics of his day, was really confused - so, being sensible as well as being an academic, he came to talk to Jesus about his difficulties. Mind you, he came out of office hours, so no one else in the Sanhedrin could see him asking someone without proper qualifications about God. Let's eavesdrop on their conversation, carefully crafted by the writer of John's Gospel.
Nicodemus starts with uncontested facts: Jesus must have been sent by God, as Isaiah was in our first reading, otherwise he couldn't possibly have done the amazing things he has done. At this point in John's Gospel, Nicodemus would be mainly thinking about the way Jesus boosted the wine supply at a wedding. Nicodemus plainly sees God's hand at work in Jesus' increasing reputation, but it worries him too - after all, Jesus holds no official position, he's an outsider. But that's nothing compared with the poser Jesus is about to bowl him: no one, he says, can see God's kingdom unless they are born from above - in other words, unless they are looking at things from God's perspective. It sounds as if Jesus is calling him, Nicodemus, an outsider! But that's not the only problem Nicodemus has with this conversation. He is evidently not someone who has much time for metaphors, for what's his immediate objection? You can't be born a second time! You'd never fit into your mother's womb again!
Actually, I may be a bit unfair on Nicodemus here - that's always a temptation for preachers, to embroider the gaps of a biblical story in a way that suits us. In fact, he may be raising a very valid objection: how is it humanly possible to leave our old ways of thinking, to see things in God's way?
But whatever he meant, Nicodemus evidently has the wrong end of the stick. So to explain further what he means, Jesus brings in God's Spirit. Think of the wind, he says to Nicodemus. You can't see it, but you can tell by the way everything else reacts to its passing that something real is happening. So when someone sees things in God's way, they're bound to seem different from others, to show by what they say and do that God's Spirit is at work in them.
That's what Nicodemus has noticed in Jesus' life, why he's come to Jesus by night to start with. And here John is starting to show us the intimate connection between Jesus and God's Spirit - you start talking about one, and the other inevitably comes into the conversation. Jesus is born from above, born of God's Spirit; that is why he can do the things he does. But John's really getting going now. We've seen all this happening, he tells his readers. We didn't start off from nice theories - this came out of us trying to make sense of the amazing things we saw Jesus doing. And if you have trouble with that, he adds, you're really going to be up a creek without a paddle when we get to the climax of this story, Jesus returning to heaven.
What's John on about now? Jesus died lifted up on a cross - a cursed death, a terrorist's death. How on earth can a shocker like that be described as ‘returning to heaven'? Yet when Jesus has been raised from death by God, and seen by many witnesses thereafter, how else can it be described? And the very intimacy of the relationship between Jesus and God which such an outcome entails comes back to the image of birth by calling Jesus God's son. The kings of Israel have already been described as God's sons in the Hebrew Bible, and Greek myth has many sons of the gods, so the idea's not completely unknown, but still it's a bold leap for John's hearers, a way to explain to them just how those who experienced the reality of Jesus, and had to make sense of him, could make a place for him within their own frame of reference.
But it doesn't stop there. Once we have this new concept of Jesus as born of God's Spirit, as God's Son - the dance of God's relationships later generations would try to formalise, define and generally tidy up by calling it the Holy Trinity - John can use that new framework of experience to help us understand more about how God connects with God's world.
For in the ancient world fatherhood meant power. Fathers in ancient Greek society could choose whether their new-born children would survive or be left outside to die. Men in Roman society had total authority over their wives, children, slaves. Even our Hebrew psalm this morning emphasises God's power over the whole of nature. But the way John describes God here is about love, not power, about self-sacrificial giving, not compelling others, about offering us innumerable second chances to bring us from Isaiah's sad self-reproach to the energy and delight of accepting God's call.
I wouldn't like to leave you thinking that our experience of God's love is always trouble-free. Isaiah's feeling of total inadequacy and Nicodemus' embarrassed approach by night are two ways of describing how painful it can be to have to reconsider ways of thinking we'd assumed were set, years ago, into our own personal account of How the World Is. When, like Isaiah or Nicodemus, we are exposed to a deeper understanding of God, we can either make an excuse - whether we say we're too sinful or too clever to change - and turn away or, recognising that it may hurt, open our minds and hearts to a new way of seeing. It's a decision which we will have to make again and again throughout the course of our lives.
But I don't want either to leave you thinking this God stuff is more trouble than it's worth. For if we believe Paul, writing to the church in Rome, all who are led by the Spirit of God, even including us, have become God's children. God has chosen to bring us into the life of the Trinity - if we will acknowledge that choice. So what might that mean in practice for us? We will all encounter God in different ways, depending on our personality and experience, as the one who created us, who walks beside us or who inspires us. As individuals we are each invited to share the love of God-in-relationship and to pass it on to others. So collectively, too, let us take up the invitation to love and to bring others into God's love, as we like Isaiah respond in worship and in service.