Today, we especially take time to consider God in Trinity.  Today is Trinity Sunday, if we choose to observe it.  Ours is a Trinitarian, not a Unitarian faith.  We believe in one God—we don’t have three gods.  One of the inexplicable mysteries of how God makes Himself known to us through the Bible is that our one God is three: three Persons.  God in three Persons, Blessed Trinity.

At Christmas, we rejoice that the Father sent the Son.  The Risen Son returned to the Father at the Ascension, always observed just before Pentecost.  On Pentecost, we celebrate that the Son sends the Holy Spirit.  The Trinity is what God reveals to us through Scripture about His nature.  God continually has our blessing in view—God means to bless us, encourage us, support and guide us.  The Trinity is also, then, strong assurance from God that He is indeed blessing us.  God blesses us, our Father in heaven, who created us.  God blesses us, the Son who gives us his life so that, in him, we have forgiveness of our sins and full restoration to God.  God blesses us, the Holy Spirit, always with us, never far from us: speaking to us, nurturing us, correcting us, reasoning with us, checking us without overpowering us, so that we can participate in the healing of our sin-sick will.

The Trinity is what Scripture shows us about God, who God is.  The Trinity cheers us, builds us up in hope, and keeps God, God’s love for us, and our love for God front and center in our lives.  As Paul writes to the Christians in Rome, “from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom 11:36).

The Trinity is difficult to comprehend—how one can be three and three one.  No sign, symbol, or metaphor adequately expresses the Trinity.  This is part of the confusion Nicodemus is feeling as he speaks with Jesus.  Are you ever confused by things Jesus says?  Nicodemus is feeling confused.  It seems as if Nicodemus is being a bit dense about the second birth Jesus insists upon.  I hope we get the image of being born again.  Some of you may regard yourselves as born-again Christians.  My parents did, when they came back to the church in the ‘70s.

Nicodemus is a Jew, a Pharisee.  Oh, those evil, wicked, hypocritical Pharisees!  Only, Scripture makes plain that there were Pharisees who found Jesus wonderful, challenging, Pharisees who deeply respected Jesus and even defended him, spoke up for him.  Nicodemus is one.  The Pharisees were many things, and many of them probably were terrible hypocrites who enjoyed public deference more than devotion to God.  That is what the Pharisees were supposed to be all about: devotion to God.  The Pharisees sought to separate themselves from the world, the ways of the world.  Sound familiar?  The Pharisees sought purity, the purity that comes with zealous love for God and earnest commitment to following God’s ways.  Sound familiar?  The Pharisees sought to cultivate deep personal piety.  I find nothing to object to in any of this.  I commend those who decline to be slaves to the ways of this world.  I commend those who earnestly desire purity in their lives and in their hearts.  I am a friend to any man, woman, boy or girl who seeks to cultivate deep personal piety.

The Pharisees were also staunch supporters of belief in the resurrection.  Many peoples in antiquity believed in an underworld, where the shades of the dead dwelled.  The resurrection was quite different: a revelation of righteousness.  For Christians, the resurrection is a revelation of the righteousness of God.  Indeed, the Trinity is a further revelation of the righteousness of God.

But Jews, and the Pharisees among them, do not believe in the Trinity.  God is one.  God is in heaven.  God speaks through His prophets.  God works His works among mankind.  But God does not come among us, does not walk among us, does not eat and drink with us, does not lay His hands upon the sick, the sorrowing, the weak and the blind.  And God certainly does not give His life for us to atone for our sins.  So Nicodemus, a Pharisee, does not comprehend Jesus, yet he claims to know who Jesus is.  That’s a problem.  That’s the problem.

Nicodemus knows that Jesus is a man sent from God.  Jesus tells Nicodemus he does not know what he is talking about.

Consider righteousness.  We know righteousness is important, even if we aren’t sure just what it means or what it actually is.  Righteousness is something like the way to God.  Righteousness is something like the way of God.  Righteousness pleases God.  Righteousness is after the heart of God.  The Pharisees thought they knew a lot about the righteousness of God.  Part of what they thought they knew was that the righteous were elect, and the elect were righteous.  God’s chosen people were righteous.  No one who was not righteous could be one of God’s chosen ones; we see and hear the Pharisees acting on this belief throughout the Gospels.  If you do what is righteous, you are righteous.  If you are righteous, you are elect, and if you are elect, you will know the resurrection and be forever in the presence of God.

If you do what is righteous.  I hope you sense there’s a problem there.  I bet the Pharisees did, but they couldn’t talk about it because everything they were, all that they stood for, was tied up in that, tied up with a fundamental error, a basic misunderstanding, right there.  For Nicodemus, being righteous was a matter of keeping the Law scrupulously: studying the Torah, devoting himself to all the rules, strictly observing Sabbaths, all the religious festivals and holy days, in each rich, ever more minute, complex detail and step.  And righteousness certainly also included the very strictest observance of all the dietary laws.  Righteousness was a matter of what Nicodemus did, his own efforts, his own work.  If you want God’s approval, do not deviate in the least from what God has commanded.  Loving the Law, celebrating the Law, knowing the Law—this was the way of righteousness.

Jesus tells Nicodemus, in a way Nicodemus has always suspected but always been too terrified to confess, that he, the Pharisees, and everyone, is wrong.  More, Jesus tells them that they don’t know what they are talking about; they don’t know who they are talking about.

What Scripture shows us, beginning to end, is that it isn’t about us.  The whole problem we face throughout our lives is that we, people, place ourselves at the center of our stories, the center of our interests, concerns, desires, pursuits, aims, and goals.  It isn’t about us.  It’s about God.  We are all and each of us part of God’s story.  It’s about God’s initiative, God’s plan, God’s righteousness, God’s holiness, His joy, and His love.  Jesus, and the Spirit, come to us and among us first of all as expressions of God’s love for us, for the world.  His love.  If Trinity Sunday has any message for us, it is the message of the richness, the abundance of God’s love: His creating, redeeming, sustaining love.

It’s not about our flawless performance—the Russian judge will always give us a 2.0, anyway!  Loving the Law, celebrating the Law, knowing the Law—we end up worshiping the Law rather than the one who gives the Law.  I think that, among other reasons why the Father sent the Son at the time and in the place and in the way He did was because Law-worship was getting out of hand; when we worship the Law we not only lose sight of God—who God is and what God expects of us—we also lose sight of others.  We no longer see people; we see subjects of the law.  Everyone is measured according to the Law; some (a few) receive commendation; many (most) are found wanting, sorely wanting.  Considering what God expects of me, beloved, I tell you, candidly, not proudly, that I am wanting, sorely wanting.  Wretched man!  How will I ever see the kingdom of God?

Jesus comes and says to Nicodemus and all of us that “no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again” (Jn 3:3).  Do I give birth to myself?  My mother would have said no way!  But the righteous see the kingdom—this is what Nicodemus knows.  He is right, but he is wrong because he does not know.  Jesus insists upon what he has told Nicodemus: “no one can enter the Kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit” (Jn 3:5).  By water we confess our sin and receive forgiveness; we admit before God and the world that we are not worthy of God, no matter whatever worldly excellences we may have achieved.  By the Spirit we receive faith, faith in Christ, faith in what God does for us in Christ, faith in God’s love.  A third time Jesus insists, saying, “you must all be born again” (3:7).  No exceptions.  Jesus is saying righteousness does not arise from us.  Righteousness comes to us, comes upon us.

What is this birth?  How does it happen?  When?  Where?  The Son, sent from the Father, now speaks of the Spirit: the Trinity points to the Trinity.  Jesus tells Nicodemus, “[t]he wind blows wherever it wishes; you hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going.  It is like that with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (3:8).  I’m reminded of a brief poem by the Victorian poet Christina Rosetti: “Who has seen the wind? / Neither I nor you: / But when the leaves hang trembling, / The wind is passing through. / Who has seen the wind? / Neither you nor I: / But when the trees bow down their heads, / The wind is passing by.”  We do not see the wind.  We see what it does.  We do not see the Spirit.  We see what the Spirit does.  What does the Spirit do?  Look around you, here; look within yourself.

The Scottish pastor and Biblical scholar William Barclay, reading this same passage in John, observed that “[t]he unanswerable argument for Christianity is Christian lives.  No man can disregard a faith which is able to make bad men good.”[1]  The Spirit argues for itself by what the Spirit is doing, doing in us and through us.  The Christian never points to himself, to herself.  The Christian always points to God, one God in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Some claim to be thoroughgoing materialists or naturalists, though they might not use words like that.  They do not believe what science cannot observe, what science cannot prove (as though science were about proving things).  My high school physics teacher was formerly an engineer who helped design and test engines for the Saturn rockets that carried us into space.  He knew his stuff.  He was also a Christian.  I think John Harlan, engineer and physicist, would heartily have endorsed what biblical scholar C. K. Barrett says: “The Spirit, like the wind, is entirely beyond both the control and the comprehension of man: it breathes into this world from another”[2]

Most, though, are not materialists or naturalists in any serious way.  Most people believe in something, something they might describe as spiritual if not religious.  Only, the something they believe in is what they have patched together from this and that, so that it satisfies them.  The term Scripture uses for the result is idol.  You’ll find a lot of idolatry in Scripture.  You’ll find a lot of idolatry in the world.  You’ll find a lot of idolatry in the human heart.  Oh, many are “benign,” of course, but they are idols nonetheless: gods fashioned after the hearts, aims, purposes, and desires of people.  All send their worship up, but there is only one who came down, down from the Father, in the power of the Holy Spirit.  He speaks of what he knows and reports what he has seen.  Are you willing to accept his message?

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.

                [1] William Barclay. The Gospel of John. Vol. 1. Daily Study Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975. 132.

                [2] Qtd in Francis J. Moloney, SDB. Gospel of John. Sacra Pagina. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical P, 1998. 93.