Triune Belovedness & Belonging
(Ex 3:1-6, Ps 93; Rom 8:9-17; John 3:1-16)
Trinity Sunday. Christ Church Anglican 5/26/24
When I finished sixth grade, my dad put up a basketball hoop in our driveway. My three brothers spent lots of lazy afternoons shooting baskets and talking nonsense. But some of our conversations I won’t forget, like the day we got talking about heaven.
What would it be like? How would we see God if he lives in unapproachable light? How would we recognize each other without our bodies? Would we fly? Sit on clouds? How would we handle the boredom if, after 10,000 years, “we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun”? We could barely make it through a Sunday morning service!
We knew that God ‘so loved the world’ but we weren’t sure he liked it, at least not as much as we did. We wondered why so many cool things – like glaciers, and whales, and basketball – were going to disappear when Jesus took us all to that place reserved for only angels, souls, and God.
We looked forward to meeting Jesus, but not in a body. Sure, he temporarily needed one to teach and do miracles, die and resurrect, but he dumped it at his ascension, right? And though we prayed for his return, we hoped he would take his time. Not least because we wanted to stay up late, drive, get married, have kids, stop sinning. We still wanted to live so much human life.
Clearly, we didn’t know the first thing about the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We didn’t know that he became like us so that we would become like him in our humanity—and his!
Or that he’d lived and died and been raised not with a divine power pack but in the power of the Holy Spirit, precisely so that we too could live by the Spirit.
We didn’t know that resurrection was about getting our creaturely human lives back, made new, fitted for life in a renewed heaven on earth.
Or that in Jesus’ ascension our human lives were joined to the very life of God, perfect human life enfolded into the Trinity forever, united to the shared love of the Father, Son and Spirit.
Even though we’d been baptized into the One Triune Name, we didn’t know that we would find our Belonging, our Belovedness, and our most human being, at a Trinitarian table, in God’s Triune life.
They say that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. I beg to differ.
We all carry preset notions of God and ourselves and others. Unexamined beliefs shaped by our experience that we simply assume to be true, even if we can’t really say what they are or why they matter.
Nicodemus had the same problem. Like us, he was raised in a religious system of deeply held beliefs and rules. As an expert in Jewish law, an interpreter of Israel’s Scriptures, he tested things and people by what he knew. His curiosity about Jesus was because Jesus’ miracles sounded so much like what Yahweh had done and promised in Scripture, in Israel’s history. Hence his acknowledgment of Jesus as one sent from God.
Clearly, Jesus’ response about the extraordinary means necessary to see God’s Kingdom didn’t fit the categories for this man, who had little imagination for metaphor,let alone what God might be doing in Jesus.
“Born Again?
Through a mother’s womb?
Nonsense.
Can’t be done.”
Well, says, Jesus, it’s already been done, and it’s the only Kingdom life there is on offer. Reborn life. Something must happen to Nicodemus that he cannot do for himself or understand in advance. Jesus’ invitation assumes that Nicodemus has already been placed in the birth canal of God’s new covenant by the Spirit. The invitation is to come on out and live, as a child of Yahweh, who loves the whole world so much that he won’t give a Messiah to crush it but his Son to save it. As a gift.
But transactional religious ideas always get in the way of gift. They’re too busy telling God what he can and can’t do, what people deserve, or don’t, who gets a seat at the table and who doesn’t, all the while attempting to secure their place by doing things for God, for which God owes them—hiding failure, fear, and shame.
It’s so hard to receive a gift we can’t earn, so hard to be set free from defending religious ideas in order to be freefor, saved for, eternal life with the Triune God of self-giving love.
Jesus’ own disciples had a hard time receiving what they’d been given. As we heard last week, Philip was done with talk and mystery and waiting. He just wanted to see the Father—a Father he couldn’t seem to recognize in Jesus. Jesus, in turn, told Philip, and us, as plainly as possible, that when we’ve seen Jesus, we’ve seen our Father. They look like each other, act just like each other. Only he can show us our Father, our Abba who art in heaven—which is exactly what he has done.
To see what God is like, we look to Jesus, Son of God and Mary.
Which means we must also look to Jesus to see what it means to be truly human, wearing the DNA of his mother and the stardust of the cosmos. Fully human like us, tempted in every way that we are. He gets what it means to be born into a weird family, to be deeply loved yet also suspect and unloved. To be poor, oppressed, betrayed, delighted, disappointed, tired, aroused, cranky, tempted to misuse love and power for his own gain.
Yet he’s unlike us at the most critical point; when tempted to break, he is without sin. Instead, he trusted and delighted in the love of our Father and obeyed him out of love for the world. That obedience, minute by minute, attentive, prophetic, wise, parabolically just and merciful, loving those considered most, and least, human, more than his own life. Healing, delivering, and obeying, all the way to a final Passover that would be the death of him for the resurrection of the world.
Trinity Sunday reminds us that the ascended, still-human Jesus is God’s faithful embodiment of grace and truth, standing at the center of God’s Kingdom, entering the depths of our depravity to reorder it toward life.
Crowned with glory and honor and Yahweh’s own name, not simply in his divinity but his humanity, Jesus has faithfully brought our life into the very life of God and kept it there, as God’s way of being Triune, forever!
Taking what is ours and giving us what is his, our brother and Lord still serves us on his knees, washing not only our feet but our whole lives.
As our High Priest, he remains united to our suffering, priesting our joy and sorrow, our hope and despair, in his intercessory life, speaking on our behalf to his Abba and ours using the most intimate, infant, of names. He embodies the prayers we have no words for or awareness of and invites us to join him in what he’s still doing in the world.
By the Spirit, he mediates our brokenness and our perfection until our final homecoming.
In Jesus, the Father always sees us finished, so the Trinity isn’t stressed about how we turn out. Their love for us is complete.
Yet, they love us without measure, in the moments of our daily lives. Because it’s here that we let the Triune God shape us as beloveds as we learn to trust that love and discover its faithfulness and forgiveness.
We discover that our life in the Spirit is a gift of love, killing off what is killing us, empowering us to be free enough to die to ourselves, just like him.
Conformed to Jesus’ image, the spitting image of the Father, we too take on the family likeness. As Hebrews reminds us, “both the one who makes people holy, and those who are made holy are of the same family. So, Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters.
Thus, our Father seats us with Jesus to enact his justice and mercy, giving us authority as firstborns that is always shaped by the intimacy of life with our Abba who named himself to Moses in the bush of fire and later called himself a “Father” to Israel, protecting and nurturing her. This Father, says Paul, who raised Jesus from the dead by the Spirit, will also give life to our mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in us, seating us human children at the Triune table forever.
This means life in the Spirit is nonnegotiable. It’s the only human life there is, now and forever. And only Jesus can show us the Spirit—“the Lord and giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified,” fully, equally God among us.
This is not some invisible, shy, God who assures us of salvation, not a force who convicts us of sin or illuminates the Scriptures between whose pages we’ve trapped him. This is God, with us, hovering over the waters of first creation with life-giving breath; hovering like a dove over a flood, bringing a branch from a new tree of life as a promise of new creation; hovering over the waters of the Red Sea like a pillar of fire and cloud; and later over the Jordan. A millennia later, the Spirit is hovering in that same river once more in the form of a dove, resting on the Father’s beloved Son, who is being baptized in the waters of our repentance so that we too might hear our Abba’s voice speaking his love over us, as children are reborn.
About six hundred years ago, a monk named Andrei Rublev painted an icon of the Trinity based on the story of God coming to Abraham in Gen 18 in a three-personed, angelic visitation,
Rublev’s icon is a two-dimensional picture window of God’s reality, through which WE are gazed upon, into which we step, opening a reality waiting to greet us and gather us in.
This is what “Trinity” is shorthand for: the Father loving the Son loving the Spirit loving Father loving the Son, and so on; Mutually indwelling, self-giving, other-fulfilling love.
God’s Love is not a commodity. The Trinity does “have” an allotment of “love.” No, the Trinity is endless, eternal love that loves you and me and all creation in the same way the Father Son, and Spirit reciprocally love one other as one God. A creation made not because God needs to love, or be loved, but simply for the joy of including what is not God in God’s perfect love.
As we look at this icon for a moment, Rublev wants to remind us of all of this. [Size, colors, faces, poses/gazes, imagery, open table, emphasis on divine identity/character, relationality, personhood]
By the Spirit we feast at the Table of the Son of God, the only truly human person there has ever yet been. As we set our minds on “things above” right here where Christ is, where our life “is now hidden with Christ in God,” we come together in the Eucharist and offer his “one-anothering” life to each other, laying down our privilege and divisions, our conflicts and brokenness, to receive individual and communal healing and wholeness, forgiveness and human holiness. Yet, also to be empowered to share in the sufferings that Jesus still suffers with and for us all and also to minister healing as a sign of resurrection.
This meal is a lifeline to his own person and cruciform power to the world. As one theologian has put it, “He takes us, as those who have died, risen and ascended with him, into his own movement from the world toward the Father and empowers us to join with him in transforming the old world into a new, divine world, a world of the Spirit.” [Hans Urs von Balthasar]
So come. You were made for love by Father, Son, and Spirit, whose love makes the world new, new like a reborn baby. Find your place at the Triune table of belovedness and belonging. That place has your name on it. It was set for you, with you in God’s heart and eyes on you, before the creation of the world. The bread is abundant, and the wine is flowing freely.
Look around the table at one another. Until the day you see Jesus face to face, you get to see him in every human brother and sister.
Come ready to laugh, because the joke’s on us all, thinking we could ever earn a place at a table for which we were made.
Laugh with the relief of it. And when you’ve eaten, run and tell the world that God so loved them that he gave his only Son to bring them home as well. Then pass the wine again. There’s always more than enough. There always has been. In the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.