A Trinity of Questions

Holy Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024 – Gospel, John 3:1-17. Also Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 29, Romans 8:12-17

It’s very interesting what you can find online when you search around a little bit. Heaven knows there’s a lot of garbage out there, but sometimes I like to see the kinds of questions people are asking about God and matters of faith.

On a site called Reddit, a user posted this message: “If you could ask God one question, what would it be and how do you hope he would answer it?” The responses were fascinating. Some of the questions users would ask God are about our very existence:

“Why did you make us?”

“Why is there so much pain in the world?”

“Will everything turn out ok?”

Some were just funny, like this one:

“Are there any cheeses we haven’t invented yet?”

Some were about God’s power and action in the world:

“Hey dude, can you cure all cancer today?” and

“Would it really kill ya to show up for 5 minutes, clear up the abortion and LGBTQ thing, and let humanity know you’re watching?

And others were just really about relationship:

“Can I have a hug?”

When we read today’s texts and contemplate the fact that it’s Holy Trinity Sunday, we may be left with a lot of questions.

First, we’re given Isaiah’s vision – most likely a nighttime dream – where fiery angels and a hot coal recruit the prophet into his vocational calling. We might be led to ask, “What on earth is going on here, and what does this have to do with daily life where I’m struggling to pay my monthly bills?”

Then Psalm 29 describes this mighty power of God that moves mountains and splits gigantic trees. We might wonder, “If God is so powerful, why do our loved ones die too young? Why don’t we actually see that power doing something to fix this mess of a world?”

And what about this Holy Trinity business? As my friend, Jim Hazelwood, an ELCA bishop, points out,

If you were alive in the year 25 CE, walked up to the most learned person in the ancient world, and brought up the topic of the Trinity, they would have no idea what you were talking about. That’s because it’s a concept that wasn’t fully developed for another three hundred years. In other words, Rabbi Jesus would not have been lecturing his disciples on the Holy Trinity, though he did have a few words to say about the Holy Spirit, especially in John’s Gospel.”

If we’re not theology nerds, we might scratch our heads on the Holy Trinity and think it’s all just a bunch of gobbledygook that we’ll never understand, this business of a God who is one Unity of three Persons. How many of us who are not in seminaries or pulpits really think about the Trinity anyway?

When I look at these texts, I think they can be boiled down to three key questions:

“How does God speak?”

“How does God work?” and

“How does God love?”

In scripture, there are endless stories of people hearing God’s guidance. But does that still happen today? And if so, how? God doesn’t have lips or vocal cords or even a body to stand beside us and whisper loving instructions in our ear. So how does God speak?

We see one answer to that question in Isaiah and the many other texts in the bible that tell us of meaningful visions and dreams. I know from both my own experience and scripture that God speaks to us through the symbols that arise in our dreams from the deep unconscious part of our psyche. God can only speak through the body of the world, our embodied human psyches, and our physical dreaming bodies. We might think of the world as God’s mouthpiece.

We find a similar answer to the question, “How does God work?” when we read the Gospel for today. Nicodemus tells Jesus that “no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” In other words, Jesus’ power to do signs and healings was because of the presence of God within him. God worked through the body of Jesus. Again, God doesn’t have arms and hands with which to make things move or perform a healing.

But we exist in a world that is animated and empowered by the indwelling Spirit of God.

There are many theologians who believe that the entire cosmos is God’s body and, in a sense, this is what the Gospel tells us. God works through human bodies and the material world. It is God’s presence in us and in the world that has the power to make change. That power to change the world wasn’t only present in Jesus. It is present in each and every one of us today who believe and who open our hearts to the guidance, power, and presence of the Holy Spirit.

To my final question, “how does God love?”, we can look to the Trinity for an answer.

Now we must understand that nowhere in scripture is there a sentence that tells us that God is a Trinity. Trinity is a symbol or metaphor used to express the idea that it is essential to the mystery we call God to be in relationship. God’s essence is relationship. God is not alone in God’s self.

And here’s another metaphor: God is like a dynamic, dancing waterwheel, pouring love from the Father to the Son to the Spirit. But that Trinity can’t contain all the love God has, so God pours more love toward everything that God created. “For God so loved the world…”

This Trinity isn’t a literal idea. It’s the grasping at language of finite humans trying to express the infinite Mystery as best we can. It’s not that there are three chairs up in some heavenly realm where the Father, Son, and Spirit sit and have tea together. This is a rich symbol trying to convey a deep truth of a constantly and consistently loving God in intimate relationship with the world.

The truth is that symbol and metaphor are the only ways we can communicate about this deep Reality that we call God. When Isaiah describes his vision of the hem of the Lord’s robe filling the temple, this isn’t a literal description. It’s an evocative symbol that points to something wondrous and mysterious that is above and beyond any words we can possibly use.

It’s the same when Jesus talks about being “born from above.”

Nicodemus was stuck in literal thinking, trying to understand what kind of womb up in the sky could Jesus possibly be talking about that gives birth to us a second time. But just like the coal that touches Isaiah in an intimate kiss on the lips, allowing him to know and love the God that was calling him, Jesus shows us a God who births us into an intimate, familial relationship that will last forever.

This moving, dynamic God who created the cosmos loves us. Loves us here. Loves us now. Loves us always.