Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Trinity Sunday (June 7, 2009).
Readings: Isaiah 6: 1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8: 12-17; John 3: 1-7
As many of you know, the first parish I served at was St. James, in the Downtown Eastside. In those days, we had three full-time priests on staff, and we maintained a quaint custom whereby the junior of the three would be designated to preach on Trinity Sunday. Or, at least that’s the story I was told when Fr. David advised me that I would be preaching that day, eight years ago.
Others might have blanched at the prospect of trying to untangle this thorny doctrinal knot, but I dove in as others might dive into the New York Times crossword puzzle. I happened upon the analogy of an egg – which I often inflict as a children’s story. If you think about it, the metaphor is obvious: you’ve got one object with three parts – a shell, a yolk, and the white – and if you remove any of the parts it ceases to be that object. Where the parallel collapses, however, is that an egg – unlike God – is divisible, as anyone who has made a soufflé can attest.
Now, I sometimes get teased for the amount of time I spend exercising, but I can assure you that the wheels are turning even when the wheels are turning, so to speak. For instance, last Sunday, after the house blessing at Corinne and Don Newman’s, I went bicycling for a couple of hours around Halfmoon Bay – and I began thinking of my next sermon. Suddenly, the real identity of the Trinity dawned on me. That identity is the Lover, the Beloved, and Love – an utterly indivisible whole. And I think our readings help illustrate this.
Take our first one, the call of Isaiah. This is a significant episode, because when God appears to mortals in the Old Testament, it is usually as something other than God – a burning bush, perhaps, or a pillar of smoke, or even sheer silence. Here, God appears as the entity himself – and God is definitely a he in this manifestation. The first thing we notice about God is that he is quite large, to put it mildly. The temple, which for Palestinian Hebrews was about as grand a structure as they would have personal knowledge, can contain only the hem of his robe. God asks the rhetorical question, “Whom shall I send?” and Isaiah responds with the phrase that has inspired the hymn heard invariably at seminaries and ordinations, “Here I am, Lord! Send me!”
Alert listeners may think that the significance of this passage lies in the threefold “Holy, holy, holy,” exclaimed by the seraphs as God appears – presumably foretelling the Trinity which would be revealed with the coming of the Messiah. But, personally, I think this is to credit too much discernment on the part of Isaiah and his audience, who lived over seven hundred years before the birth of Christ. Threefold exclamations of various sorts are strewn all over the Old Testament, after all.
Rather, I think that the importance of the Isaiah passage is that it portrays the Father, the Creator, the First Person of the Trinity, in the role of Lover. As the one who brings everything into being, who appoints rulers and elders to guide and direct God’s chosen people into righteousness, who sends the prophets to warn and correct; the Lover demonstrates the attachment he has for that which he has brought into being, and for those whom he has chosen to be the bearers of his love. This passage is no different – as Isaiah is called, God offers the assurance a few verses after our reading that the defeat of Israel by the Syrians will be like the felling of a mighty tree – but that the holy seed will be the stump, from which something new and even grander will spring forth.
In our Gospel passage from John, we hear again that famous exchange between Nicodemus and Jesus. To him, Jesus offers the assurance that his coming was the most sublime act of God’s love – “For God so loved the world…” And, to ensure the point isn’t lost, Jesus adds that “God did not send the Son to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” To me, this identifies the Son, the Saviour, the Second Person of the Trinity as the Beloved.
Now, what does it mean to be beloved? One thing it means is that you are the mediator of love – a sort of transmitter through which love passes, being amplified in the process. All of us, I think, have experienced the empowering and enriching quality of loving and being loved. It magnifies your being. The love exchange compounds exponentially with interest. So it is with Jesus. He is the single most powerful and tangible expression of divine love for us. And the natural response on our part is to receive and radiate it back to God, as well as to everything associated with the God whom we love. With, that is to say, everything! Unrequited love is sad, but unrequited divine love is a tragedy.
This full circle of love is completed with the Holy Spirit, through whom, Paul tells us, we are adopted as children of God, co-equal with the Son of God. As we heard in the gospel last week – Pentecost, the Feast of the Holy Spirit – Jesus describes her as that which leads us into wisdom and truth, and so into life which is life indeed. A life worth living is a life guided and animated by love. But the guide can lead us to surprising places, for in his dialogue with Nicodemus, Jesus further describes the Spirit as being as free and unrestrained and unpredictable as the wind.
But in all this talk about love, we must not lose sight of the fact that it is a difficult allegiance to maintain. Love can make conflicting demands on our heart, and too often we think that true love is that which leaves us with the warmest, fuzziest feeling on the inside. It is important in such cases to understand the motive behind any loving impulse. Is the motive to satisfy some self-interested desire, to boost self-esteem, to fortify walls of denial or projection? Or is the motive to contribute something to that full circle of divine love, to fulfill vows of service and self-offering, to expand the boundaries of truth and wisdom as the Holy Spirit beckons us to roam farther outward from the constructed limits of our comfort zone? The delights yielded by love do not come without some measure of sacrifice – as was demonstrated most starkly when the Beloved strode to his cross. And so even the love we have for an intimate partner does not fully blossom until we practice the mutual self-offering that nurtures the full potential of the other.
The love of God is the source and pattern of all earthly loves – this is the lesson of the Trinity. And so let us be as lover, beloved, and love to all whom we encounter in this endless journey we share, being like Midas in all that we touch, where love is gold. This is the invitation into the reality we all intuit – let us dare to live it. Amen.
© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009
