To SEE the Kingdom of God HOLY TRINITY 26th May 2024

                                               TRINITY SUNDAY Year B  May 26, 2024

Isaiah 6:1-8 and Psalm 29  •  Romans 8:12-17  •  John 3:1-17

 

What does a three-leaf clover, three overlapping circles, and a triangle all have in common?  All have been used to try to illustrate the Holy Trinity; one God, three persons.  And probably there have been various other analogies also, because this concept of the Holy Trinity is not an easy thing to understand…  In fact, I’d go so far as to say, you can only understand it if you are born of the Spirit.

 

As we explore and celebrate this today, note the structure of our services; we begin and end our services in the name of, and the blessing of, God the father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. 

 

A couple of weeks ago we had the reading of the prayer of Jesus.  In this he prayed to the father to protect us.  He said, “Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one.”   When I read these words, I straight away think of, “In the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit”  -the sign of the cross.  And it calls to mind those movies where the characters are in dire straits and they bless themselves. It makes sense in the light of Jesus prayer for protection.  And it makes sense that we should also, regularly remind ourselves that our faith, and our destiny for the kingdom of God is protected by God, through that prayer of Jesus – through our faith in one God – Three persons.

 

The HOLY TRINITY is a mysterious and sometimes divisive statement of faith.  But it is super important.  The doctrine of the Holy Trinity began to be formalised at the council of Nicaea in 325 AD when it stated that Christ is “of the same substance [homoousios] as the Father,”… 

 

You will not find the Holy Trinity written in the scriptures, but you will find, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord”.  And you will find, in the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ..”  The word of God was a common term in the Old Testament, and we have come to know that the word of God is Jesus.  St. John made this very clear when he said, “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  And as scripture tells us, Jesus is the exact representation – the visible expression of our unseen God.  So we come to understand, as Christians, that Christ and God the father are ONE…. But how?  It is still a mystery and hard to grasp concept….. so lets just add another…. The Holy Spirit.

 

Before I talk a little more on the Holy Spirit, however, lets imagine the Christian Church back in the first few centuries….. They started with a bang.  The Holy Spirit enabled the Gospel to be proclaimed with boldness and accompanied by many miracles showing the power of God.  They went through extreme persecution and finally, in the 3^rd century, through the Roman empire and the Christian influence of the Emperor Constantine, the church gained legal status.  Then through the Emperor Theodosius, Christianity, specifically Nicene Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire. Other Christian sects were deemed heretical.

 

There were lots of ideas floated around about Christianity…. Right from the start!  We know this through the New Testament letters.  Most of those letters were written to teach and correct. 

 

In our God-given freedom, we will all sometimes, on one point or another, get it wrong.  Why?  Because there is so very much to know about God.  His thoughts are way beyond our thoughts… scripture tells us this.  Our wisdom is foolishness compared to God.   God loves for us to get to know him, but he understands that we will sometimes get it wrong.  However, it is important that there are some guidelines to bring us back…. Our creed does this.

 

The third part of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and is our helper, teacher and comforter.  In fact, the only real way to understand anything about God is “Spiritually”.   In fact Scripture tells us about this New Covenant into which we have entered, in the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, 31 it says; “33“But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will put My law in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be My people. 34No longer will each man teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD.”  This is because of the coming of the Holy Spirit. 

 – the Jewish festival of Pentecost was a festival celebrating the coming of God’s Holy Law to his people.  When the Holy Spirit came, he indwelt and wrote that law on the hearts and minds of God’s people.  In other words, the Holy Spirit leads, guides and teaches… the Holy Spirit is God within us and is the Key to understanding.  The image that comes to mind is like one of those great adventure movies, where the characters all have different parts of the puzzle and when they all come together the final piece becomes the key, and suddenly everything opens up and reveals the treasure.  The Holy Spirit is that final Key.

 

In our reading today we have Nicodemus having a discussion with Christ.  Nicodemus really and truly desires to know God.  He has already observed Jesus and decided that He must be from God, but it went against his traditional understanding…. So he comes at night.  In some ways it is figurative… he is still in the dark… he doesn’t understand… and then the first thing that Jesus says to him is; , "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above."

Older translations of this passage have the phrase “born from above” as “Born Again” The Greek word translated as 'again' or “from above” actual has two meanings: it can mean not only 'a second time' but also 'from above.'  Jesus may have meant both, but Nicodemus doesn’t understand and takes the literal meaning as being born again.  He therefore asks and says that a man can’t enter his mother’s womb a second time.

 

Jesus is talking about being born of the Spirit.  Something that we often forget, is that we are made in the image of God and we are also triune beings.   Mostly we are familiar with body and soul and there is a good reason for this.  We are body, soul and spirit.   However, our spirit is dormant like a seed in an alfoil packet.  When we respond to the message of the Gospel it is because our spirit has been awakened by the Spirit of God… and we can finally SEE spiritual truth.   We have become born from above because it is of God that we are born spiritually. 

 

Just like physical birth, when you are born you can’t then be unborn.  You can’t stop being a child of God… you are born again and your spiritual life is a reality.  And this is regardless of any of our failings.  We don’t forfeit being a child of God because we fail or get things wrong.  But we should come to resemble our heavenly father’s nature that becomes our own, simply because we are his children and we resemble him… we have his spirit… in fact we have his Holy Spirit. 

 

With the Holy Spirit in union with our own spirit we can finally SEE the kingdom of God… the things of God.  In our world there may be spiritual things that we encounter, but not all of these are the Holy Spirit.  We need to discern these with the help of the Holy Spirit, and also through scripture itself and through returning to our creed.

 

We believe in one God the father, the almighty.  We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ – Of one being with the father.  We believe in the Holy Spirit – who proceeds from the Father and the Son.  This Holy Trinity is there throughout scripture, and the formalizing and defining God as three in one, gives validity to the Son and the Holy Spirit. 

 

Many accept Jesus as a good man and maybe as one who was even God’s son, but they fail to see Jesus as God.  Jesus was crucified because he claimed divinity and oneness with God.  Jesus tells us through his words to Nicodemus, that God sent the Son to bring us ETERNAL life, and that life comes to us though our union with the Holy Spirit.  Just as the Holy Spirit came over the early Christians in power, the Holy Spirit needs to be integral to our experience of God today. 

 

Unlike the pictures of the three circles, three leaf-ed clover and other images, I am not going to explain how God can possibly be three in one.  But instead I will leave you with this one truth; the Holy Spirit will bring about an understanding about the things of God that are naturally beyond us.  Scripture also tells us that with the Holy Spirit in us, we have the mind of Christ – We can SEE the kingdom of God. 

 

So, I’ll leave it in your hands, and the hands of the author and perfector of our faith and with the Holy Spirit who hovered over the waters of chaos at the beginning of time and created all things.  He is with us always… lean into him and wait.  He has SO much that he desires to teach us, And I will finish with this…. In the name of the father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  AMEN.