Isaiah 6:1-8, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17
God is not meant to be understood. God is meant to be experienced. Don Waring, Rector of Grace Church in New York City, offered these words in a sermon I heard him preach several years ago. Such grace and beauty and truth in these words: God is not meant to be understood. God is meant to be experienced. Today is Trinity Sunday, a day in which we celebrate a doctrine, God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This feast was added to the church calendar around 1,000 AD. As a church, we struggled for hundreds of years to formulate this doctrine – a doctrine not defined in Scripture, but formulated through Scripture. In our Gospel lesson today, we hear about Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus. Jesus lived among us teaching us about God, the Father, drawing us into relationship with God. Jesus speaks of God’s love: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). And, Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit: “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). Paul speaks of the Spirit, also, in his letter to the Romans, as we heard in the Epistle today: “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” (Romans 8:14). Though never defining a doctrine, Scripture teaches us all about the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
We, the church, spent hundreds of years defining this doctrine, drawing on Scripture to formulate this doctrine, trying to understand our manifold experience of God in order to proclaim to the world with unequivocal authority the existence of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. In the year 325, 300 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we put to paper, or perhaps I should say we put to papyrus, the first formulation of the Nicene Creed. Listen to the words from this first draft, listen to our struggle to understand the Trinity: “But those who say that there was when He was not, and that before being begotten He was not, or that He came from that which is not, or that the Son of God is of a different substance or essence, or that He is created, or mutable, these the catholic church anathematizes” (Justo L. Gonzales, The Story of Christianity, Vol. I: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, HarperSanFrancisco, 1984, p. 165). How we struggled to understand God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, how we struggled to understand Jesus as fully human and fully divine, how we struggled to understand how God continues to live with us. The doctrine evolved over the centuries and was finally adopted by Rome around 1,000 AD. Our struggle to understand our faith in the Trinity evolved into the Nicene Creed which we proclaim every Sunday.
However, even today, when we try to get our minds around the concept of the Trinity, we continue to struggle. We struggle because understanding God is beyond the limits of our language. Understanding God might begin in doctrine, but understanding culminates in our hearts. God is not meant to be understood. God is meant to be experienced. Doctrine is important. Doctrine is a basis for understanding and discussion and community. Doctrine, restrained by the limits of our language, invites us to take that leap of faith, invites us to experience God. Consider how music stirs our soul. Music brings us to a place that words alone can not. Music allows us to express and experience emotions beyond the limits of language. That is precisely why hymnody is prayer. Hymns help us take that leap of faith, help to carry us closer to God, help us to experience God.
I talk so often about, because I so firmly believe, that relationship is foundational to Creation, foundational to our existence. Fundamentally, we are called to live in relationship with God and with one another. Through our relationships with others, through our activities and encounters and endeavors with others, we see God, we come to know God. Today, however, I want to focus on how we can experience God in ourselves, how we can experience God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I have been dreaming vivid dreams for as long as I can remember. At times, these dreams are more vivid than at other times, and I love waking up and recounting to anyone who will listen, the humorous nature, or sometimes frightening aspects of these dreams. Sometimes, I just have to laugh at the connection I make between something actually going on in my life and how it plays out in a rather absurd or exaggerated way in my dreams. I had a dream quite a few years ago that I want to recall with you today. In this dream, my husband, Scott, and I are driving on a long trip. We arrive in a place, and a bad storm hits. The streets flood and we can’t get out. We are staying in a two- or three-story dilapidated shack. I sense evil and have a desperate need to get away. For three days, I frantically look for a way out, but can’t find one. Then, quite suddenly, I find a road out, though all the other streets are still flooded. The path is so obvious; I just can’t believe I haven’t seen it before. And, then I know we need to go. In the dream, I tell Scott, we need to go now. When I woke up from this dream, I had a nagging sense that I needed to understand the dream. Usually, when I wake up from a dream, I just enjoy the challenge of trying to remember it, so that I might share its amusing content with someone else. However, with this dream, I felt a need to understand it, a nagging sense that there was a message in this dream. It wasn’t until later, when I was able to acknowledge my call to ministry, that I recognized the message…there was a path for me to follow….I didn’t see it for a long while, but when I did see it, I knew for certain this was a path I needed to follow. God speaks to us. God lives in us. We can experience God.
I recently returned from a week-long preaching conference, which was fabulous. I heard lectures and sermons from a distinguished list of preachers, and I hope to be able to incorporate some of their stories and techniques into my own preaching voice. Beth Nielsen Chapman, a singer/songwriter participated in this conference. She played guitar and piano and sang in worship and participated in a panel discussion on the theology of music. Beth talked about the songwriting process. For herself, she refers to the process as layering. She writes the vowels first, and waits for the consonants to come to her. Think about that…she writes the vowels first, and waits for the consonants to come to her. When she finished writing one of her songs, one which she played for us, she wondered what it was about, and why it had been written. Her description made me think about that nagging sense I had when I woke up from my dream. Two years after writing this song, she got cancer, and this song was healing to her through that ordeal. The song is entitled Every December Sky (from Deeper Still, Artemis Records, 2002). Listen to the words:
Every December sky
Must lose it’s faith in leaves
And dream of the spring inside the trees
How heavy the empty heart
How light the heart that’s full
Sometimes I have to trust what I can’t know
Sometimes I have to trust what I can’t know
We’re walking to paradise
The angels lend us shoes
Cause all that we own we’ll come to lose
And heaven is not so far
Outside this womb of words
With every rose that blooms my soul is assured
Just like a song I’ve known, yet still unheard
And every leaf of fire lets go
Melting in the arms of earth and snow…
If I could hold you now
You’d enter like a sigh
You’d be the wind that blows the answer to why
You’d be the spring-filled trees of
Every December sky…
God speaks to us. God lives in us. We can experience God.
We know God, the Father, our Creator, because we are loved, we are loved into existence. We know God, the Son, our Redeemer, because we are forgiven. We know God, the Holy Spirit, our Sustainer, because God speaks to our hearts. On this Trinity Sunday, I want you to know my story, the story of someone who went through the paces on Sunday morning who grew into a person who desires God. I want you to know about a love story with God. I want you to know the joy in your heart and the peace that passes all understanding. I want you to feel the Holy Spirit, feel the energy which fills you from head to toe, from fingertip to fingertip. But, describing our relationship with God is, in many ways, beyond the limits of our language. So, we share the stories of life, hoping all find their way to experience God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
