Sermon for Trinity Sunday
“If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not; how shall ye believe,
if I tell you of heavenly things?”
It is Jesus’s question to Nicodemus who had asked, “how can these things be?” “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” Jesus had said. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven” and “immediately,” John the Divine tells us, “I was in the Spirit.”
Great mysteries are before our very eyes. Trinity Sunday celebrates the great and distinctive teaching of the Christian Faith. It does not celebrate an event. Nor is it about some moral lesson for us to act upon in our lives. It celebrates simply and clearly the mystery of God revealed. That is the great wonder that underlies the whole of reality and the whole meaning of our lives, morally and spiritually, intellectually and practically.
Our Church and culture is dead when it is no longer alive to the mystery of the Trinity. God’s relation to everything else is founded in God himself. We cannot not think the Trinity; to think it is our greatest challenge. The to-and-fro of questions between Nicodemus and Jesus signal the nature of that thinking. It is in the truest sense analogical thinking, thinking upwards, thinking into what has been shown to us, which are not simply earthly things but heavenly things. Being born again is not the monopoly of the charismatic and Pentecostal forms of Christian faith; it is the truth of the Christian faith. We are defined by what God reveals to us: himself, from which everything else derives. Religion is as dead as a door-nail when we think of it in terms of what pleases us or what is useful to us. Our instrumental reason betrays us when we attempt to turn everything into ways and means and deny what has intrinsic worth and value.
