Sunday, June 16, 2019

Trinity Sunday Evensong: John 3:16

If you had to sum up the Christian faith in a single verse of Scripture I wonder what that verse might be. Have a think, and do tell me afterwards. I’d really like to know.     I guess that many of us would want to plump for something that gave us a reminder of God's  love...for that, surely, is at the root of pretty much everything that the Church proclaims, struggle though we may, in our human frailty, to make that love clearly known. When I was a teenager, I had a phase of frankly alarming evangelical zeal, which manifested itself in a desire to place stickers with cheery Bible texts all over my home town, reflecting this basic message. I don’t recommend this as a way of achieving anything much, except possibly a police reprimand for defacing public property – but for a while that summer most of the lamp-posts between my home and the school bus stop were decorated with smiley faces and the reminder “Smile, Jesus loves you”. Other stickers assumed a degree of familiarity with the Bible that in retrospect seems very optimistic – for they proclaimed quite simply John 3:16 – without any further explanation at all.
Nonetheless, there IS something about that verse. Gathering my thoughts as I prepared for this sermon, I remembered a moment early in my ministry as a deacon, when this passage came up in the morning lectionary Still new to the context, and rather weighed down by the formality that characterized the Parish Mass, I was well into the story of Nicodemus from John 3 when I realised that the reading continued over the page from the words I could see in front of me. In fact, they continued all the way to verse 16. To stand there in the midst of God's people and speak those words aloud was, suddenly, the most mind-blowing privilege..The words were so real that they almost burned on the page and I was allowed, even expected, to share them with others. It seemed to me then that perhaps sharing those words was the most important task of ministry, that everything we do and everything we say as ministers of word and sacrament is in some way or other a translation of this text – into other words, into symbolic action, into a whole way of life…
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him should not die but have everlasting life."
Today is Trinity Sunday. WE’ve just heard a wonderful Collect intoned, which may well have given you a deep sense of mystery but not much of a clue as to how that mystery might be solved. Listen to it again
Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity: We beseech thee, that thou wouldest keep us stedfast in this faith, and evermore defend us from all adversities, who livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.
WE are asking God to keep us steadfast, anchored deeply in this faith – but I suspect that if any one of us was backed into a corner and asked to explain exactly what this faith was, we wouldn’t choose to express it in terms of trinity OR unity. The doctrine of the Trinity, however many knots it may tie us into, is fundamentally an attempt to describe our human experience of God’s love. One theologian, Catherine Mowry La Cugna, puts it like this:
 "The doctrine of the Trinity is ultimately therefore a teaching not about the
abstract nature of God but a teaching about God's life with us and our life with each other. Trinitarian theology could be described as ...a theology of
relationship, which explores the mysteries of love, relationship, personhood and communion within the framework of God's self-revelation in the person of Christ and the activity of the Spirit."

In other words – God is love…Jesus reveals this…The Spirit enables us to share it…
or if you prefer “God so loved the world...”
We do get ourselves entangled when we try to sum all this up in an intellectual proposition – and that’s really not surprising. After all, we are exploring nothing less than the ground of our being, the one in whom all things hold together
This is not a mystery to be solved, in the grand tradition of Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple...but one to inhabit.
It’s all there in John 3:16
God so loves..not the good, not the chosen, not the Church – but the WORLD
The world which God made and saw was very good – the world whose beauty and potential still shines through for all our best efforts to obscure it. Sometimes its as simple and as impossible as asking God to lend us God’s eyes – so that we can really SEE and learn to love God’s creation.
God so loved the world...
But God does not love passively...that love finds its expression in action, in the sending of God’s Son...God’s self-revelation, - God showing us what God’s love looks like when translated into a human life completely and utterly shaped and informed by the presiding action of the Spirit.
Jesus is the complete and flawless expression of God’s love in human form…
We glimpse this perfection and are drawn into relationship by a love that we cannot resist
“He sent his only Son so that everyone who believes in him should not perish...”
We are made for this. This is our place of safety...the place where we will not, cannot be touched by the tangle of our faults and fears, the loud voice of our own insecurity and its equal opponent, our pride…

You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless til they find their rest in you…

Believing in Jesus is absolutely nothing to do with head-knowledge...with intellectual assent to the fact of his existence (in the way that we might believe historical or scientific truths that we don’t know from first hand experience). It is, rather, to do with where we put our trust...where our hearts find rest and lodging. In practice it means believing that self-giving love is at the heart of everything...and that this love is the strongest power there is, bringing joy out of grief and life out of death.

It means, too, LIVING this out as our core belief.
Not settling for anything less, - no matter how eloquently it may be expressed
What might that mean for you? How might it translate into your daily life?

Hold these words and ponder them in your heart…
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life…
Amen.
Let it be so.

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