Trinity
Sunday Homily By The Rev. Marcia McRae
St. John’s
Episcopal Church, Bainbridge, GA, 31 May 2015,
Isaiah
6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17
What
does the pistachio tell us
about
today's Gospel?
The
pistachio holds essential nutritional value that your body needs,
including: calcium, carbohydrates, copper, iron,
manganese, magnesium, phosphorus, protein, sodium, thiamin &
Vitamins A, B6 & C.
Look
how small the pistachio is, yet it offers a lot of nutrition.
What
verse in today's Gospel offers us the essentials of God's Good News
that we know in Jesus?
[Congregation answers.]
John
3:16 is on the top 10 chart of favorite Bible verses1
and often is #1: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only
Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have
eternal life.”
In
the Bible's 66 books, its 1,189 chapters, its 31,173 verses this
ONE verse contains the kernel, the essential message to nourish us
about God's love.2
It
tells us these truths:3
- God acts/God loves;
- God loves the world [including you & me];
- God shows us God's love by giving his only Son, Jesus, so that we can believe in Jesus & through him receive eternal life.4
In
this first mention of eternal life in John's Gospel, after
John tells of Jesus' cleansing the temple at Passover,
John emphasizes quality of life rather than its duration.5
This is simple, Good News to share. Yet we may be reluctant to share.
What will it take for us to speak the Good News? A hot burning coal
like Isaiah experiences in his encounter with God?
Notice:
After earthly King Uzziah dies
[736/35
B.C.E.]6,
Isaiah sees “the real king high & lifted up,” as
writer & contemporary prophet Walter Brueggemann says in his
book, The
Prophetic Imagination7.
This
is the birth of a new phase in Isaiah's work as a prophet.8
It is a reminder to us to die to an earth-bound way of life, that
human perspective that keeps Nicodemus stuck.
Notice:
Nicodemus, a
leader, a teacher who knows God's Holy Scriptures,
cannot clearly comprehend what Jesus tells him about new birth. To
grow in spirit, he must die to old concepts, die to the idea that
people can be part of God's kingdom by moral achievement. We enter
God's kingdom by God's grace – the
transformation God gives us through the water of baptism
&
the fire of the Holy Spirit
that
births new life in us.9
This
gift is why we can speak to God as “Abba” – the
term Paul uses in our lesson from Romans.
Abba, Papa, is an endearing term of family love.
What
holds us back from sharing the love of our “Abba” that we know
through Jesus? The
Holy Spirit lives in each of us to help us find our voice.
Maybe we are reluctant to share the Good News because we get tangled
in theological doctrines. We worship ONE God, who is in THREE
persons: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit – 3 in one, one in 3 – a
truth we emphasize on Trinity Sunday. How
on earth can we share this simple truth that sounds so complex? How
can we understand things heavenly, as Jesus asks
Nicodemus, if we don't
understand earthly things?
The
gift of music,
one
of our heavenly, earthly delights,
can
give us voice to share the Good News,10
as The
Rev. Timothy B. Safford, rector of Christ Church,Philadelphia,
explains in his sermon that follows and which Juliet will help
demonstrate. Thank
you, Juliet. She will press the piano's key in the middle of the
keyboard – middle C. What
do you hear?
One pure, full note that fills your ears and your senses.
Juliet,
please press very gently the key 7 keys above middle C
[that's one octave
above middle C].
Press so gently that
the hammer doesn’t strike the piano strings: Those
strings remain “open”...[“undamped”]
Without
moving your right hand or releasing the key an octave above middle C,
with your left hand press the key for middle C.
[What
a beautiful tone.] Now
let go of middle C.
Did
you all expect all sound to stop? We could still hear a musical tone.
[Thank
you, Juliet.] The
vibration of middle C's 3 strings11
– its trinity of strings – has caused the strings to vibrate on
the C note one octave above: that's why we can hear it. The lower
note makes the open note resonate.
This
may be a useful metaphor. God
is that powerful musical tone at the center of the universe,
vibrating so steadily that all that is open vibrates also.
Think
of yourself as an open string one octave above middle C. You begin to
resonate, not because something or someone has struck you or plucked
you like a harpist does, but because you are
open & in tune with God.
Created
in God's image, we are made to be in tune with God.
Anglican
theologian & musician Jeremy Begbie
encourages us to imagine God in musical sounds. In
the book Beholding
the Glory,
Begbie says
God
interacts “with the world intimately, without violating it or
merging with it, liberating it to be more fully itself.”
God
is a liberating God, not a controlling God. In our
resonance with God, we move from dissonance to tunefulness,
freedom to live fully into God’s image of us, not the world’s
version of us. Begbie says: “...(T)hrough
intimate interaction with us, God frees us to ‘sound’ as we were
created to sound, (so that we can) be more fully ourselves. We are
not de-humanized, (we are) re-humanized.”
Notice
what Jesus’ says to Nicodemus: “No one
can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
Jesus strives to put Nicodemus in tune with
the music God makes in the creation, not to dehumanize
Nicodemus but to re-humanize him, liberating
his spirit from the fallen world's folly so that his spirit may
resonate with God's Spirit that gives life to all of creation.
Maybe
Nicodemus' question is his way of seeking to open himself from all
that keeps him from resonating with God. Maybe he does this because
he sees others with Jesus resonating with God.
Jesus
tells Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses,... you hear the
sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it
goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Maybe
St. Paul shares this truth when he writes to the church in Rome: “All
who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.”
We could say: “All who resonate with the
music of God are children of God.”
Children
of God all out: “Abba! Father!”
because God's Spirit is bearing witness with our spirit that we are
God's children – that we resonate with
God’s music. God's Spirit
vibrates our spirit, showing us that we are birthed by God, which
makes us children of God.
We
hear how one note vibrating causes another to vibrate. Our challenge
is to make our resonance possible by being in tune.
Tunefulness is a gift of grace: we tune
ourselves by sharing in the life and death of Jesus.
[One
way we do this is sharing Holy Communion, the Body & Blood of
Jesus. Today's host is a loaf of bread shaped like the entwined
triangles on our order of worship, a symbol of the Holy Trinity, the
Unity of he with no beginning & no end. This Bread, like
the pistachios you have, offers nourishment which you can
accept by eating or ignore like leaving that pistachio uneaten in its
shell.]
Know
this: playing middle C at the center of the keyboard are 3 notes –
a trinity, a full chord – that makes the other open note resonate.
The
Lord’s voice is the music at the center of all life in which we
strive to be in tune. Being formed in Jesus & imitating the life
he shows us, we turn from the brokenness of sin & open ourselves
to being made resonant with the eternal life of God.
Bibliography
Brueggemann,
Walter. The
Prophetic Imagination.
Second Ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2001.
Harper’s
Bible Commentary.
General Ed.: James. L. Mays. San Francisco: Harper & Row
Publishers. 1988.
Holy
Bible with the Apocrypha.
New Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford University Press.
1989.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_nutrient
Accessed: 30 May 2015.
http://www.answers.com/Q/How_many_piano_strings_are_hit_to_play_middle_c
Accessed: 30 May 2015.
https://www.biblegateway.com/blog/2013/01/the-top-10-bible-verses-of-2012/
Accessed: 30 May 2015.
http://www.foodpyramid.com/6-essential-nutrients/
Accessed: 30 May 2015.
Jewish
Study Bible: Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation.
New York: Oxford University Press. 2004.
The
New American Bible for Catholics.
South Bend: Greenlawn Press. 1986.
The
New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha.
Expanded Ed. Revised Stantard Version. Eds: Herbert G. May. Bruce M.
Metzger. New York: Oxford University Press. 1977.
Safford,
The Rev. Timothy B. “Sermon for Trinity Sunday Year B”. Accessed:
29 May 2015.
http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/stw/2009/06/07/first-sunday-after-pentecost-trinity-sunday-june-7-2009/
1
Note: Internet showed many sites, including
https://www.biblegateway.com/blog/2013/01/the-top-10-bible-verses-of-2012/
Accessed: 30 May 2015.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
10
Note: The music illustration is from
The Rev. Timothy B. Safford.“Sermon for Trinity Sunday Year B”.
Accessed:
29 May 2015.
http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/stw/2009/06/07/first-sunday-after-pentecost-trinity-sunday-june-7-2009/
No comments:
Post a Comment