EXODUS 3:1-6

PSALM 93

ROMANS 8:12-17

JOHN 3:1-16

Sermon – June 15, 2003

The Holy Trinity: The Importance of Relationship

Back in the ‘60’s, Simon and Garfunkel wrote a song titled “I Am a Rock” which ostensibly celebrated the author’s independence and ability to live life in isolation from others. It sounds very much like an angry ballad by someone who just broke up with someone important to him, a ballad written partly to convince the author himself that he’s just fine on his own.

Paul Simon wrote:

“Don’t talk of love, well

I’ve heard the word before,

It’s sleeping in my memory;

I won’t disturb the slumber

Of feelings that have died.

If I never loved, I never would have cried.

I am a rock, I am an island.”

Well, maybe that’s what people sometimes need to tell themselves – and it’s certainly better to re-establish oneself as a strong, healthy individual after a break-up than to immediately seek to become “whole” only by latching onto someone like either a parasite or a tyrant. But ultimately, the Seventeenth Century poet John Donne got it right:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Relationship is, indeed, a crucial part of being human. This is true not just for the naturally extroverted and sociable but for all people. Shy and retiring people may have fewer acquaintances than gregarious people but they may have deep friendships, and even hermits can have a profound sense of relationship with the natural world around them; and all people can be nurtured by a deep relationship with God.

The importance of relationship, the need for community and connection in order to be whole – whatever our personalities – is something we learn, is an inherent part of the natural order of the universe – and in some senses even pre-dates the creation of the universe. For the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which we celebrate today on Trinity Sunday, declares that even God exists in relationship within God’s self.

Christians believe in one God: that is crucial. We are monotheists, along with Jews and Muslims. Where we differ is in our understanding that God is in three persons, known as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

St. Patrick reputedly used the shamrock to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity to Irish. The explanation attributed to him is as follows: “Is this one leaf or three? If one leaf, why are there three lobes of equal size? If three leaves, why is there just one stem?” Clearly, there is unity in the shamrock, and each lobe of it can be seen distinctly, yet all are part of one leaf and are organically related and united.

Relationship is so essential to the nature of existence that even God’s being is a relationship, a relationship so profound (“mutual indwelling” between the Persons is the phrase theologians used) as to be beyond our full understanding, but something we can acknowledge, believe in, celebrate and even seek to approach. For God wants to dwell with us and us with God and to pour God’s self into us so that each of us as individuals and all of us as human communities may experience the fullness of love and joy.

God does not dwell solely in some remote location (physically or spiritually) to be approached only by people prepared by years of spiritual discipline, selection and training; God came and comes to us where we are and invites us into relationship with God, a relationship which can transform us and all our other relationships.

The Bible tells stories of God reaching out to people, stories that to 21^st Century suburban people may seem exotic but to ancient Middle Eastern people represented the discovery of the presence of ultimate holiness and power in the midst of the routine. Imagine going to the gas station for a fill-up and having Jesus Christ, dressed as the gas station attendant, come up to your car and say “What can I do for you?” How would you answer?

Have that picture in your mind as we reflect on this morning’s first reading, the story of the call of Moses. Moses is out in the countryside on the slopes of Mt. Sinai in Egypt, herding the sheep of his father-in-law, Jethro. Moses had been born in Egypt to Hebrew slaves, but had been brought up in Pharaoh’s court as a pet project of Pharaoh’s daughter – until he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, and something inside him snapped. He assaulted and killed the Egyptian abuser, but he was not accepted by the Hebrews as a hero – and he was wanted by the Egyptians for manslaughter. So he escaped to the wilderness of Sinai to start a new life in exile, where he settled down, married and probably expected to live out his days in peaceful obscurity.

Until God, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” – Moses’ ancestors, the first ones to know the One True God, got his attention and called Moses into a personal relationship with God. It was a relationship Moses had not sought, was scared of and which took enormous faith and courage to live out, for God was calling him to be the leader who would be the means by which God would liberate the Hebrew people from slavery to the greatest power in the world, give them the 10 Commandments and the rest of the holy law, and transform them from a rabble into a nation.

Never again would Moses’ life be either peaceful or obscure. The relationship he would be called into with God would transform not only him, but civilization itself. The ideas that God is on the side of the oppressed and acts to liberate people, that God stands for freedom within the rigorous discipline of religious principles and rules, and that government should be by law and not by the whim of rulers – all those ideas came and bore fruit out of this relationship between God and Moses. It was a relationship which would transform human relationships.

God reached out to humanity most fully in Jesus Christ, who spoke with equal ease and depth both with the outcast and suffering and with eminent, learned leaders like Nicodemus, as in today’s Gospel. Nicodemus was the first one to hear that a person needs to be “born from above” (also translated “born again”) in order to see the Kingdom of God. The ability to live in the fullness of God’s presence and ultimate peace and joy is not granted by genetic inheritance or by obedience to rules but by spiritual rebirth made possible by relationship with God.

Again and again in the Bible, we read of God reaching out to people with power and tenderness, in ways awesome and simple, so that people might come into right relationship with God, with themselves and with each other and experience justice, peace, harmony and the fullness of well-being – Shalom.

The ancient Hebrews emphasized the extended family and the tribe as a vital part of a person’s identity, in the early years extending responsibilities and blessings to the group rather than the individual. In the First Century after Christ’s resurrection, as the Christian faith spread far beyond its womb in Judaism, it started communities of faith in which many members had no kinship relationship with each other at all. Paul and the other apostles had to build community among people who were strangers to each other and even on opposite sides of ancient prejudices – a challenge Christians today also often face!

Paul in today’s selection from his “Letter to the Romans” tells his readers that they have “received a spirit of adoption” as “children of God” – and therefore each other’s brothers and sisters in Christ. Paul says we are even empowered by the Holy Spirit to use the same word Jesus used in addressing God the Father: “Abba”. Abba is an Aramaic word (Jesus’ everyday language) which means “Father” but in a very intimate way. It really means “Daddy”.

We have been invited to call the Creator and Lord of the Universe, the maker of everywhere and everything, the King above all Kings, “Daddy”. That is a relationship of tenderness and care with the One who has ultimate power and authority.

We are aware of the importance of relationship in what we do. [The ministries we celebrate today – music and Sunday school – would be impossible without relationship. Fifteen people singing independently are not a choir, they are a cacophony. It takes those 15 people learning and singing the same music at the same time and in accordance with the instructions of the conductor to make a choir. A bunch of students and teachers alone are not a Sunday school; it takes a dedication to teaching and learning as communities of learning, relationships between students and teachers, teachers and teachers, students and students, to make a school.] We’re also aware of the fragility of our relationships – how many can break off and how much it hurts when they do, often in proportion to what we put into them, what we hoped from them, or both.

And so it’s tempting to proclaim that we are “islands” or “rocks” – or to be tentative about our relationships, forever testing them before committing ourselves, and then sometimes committing ourselves with fingers crossed.

God did not do that.

God committed himself wholeheartedly and unreservedly even though God knew that we would disappoint him, not once but again and again. Nevertheless, God has committed himself without reservation to offering us the fullness of life through relationship with God. God has experienced the pain of human rejection of this extraordinary relationship with God when God the Son suffered and died on the cross and God the Father had to do nothing. God nonetheless offered new life by faith through Christ’s resurrection and the guidance and empowerment by the Holy Spirit, so that we might experience a glorious relationship not only with God but with each other as well!

This is why the Christian church exists, for as the Catechism says (BCP p.855), “The mission of the church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” In our relationship with God we can find the

beginning of healing for all our relationships, and the world’s. This hope and opportunity is God’s gift to us this Trinity Sunday, this Father’s Day, and every day. Thank you, Abba.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church