EXODUS 3:1-6

PSALM 93

ROMANS 8:12-17

JOHN 3:1-16

Sermon – June 11, 2006

Today is Trinity Sunday, which is the rare major feast of the Church year which celebrates a Christian doctrine rather than an historical event. Christmas, Easter and Pentecost all celebrate historical events. Trinity Sunday reminds us that Christians understand the one true God to be “three-in-one”: three persons in unity of being, one God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

When St. Patrick was explaining this to the Irish as part of converting them to Christianity, anybody know what “prop” or teaching tool he used? That’s right, a shamrock which perfectly illustrates three distinct persons within a unity of being.

I’m not the greatest at the abstractions of theology, so I like that visual aid – and besides, who am I to think I can improve on St. Patrick’s teaching methods? Reflecting on the shamrock, and the unity of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, leads me to realize that even God cannot be without relationship. Even God does not and never did exist without relationship, for there is relationship within God’s self. Even before God created the universe, God’s eternal being was a relationship of three persons in unity of being.

Relationship, therefore, is foundational to all created existence as well, since it both pre-dated all other existence and created all other existence. Human beings ignore this at our peril – whether societies which think they can flourish while ignoring their relationship with the environment in which they live, nations which think they can be uninvolved in the world outside their borders, or people who think they can thrive without significant relationships in their lives. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Our Scriptures today speak profoundly not so much of the relationship within God but of how God invites human beings to come into profound relationship with God – and with each other. We can’t pick just one or the other.

Moses was tending the sheep of his father-in-law Jethro in what is still a wild and lonely place, never mind how isolated it must have been over 3,200 years ago: a mountainside in the Southern part of the Sinai Peninsula. It is a vast, rocky, mountainous desert which separates the abundant water, agriculture and civilization of Egypt from the rainfall, agriculture and civilization of what we call the Holy Land. For Moses, it was a refuge and the start of a new life – but not the one he himself had planned. Far from living quietly and peacefully in an isolated area with his new wife, children and in-laws, he was about to be thrust right into the middle of one of the decisive events of world history: the exodus of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt and their beginning to live as free people under a code of laws given to them by the one true God. He would, in fact, be their leader in both phases of this historic enterprise.

But Moses, a true introvert, wanted no part of it. After he got over his shock at encountering God Almighty while out herding sheep, he started to resist God’s invitation to a profound relationship when he realized that this involved his returning to Egypt and getting “in the face” of the most powerful dictator in the world and saying “Let my people go.”

Moses wasn’t eager to “get into politics.” Perhaps he wondered if he couldn’t just worship God without thinking about “social issues” – like, say, slavery. God was unambiguous: being called by God into a relationship which would transform and bless Moses’ life meant that Moses had to have a relationship with his suffering people which, by the power of God, would transform and bless their lives.

The transforming power of peoples’ relationship with God is also a theme of today’s excerpt from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. He writes, “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” who can cry to God “Abba! Father!” If we are children of God, we not only have a profound relationship with God, but with each other. It is impossible for us to be children of God without being each other’s sisters and brothers.

Jesus in today’s Gospel tries to explain to the learned Nicodemus the importance for someone to be “born from above” or “born again” (another translation of the same phrase) in order to have a saving, transforming relationship with God. But lest we think that we can be saved by God without our needing to reach out in love to others, this passage concludes, “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.” If
God so loved the world, we better had too.

Especially because there are other guides who lead people in other directions in this world.

The English poet William Ernest Henley got it exactly wrong when he wrote in 1888, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” A far wiser and humbler poet, John Donne, wrote in 1613:

“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.”

We cannot live in isolation; we cannot be saved in isolation. Tragically, there are some who think only of themselves – like the 40 climbers ascending a different mountaintop, Mt. Everest, who walked right by fellow climber David Sharp as he was slowly dying of altitude sickness. They were there, after all, for themselves, to be able to go home and boast that they had reached the summit of Everest. Trying to save someone’s life might have prevented that, and after all, they had paid big money so that they could reach the summit. Another person’s life, apparently, was worthless to them.

Which mountaintop experience do we want as the defining one for us? The one of those who saw someone in trouble and “walked on by”, or the one of Moses?

We do not have to go to Mt. Everest, of course, to live out our response to “God so loved the world…” Part of our response as a church is to go to New Brunswick, to help staff the Men’s Shelter in the winter, to aid victims of domestic violence year round, and to serve a hot meal at Elijah’s Promise Soup Kitchen on the third Tuesday of every month.

But the spirit of those who walked on by David Sharp is running strong in our country.

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill which would make it a felony to “aid” an illegal alien. So if this bill were to become law, we could get arrested for obeying Jesus’ commandment in Matthew 25 to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked and welcome the stranger, if just one of those “strangers” did not have the right piece of paper on him or her at the time.

Jesus knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of government persecution for doing the right thing. That, after all, is why he got crucified. The crucifixion was a political act, just as the Exodus was. God intervened in history to liberate the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, and to offer all people liberation from slavery to sin and death. And God calls us to be liberators, too.

I know some people don’t like hearing about “social issues” in church, but when some politicians want to try to turn our soup kitchen volunteers into potential felons on the charge of doing what Christ commanded, I cannot remain silent. As always, other perspectives are welcome, and we can always have a forum on this issue, but I personally stand firmly with our President and a lot of others in saying this House-passed bill is a really bad idea. It is, I believe, both un-Christian and un-American.

The current immigration situation is not satisfactory and need changes; every country has the right to control its borders and process of immigration. But as American Christians we need to stand up against so-called solutions which trample on Christian values and ignore the fact that every American either is an immigrant or is the descendent of an immigrant. There are no other possibilities.

There are some members of Congress who need to be reintroduced, or perhaps taught for the first time, the words of a poem by Emma Lazarus which are inscribed under a certain statue in New York harbor:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Let me conclude by telling a bit of the story of one shipload of “the homeless tempest-tossed” who were “yearning to breathe free.” They were, like many others, seeking to escape hardship and persecution. They paid for passage across the ocean but were taken to a different part of the country than they had contracted for and at a very difficult time of the year to make a start in the New World. They had absolutely no “papers” provided by or recognized by the people who were already here. So, by those terms you could call them “illegal immigrants.”

It was hard. Half of them died the first winter. Those who survived established a relationship with those who were already here which saved the lives of the newcomers, who were devout and hard-working but didn’t come with all the skills they needed to be successful in their new homeland. (For starters, they didn’t yet speak the language of those who were already here.) But thanks to those who were here, who helped them, they lived.

Were it not for that welcome I would not be standing here before you.

For it’s time to identify the characters in this historical vignette. The people who were already here were members of the Wampanaug Tribe of Massachusetts Bay. The tempest-tossed immigrants with no papers who didn’t speak the language arrived on ”The Mayflower”. And one of those Pilgrim Fathers was named John Alden, one of whose 12^th generation descendents is me.

So, you could say, I’m the descendent of an “illegal immigrant” – though the history books don’t put it that way – who lived because of his faith, hard work, community – and some Christian-like charity by those who were not yet Christians.

Not only is God one, but so is humanity. God cannot be God without relationship, and neither can human beings.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church