Scripture: Isaiah 6:1-8 & John 3:1-17
Given on Trinity Sunday, 2018
Have you ever had one of those moments that were so filled with the holy, so alive with the spirit, so present with God that all you could do was sit and be in it—one of those moments in which words, descriptors, even superlatives utterly fail to capture the splendor, the majesty, the beauty? Maybe it was sitting on a high mountaintop with the whole of the world on display just below you or perhaps it was sitting on the coastline of the ocean with powerful waves crashing and the whole of God’s firmament above you, the salt in your nose and your feet dug into the sandy ground and all your senses are being moved at the exact same time, it might even come one morning while sitting on the back porch, the first cup of coffee in your hands as you are surrounded by the sounds of birds chirping in the trees, or the spring breeze dancing through your hair, or the sight of verdant trees and grass reminding you that life is all around you, that spirit is surrounding you. Those are the moments in your life that exist just beyond the reach of language or pictures—those instances of simplicity and artistry when time and space seem to come to a stop if only for a few seconds.
A few years back, I experienced one of those moments in which the exquisiteness of the moment came crashing through the mundanity. But, in order for me to tell you about what happened, I first must describe the complete and utter bleakness that is winter in upstate New York. The various hues of gray that emerge as the sky and the ground on the roads and in the mountains become united with the five month old snow and icy sludge and form a singular dismal shade of monochromatic nothing at all as the whole experience consumes all of the outside world. Even at our house which was surrounded by trees and forest on all four sides, which looked lush throughout the summer and presented an incredibly colorful pallet during the fall, by about March each year without fail began to feel like prison of icicles and snowbanks. The sun, as it made its journey from one side of the sky to the other, a trip that by now really only lasted a handful of hours, barely ever seemed to actually get up in the sky. More often than not, it just slid across a slit in the southern hemisphere as we would all stare down in that direction and think of home. It was into this world of dark and dank and cold that our only little pieces of salvation offered during this season of blah that occupied a little over half the year arose in the form of a single ray of light that shown into our house each morning. And it came like a beacon every non-snowing morning through an ever so slight parting of the trees in an otherwise completely filled in forest. A parting that is so slight as to not even be noticed save for this one thing. Throughout the winter, as the days grow shorter and the light of the earliest morning occurs later and later in the day, this parting in the trees became the stage for one of the most glorious sights I have ever seen and many days, I stood next to the window in front of the sink, a piping hot cup of coffee in hand and rested in a venerable silence for a good seven minutes watching the sun emerge from its nightly slumber and cascade the whole of my world in light. These moments of earliest lights were especially awe-inspiring considering the fact that the world is otherwise a frozen mass of trees denuded of their leaves and for much of the winter covered in snow, that the ground in the back yard, on my back deck, throughout the valley is also blanketed by a covering of fallen, frozen, and refrozen snow that seemed impenetrable. The air, too, declared a stillness, a bleakness that suggested that other than the occasional winter bird in flight looking for anything that can be classified as edible, all the world is held in suspended animation but for this singular light bursting forth through a slit in the trees and washing the whole of creation in the first-light that Eden saw play again and again each day. It was in fact one of the few tradeoffs of winter in upstate New York in which the colder months get the better of the warmer by roughly a 3-to-1 margin. Because in the warmer months, both the trees have filled in and the earth has shifted on its axis just enough to move the sunrise over a bit to the point that one cannot see that great ball rising until it is well on its journey and has begun to heat up the day rather than thaw it out thus making the first light of the day invisible from my house. But in the midst of the winter, in the bleakest part of the bleak midwinter this sunrise became part of my (and increasingly my family’s) daily routine—a celebration of the arrival of the sun. Early on, wanting to share the awe that I felt with others, friends, extended family I would try in vain each day to capture the moment in picture. I started with my phone and when that didn’t work, I began using an actual camera, just trying to hold in time that moment of wonderment, and give it as a gift to others and while beautiful, such efforts could never capture the transcendent experience that I and we have looking out over the left side of our deck each morning. And I am left to wonder on this morning, if this is not something of the experience felt by Nicodemus when the darkness of the night and the mundane nature of his life was crashed by the light of Christ shining in his midst on a night in which he would leave forever and ever changed.
Now, Nicodemus, was a man who was wise in the eyes of the world, a man successful in his endeavors, a man of great power, who still comes to the realization that all is for naught if one cannot find the light shining in the midst of the darkness. A man who is acutely aware that nothing within all creation can give ease to his stirring soul that has searched in vain over and again for the peace that surpasses all understanding. We all must know something of this. The human experience is often one of trying and trying again to find something permanent. Something in which we may place all of our trust. Something that helps us make sense of the brokenness and chaos of the world. So it is that Nicodemus, in that quest, comes to Jesus in the dark of night that he might see the light of the new day. Now, Nicodemus was a Pharisee—a man who knows all the precepts of the land, all the rules of the Jewish faith, all the laws of nature and even though he possesses all this knowledge, all this ritual, all this religion, he finds them all to be thoroughly unsatisfying for one looking for ultimate value, ultimate worth, ultimate grounding in something more stable. And so he asks the great Rabbi, “Jesus, how can I see the realm of God bursting forth in creation of which you are always speaking?” “One must be born from above,” Jesus said, “born of the spirit, inspired by the Spirit to see the world as something teeming with light and life, as something that is unpredictable and wild, as a creation that is constantly in flux, constantly returning back to the God of creation, constantly being driven by the Spirit that dwells within all creation, chaotic and untamed, blowing wherever she will with no one able to predict where she will go next.” And we see this, don’t we? Fueled by the love of God, so enamored with the world that as a gift, God gave us Jesus—a living, breathing example of how we are all to live, how we are all to love, how we are all to give of ourselves in service of the other. A sacrifice of one for the salvation of all. Not to condemn that world, not to make us wallow in our unworthiness, our sinfulness, our guilt, but to give us the courage to live a new way, a life of abundance, not of stuff, not in a way that guarantees that only a few will live but in abundance of spirit, in abundance of love, in a way that sees the shared lineage of all persons, all creation. Nicodemus, an equal measure of intrigued and confused manages to stammer out, “Jesus, how can I see the world as you see it?” “By seeing that I did not come to condemn the world but rather to save it.” In this brief interaction, Jesus helps Nicodemus and ourselves see the trinity of God as that light that shines in the darkness bringing sight to the blind and hope in a hopeless world. A God of love, so devoted to creation, that God gifts us with Jesus, a living, breathing, tangible example of how to be and interact with the rest of the world, and Jesus, he who shows us the way, blesses us with the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the pneuma, the ruach, the wind that blows across the whole of the world inspiring the people of God to see the world, not how it is, but, rather how it could be.
Following this encounter with Jesus, both scripture and the tradition recount Nicodemus as a changed person. A person who has been born from above. A person who has eyes to see and ears to hear the realm of God bursting forth into each new moment. In our own time, it is these moments on mountaintops and next to oceans in which everything else is briefly stripped away and we are blessed with the opportunity to see God burst in forth in each new moment. It is these moments of peaceful silence and the sounds of nature that gives us the opportunity to take accounting of our lives and see, really see, who we truly are and what we could become, what are the stumbling blocks that need to be removed, the logs in our eyes that prevent us from having sight, the dead and dying parts of us that must be cleaved, and left to return to the ground, “ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.” So that once we have again experienced the awe and wonder of God in our midst, once we are born of water and of the Spirit. Once we have been born from above, again and again and again, we are ready to go out and show others in our midst the power of the spirit chaotically moving through creation leaving no stone on top of stone and calling all people to see the world in new and powerful ways. We are ready to step out in faith just a single inch from where we are and see the ways that God will use that to bring about greater wholeness, and justice, and grace, and love. We are ready to leave this place and change the world.
The problems of the world, the struggles of people for personhood and survival testify to the need for a shift in the manner in which we are in relationship to one another. While small changes may place a bandage on the wounds of humanity and creation, it will take seismic shifts in the manner in which we view the world to truly heal it and one another from the wounds that each of us bear from different points in our lives in which our brokenness and the brokenness of the world has brought us pain. What is required is a renewed awe in the power of God to move through creation. An awe at the beauty of sunrises that cannot be captured in photography, a reverence for being in the presence of God, all the time, a cleansing of one’s soul in an effort to be made whole again, but then an inspired return to creation, prepared to dream not in small measures but in wild and untamed expressions of love for the world and our place within it.
Just as the prophet Isaiah was, in the darkness of night, whisked away and into the presence of God, God’s mighty robes filling the whole of the temple, God’s angels, Cherubim and Seraphim falling down before God, singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of host; the whole earth is full of his glory,” cleansing his lips with the purifying fires of heaven and leaving him with nothing on his tongue but the words, “Here I am, send me,” so, too, did Nicodemus approach Jesus in the dark of night, trapped in the despair of a life lived without ultimate purpose, without grounding in something more permanent than the tangible, than the earthly. And just as the presence of God inspired Isaiah to depart from the presence of the holy a new person, so, too did Jesus shows Nicodemus how to see the Holy Spirit moving through creation, making all things new and beautiful. And making all who are given the vision to see it, born again in the spirit of God. God the creator, Christ the redeemer, the Holy Spirit, the inspirer. Now and always.
Sisters and brothers, we can never become young again, we can never turn back the clock on the ages of brokenness and redemption that we all leave in our wake, we can never reemerge from the wombs of our mothers and begin life again armed with the knowledge of our age and our experiences of God, but we can be born anew. We can be born from above. We can be swept up in the spirit of the most high and be servants of the most high in this world so in need of children of God to be the hands and feet of the Christ. And we can dream dreams as big as the sky and a grandiose as the whole of creation. We can see a world that is fundamentally different from the one in which we inhabit and then, when we courageously move with the holy spirit, we can begin the work to bring such a world into reality, to become co-creators with God, co-redeemers with Jesus, sharers of the love of the Holy Spirit with all people, with all creation. Let us joyously and with awe and wonder approach the throne of God, touch the hem of Christ, be moved with the holy spirit, to be the children of God and tell others than they are also the children of God. And glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s peoples. Amen.