Inside God

John 3:1-17, Romans 8:12-17 (Isaiah 6:1-8)

Most of us did not ask for this.

But we got it anyway.

Nicodemus didn’t ask for a new spirituality, or a lecture on how to be born of water and wind. He was probably just looking for reassurance for his deduction that God far off in heaven had sent someone to work occasional miracles on earth.

He got Jesus, spinning impossible mysteries about rebirth and spirit, inviting him and challenging him to dive into God’s radical plan to save the world.

Most of us, probably, did not ask to be adopted by God, with all the family obligations that implies. But Paul tells us it’s happened anyway, and changes our relationship not just to God, but to life and death and everything.

And I suspect that few of us have spent a lot of time craving or praying for a day every year to sit down and stare at the intellectual puzzle of God being three distinct people and also absolutely indivisibly one, who we still talk about separately.

Here we are, though, on Trinity Sunday. 

In a particular congregation called Trinity.

Whether or not you asked for it, here we are, with God who is three different people who talk about each other and have conversations with each other and is absolutely only one being – don’t get confused here – who is inviting and challenging us to get involved in those internal conversations and the one unified transformation of the world and has swept us up into God’s household before we even knew that was possible.

Because God doesn’t just want us to know God. God wants a relationship with us.

And God doesn’t just want a relationship with us, God wants us to be part of the fundamental nature and being of God, which is relationship.

That’s the central revelation of knowing that Jesus is fully God, even while he has conversations with the Father, who is all of God. And of knowing that the Spirit is fully God, and isn’t either Christ or Creator, and is still the same as Christ and Creator from the very beginning.
All of that is the revelation that God is in relationship always, that relationship is God’s very nature, God’s fundamental being.

(If you are scratching your head a little, and didn’t really ask for this sermon, don’t worry about it. Here we are anyway.)

Jesus invites Nicodemus – and you and me – to be part of that relationship that is God’s self, being born of the Spirit, becoming of the Spirit, the will of God mysteriously blowing through the world.

And Paul tells us that we have been adopted by God, “heirs with Christ”, claimed into the exact relationship with God – no, of God – that Jesus has, is. 

And if you are finding it hard to imagine just how you have a relationship with a mystery, or struggling to imagine being inside God’s relationship with God’s self, you’re not alone.

But you have, probably, been practicing for it.

For a year and more all of us have been involved in active, often intimate, relationship with people we can’t see. The ways we got used to experiencing our relationships changed. We saw through a glass, dimly (as Paul says elsewhere) – through screens and masks and windows and through other people who told us how beloved parents in retirement communities or family and friends held apart by travel bans were doing.

The experience we had with one another this year may be similar to the way many of us experience God – more distance than presence, physically; or through a certain amount of interference – the voice of God muffled as if through a heavy mask, or broken up over spotty wifi. Often our relationship with God goes through other people who tell us what we can’t see for ourselves. 

We didn’t choose it, did not ask for it – and yet we all found ourselves taking on this spiritual practice of intimate relationship with strangeness and mystery.

And found that – in many cases – we could.

Over the last 15 months, I’ve had any number of conversations and moments where I completely forget that we are wearing masks.
I see the smile on my friend’s whole face, when we meet, even when there’s fabric over her mouth and nose.  Another friend’s bad jokes come through with perfect clarity, even when the videoconference glitches and delays and buzzes in the middle of his sentence.
I greet you in the church or in the grocery, and I turn around and remember the shape of your mouth as you said hello, but not the color or shape of your mask.

I expect that you, also, have found some way in these last 15 months that love or trust or intimacy have made some solid pandemic barrier disappear, not matter at all.

That’s what God is inviting us into, when Jesus talks about being born of the Spirit: becoming as intimate with, and as integrated into, God’s self as Jesus ever is.
God wants us to experience God’s wholeness, God’s joy and presence, as if the masks and distance of human logic that we wear every day just doesn’t get in the way.  So that we experience God the way God experiences us: whole and undisguised and beloved.

A few weeks ago, I sat down to lunch with a friend I hadn’t seen in 434 days. I thought it might be awkward. I thought I might have forgotten how to eat in a restaurant. (Not really, but that’s the best way I’ve got of expressing that sense of weirdness, the sense that it just couldn’t be the same.)

And what I thought would feel strange actually felt so very familiar – it felt like my friend and I had shared hand sanitizer before every meal we’d eaten together, had masks on our faces, then on the table, for years, and like we’d always been at this restaurant that was new to us. It felt like we hadn’t been apart at all.

That’s why God insists on adopting us as God’s children, claiming us right into the same relationship that flows between Jesus and God.

So that seeing God face-to-face – the intimidatingly powerful experience the prophet Isaiah describes today, some thing we might not seek for ourselves – actually feels like the most familiar, awesomely natural and desirable experience we could have.

Because God doesn’t just want us to know God. God wants a relationship with us.

And God doesn’t just want a relationship with us, God wants us to be part of the fundamental nature and being of God, which is relationship.

God wants us to be so close – so inside the being of God – that the power and love poured out as the Spirit, the sacrificial generosity of God’s character shown as the Christ, the overwhelming glory of God’s self as Almighty, are the most natural part of our own selves.

We didn’t ask for this, most of us.

But God is doing it anyway.

And Paul us points to the evidence we already have, whether we feel it or not, that God has already brought us inside God’s own relationship, as close as Jesus. 

Every time we say the familiar words Jesus has taught us; every time we begin “the Lord’s prayer”; when we cry, Abba! Father! it is the [Spirit of God] bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God. Those simple words we pray are the proof God gives over and over that we are joined with Christ, children and heirs of the same Father, deeply sharing in the generous, sacrificial, glorious loving relationship of God to God.

We didn’t ask – we don’t need to ask.

Because God so loves the world that God insists on bringing us – you, and me, each of us and all of us – into the eternal -- vibrant, mutual, sacrificial, glorious, mysterious, familiar, awe-inspiring, loving -- eternal life of God.