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.

Matthias

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

The lot fell on Matthias, and he was added to the eleven, and he was never heard from again.

With the high stakes of filling the void that Judas left, the careful qualifications described, the prayerful atmosphere, and the leaving of the final decision up to God, you might think that the apostle selected this way would be a major player in the ongoing story of the Christian community, in those first days and years in Jerusalem after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus.

But no.

Matthias – this carefully selected apostle – completely disappears from the story after this one big important moment.

It’s as if it isn’t really about Matthias at all.

And that is exactly true.

This story about the selection of Matthias is not about him, really.

It’s a story about the community.
About what it takes to make the community ready for God to act. Ready for God to transform and empower them.

After forty days of making resurrection real for the disciples with teaching and prophecy, Jesus has just ascended into heaven, leaving behind a promise of immersion in God’s Spirit, of power to share the experience of resurrection with the whole earth, and the hope of the renewal and restoration of the kingdom of Israel.

And it’s that hope that makes “the eleven” – the disciples first selected by Jesus to go out and proclaim his message during his own life and ministry – really feel their incompleteness, the void left by Judas Iscariot when he left their circle by betraying Jesus to the Temple authorities.

They were twelve when they were first selected; they were twelve during Jesus’ ministry and their own in support of him. Twelve is the number of completeness, representative of the twelve tribes of Israel, the fullness of God’s people.

But now they are eleven.

And if Jesus is really gone, this time, and the whole responsibility of sharing resurrection and good news with the world is going to be on his followers, and the renewal of the kingdom might be at hand…. well, it’s just not going to work without the community being whole: complete and ready, with a circle of twelve on hand to anchor the mission.

So they look for someone to take that place – someone who has been with the community, with Jesus, from the beginning, and knows how we got here.

One scholar comments that this episode reveals a chronic problem with church leadership – that existing leadership tries to replicate itself, to maintain the way it’s been done before, while the Holy Spirit has a track record – in those first years in Jerusalem right through to here and now – of picking out those most unlike us to share the Spirit’s power, to challenge and change our assumptions, to lead God’s people and spread God’s salvation and story wider than we can yet imagine.

That commentator is absolutely right about our need to challenge ourselves to look for the unexpected leaders the Spirit is choosing when we consider church leadership today – and I’ve had conversations with a few of you recently about how that plays out in our life at Trinity!

But I think there’s a different challenge the Holy Spirit is offering us – in this story about Matthias. (Or, really, not about Matthias at all.) A challenge that my help us with welcoming the new.

You see, the Holy Spirit actually affirms the selection of Matthias. God chooses him – that’s what it means when they pray and “cast lots” – and the Holy Spirit descends on Matthias right along with all the others, newcomers and established insiders alike, a few days later.

In this case, God and the gathered community choose someone who isn’t new, who won’t make headlines, who will not himself transform the church or challenge the way it’s been. God and the community choose a person to provide assurance of shared history and the anchor of completeness that prepares the community for all the unexpected gifts and challenges the Holy Spirit may bring.

When the lot falls on Matthias, the role for which he is chosen by God and his community is to make his community complete, ready for the work and the power that God will give them, power for transformation of the world. 

He is never again named in the story, so we don’t know anything about what he actually did as a member of “the Twelve”. But I suspect his role of completeness is probably an active one. 

Matthias is undoubtedly showing up for gatherings and tasks and the things that make the community work. He’s has to be actively present and committed if he’s going to represent the direct experience of Jesus for a community that grows and grows and continues to include more people who don’t have that experience. 

His job – the job of any of us who have been here for a while, who have quietly followed Jesus and lived the story without making headlines – our job is to create the conditions that make the community ready for the Holy Spirit to arrive, to transform everything, to fill newcomers and long-timers alike with the power of God. And holding a community ready for transformation, keeping us prepared for the incredible things God is doing next is the work of a whole life.

We are – many of us – like Matthias: called to actively enable the future by bearing witness to the transformation of the past.

To tell over again the stories of how we have seen Jesus himself break barriers, seek out the least likely people for God’s blessing, or go against the way it’s always been, in order to help our community find new and fuller life in embracing a new challenge or leader or change.  

To testify that the innovations the Holy Spirit is bringing us today are consistent with God’s previous innovations for the salvation of our community and world.

To tell a story, for example, about how the current wild and uncertain territory of digital church – now taking us out of our comfort zones, and demanding that we reconsider a lot of our expectations about community and who’s in charge and when and where the holy happens – is like the wild and uncertain territory of the Protestant Reformation five centuries ago. 

Or like the uncertain territory of the early disciples figuring out how to be a whole new kind of believer in resurrection in the middle of Jerusalem twenty centuries ago. 

When change and transformation come our way, we need to remind ourselves and others that God’s done this before, and it has given strange and unexpected gifts of life.

God chooses Matthias – and many of us – to quietly, unremarkably, create a foundation of trust in the reality of God’s presence and action that prepare us for the innovations the Holy Spirit will inspire, for the unexpected and unusual people that Jesus will bring into our lives to expand God’s love and power and presence, for the next miracle God will do.

Some of us do that now by teaching Sunday School, or managing the logistics of the annual stewardship drive, or showing up reliably when there’s work to be done, or joys to celebrate, or tears to shed, or worship to be offered so that the community is present and we don’t meet change alone.

So if you are not a headliner, but you’ve been here for a while and know the story – ask yourself today, this week, how you might be Matthias.

What transformation are you – we – actively helping God make possible?

What new life are we helping into being, by being ourselves in this community? 

What more can we do to help God prepare our community, our world, for miracles of love and power and transformation?

Or if you’re feeling like an odd fit in the church; if you’re new to the story of Jesus; if you might just be chosen by the Spirit as unexpected and new – well then, look for Matthias here and now.  

God has chosen someone here to make us ready for you, to anchor that deep experience of Christ that prepares us to recognize God at work in you – and in what God will call us to do next, together.

The lot fell on Matthias, and he was added to the eleven.

And he never made a headline again. 

But when the whole world changed – when we changed – we were ready.

True Friends

 John 15:9-17

It’s the day before Jesus dies. No one listening to him knows that, but they might feel it in the air as Jesus sits at dinner and talks and talks, cramming in everything he’s wanted to say to us, everything he needs to teach us. 

He talks about loving one another, about God’s current and coming glory, about being here but gone but here, about intimacy with God, about loving Jesus himself by keeping commandments, about vines and abiding in one another… 

It’s inspiring and overwhelming and bewildering.

And then Jesus says: 

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. 

You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, but I have called you friends…

Friends.

I suspect that’s not what anyone was expecting to hear from Jesus that night.

They have been close to him – some of them for years. But he’s… the special one. The leader, the rabbi – the one you’ll follow because of the amazing things that happen, the way he makes you feel like the world is changing for the better. He gives the advice, fixes what’s broken, makes the decisions. He is amazing and you love being with him. But he doesn’t feel like your buddy. You’re not equals. Not… friends.

And yet, we are.

We could be.

Jesus is saying to those disciples gathered around a table in Jerusalem, and to you and me all these centuries later, that he wants us to be his friends.

There’s a mutuality in friendship. You can’t just follow a friend, you can’t wait for them to lead, and just react. You plan together, go together. We share responsibility for initiative in a friendship. We each care for and support the other, and let the other care for and support us. 

Jesus points that out – friends are not servants, who just do what the master says without knowing why. Friends know what’s on their friend’s mind, and share in the planning of what comes next.

A lot of our relationships these days – relationships that make us laugh, provide advice, affect our opinions, give us that sense of familiarity – are one-way relationships, with people we see through screens (not just since last March) – Instagram celebrities, sportscasters, online fitness instructors, TV stars and news anchors. 

Those affiliations often feel a lot like friendships. They can change us for the better – or worse – like friendship, as well as entertain and advise us.  

And that’s the kind of relationship it’s probably easy for us to have with Jesus.

But I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about today. I don’t think that’s all he wants from us.

When he tells us he calls us friends, he’s inviting us to a relationship that demands mutuality. Where unconditional love – and expectations, and joy – flows two ways. 

A friendship that is like Jesus’ own relationship to God as “Father” – a deep, intimate, sharing of all things, so close that we feel like we are one. 

A friendship that demands that instead of drifting away when things go wrong, we invest in the mutual trust of arguing it out, admitting when we are hurt, admitting fault. The mutual trust that means we go through the hard work of the friendship together when things are rough, as well as enjoying the pleasure of each other’s company when it’s easy.

It might be hard for us to imagine Jesus in the kind of deeply mutual relationship we have with our close friends. It’s like how few, if any, of us would feel comfortable asking Anderson Cooper from CNN, or George Takei from Star Trek and Twitter, or Ally Love from Peloton to drive us to the doctor while we’re throwing up, or invite them for dinner when we haven’t cleaned the house in weeks – or expect to be asked to spend all day moving their furniture for pizza and old times sake. 

I don’t assume they’ll laugh at my long-winded, not very funny story about the cat. That takes a lot of mutual history, personal investment, and maybe knowing the cat. 

Things like that, though, are the outward and visible signs of two-way friendship – of deep mutual trust in one another, long-term investment, and sacrificial love. So Jesus is inviting us to imagine all that - the cold pizza and messy house and boring stories - in our relationship with him, with God. 

Because we can’t truly be friends with someone who only takes from us, never gives in return. Or with someone who only gives, and will never receive from us. You’ve felt this if you’ve tried to give presents, or thanks, or invitations to someone who always waves you away or turns you down. Or if you’ve felt the burden of a relationship where someone always demands help, forgiveness, attention, and care and never offers it to you.

True friendship is mutual.

And true friendship is sacrificial.

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” Jesus tells us.

It must have been unsettling for those who first heard him say this to remember those words the next day, as Jesus hung on the cross.  That’s a lot for someone to do for you as a friend, even if it might be okay to see someone die for a cause.  It was probably even more unsettling for those first hearers – as for us! – to contemplate that being friends with Jesus might mean being ready to lay down my life for him – as a personal friend, not a concept or ideal. 

What those first disciples found – and perhaps you have, too – is that there are a lot of other ways besides crucifixion of laying down one’s life for a friend. For love.

Any time we put aside, or let go of, our ego or self-interest or personal desires in order to be there for someone, to offer them an opportunity, to care for their need, we lay life down. 

We’ve all done that – grudgingly, generously, intentionally or accidentally – in this last year of public and personal sacrifices for the health of others. 

And perhaps you have dropped everything and driven all day across the country to be present for one special hour in someone’s life. 

Maybe you gave up a professional advantage to boost a friend to success. 

Maybe you quietly re-arrange your schedule, week by week, to find time to listen to the ordinary details of a friend’s life, and share your own small triumphs and stresses, even when you don’t feel chatty.

Each of those is an act of sacrifice, of laying life down, which may also feel like an act of joy, or may comfort and nourish your own soul.  That nourishing joy in giving of ourselves is exactly what Jesus is inviting us to, today.

Jesus is inviting us to befriend and love him, to love God, just as completely, extravagantly, generously, practically, ordinarily, and unconditionally as God loves us.

We may not feel capable of that Christ-like love – I’m not God, after all; my heart is human-sized. But we are capable. That’s what Jesus is telling us when he says “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”
We didn’t start this extravagant love and friendship from our own resources. Jesus chose us – you, me – and equips us for that love. Jesus makes that mutuality with God possible for us since we cannot do it for ourselves. 

So that his joy may be in us, and our joy may be complete. 

That’s the point of all this mutual love. 

So that we – with Jesus – may be complete in joy: filled and fulfilled by giving love – and support and company and laughter and forgiveness and everyday moments – giving friendship, to one who receives it as no one else can. Receives all of us, not just the public and pretty us, in love and friendship that makes laying our lives down a whole-hearted joy. 

Jesus is choosing us for friendship with the best friend we can ever have, friendship that completes all the joy of all our other friendships, that transforms everyday life into eternal life.

And even, perhaps, makes make my cat stories funny.

Moments We Might Miss

Acts 8:26-40

How often does this happen to you?

You’re minding your own business, and you get a call: “Quick, head out to route 206, where it goes through the Pine Barrens.”

So you do, and you see a convertible cruising slowly by, with someone listening to an audio Bible, and you run up to them and say, “Hey, want to talk about that book?” and they invite you into the car and you have a life changing conversation and they ask you to baptize them. And you do.

And suddenly, you find yourself vanishing from the car and reappearing in Ocean City, 

Never happens, right?

This is Mission From God stuff raised from the Blues Brothers to the James Bond level: from the call to drop everything and go, through the amazing coincidences and results, to the transporter beam that whisks our hero away…

Never happens to you and me, right?

Except I suspect it does happen, more often than you might think. Maybe even all the time.

Because the story we heard today about Philip – meeting with a stranger on the road, sharing his own great discovery of faith, and leaving that stranger with a life transformed – is not really so much a story about Philip himself, but about God at work. About Jesus being present in that place and time, through Philip. And the Ethiopian eunuch.

Many of the stories in the Acts of the Apostles are like that: stories about how after Jesus’ resurrection the community of disciples over and over had experiences in which they were God’s incarnate love for other people. Just as Jesus himself had been God’s love incarnate for them.

Extraordinary things happen to these new Christians – they heal the uncurable, see visions, break iron chains, raise the dead, make miraculous conversions, and get teleported by the Spirit.  And they are very clear that it’s not they themselves who do these things. It’s Christ.

For a moment or an hour or a day, these particular followers of Jesus become Jesus, become the presence and power of God, through whom God helps someone else, or changes the world. 

And that – exactly that – happens to you and me, too.

We just don’t always realize it.

Somewhere in your life, in however long or short a time you have loved God and tried to follow Jesus yourself, there is a conversation you have had with someone which opened their eyes or ears or heart to receive a gift from God. 

You might remember seeing and feeling the insight or the joy or the healing in someone else’s eyes or words or actions as they responded to something you said or did.

Or you may have absolutely no idea what conversation that was.  It may even not have seemed like a conversation at all.  It may have been a short encounter with a stranger. It may have been a long, deep, discussion with someone you love that never seemed to be about God or faith at all.

It may have left you full of the presence of God, or you may not have noticed it at all.

It’s often easier to remember the conversations, the actions, the moments, where someone else was Christ for us.

Several years ago, I got into a taxi in Kenya with a handful of other church people – a theologian, another priest, a church communications professional – and we noticed that the windscreen had “Psalms 121” written across the top in large letters.

We promptly started quoting the first verse of that psalm to one another “I lift my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come?” and thinking how appropriate that desire for help might be on the potholed mountain roads we were traveling. 

And then someone asked the driver “Is that why your car says ‘Psalms 121’”?

“This Psalm says ‘The Lord will watch over your going and your coming, from this time forth forevermore.’” he said.

There was a moment of silence in the car, as that assurance of God’s presence and protection was suddenly present – physical and tangible. 
All the church professionals had focused on the one line of Psalm 121 that expresses uncertainty or need.

And then our ears and hearts were opened to the promise and assurance that are the whole heart and truth of that psalm. The expression of profound trust painted on the windscreen and voiced by the driver made the whole cab the vivid presence and protection of God, in that place and moment.

In that moment, my own sense of trust in God woke up. And that psalm has stood beside me as deep assurance any number of times in the last eight years that I have needed to know that God is watching over me, and us.

I suspect that taxi driver doesn’t remember it at all.
Unless we gave him a really bad tip, or a really large one.

It has happened to you, too. I am sure of it.

Someone has been the teacher, the love of God made physical for you. Anyone from a stranger met in passing to a beloved lifelong friend. And you have been the rabbi, the interpreter of God, the presence of Christ for someone else.

Sometimes, it’s really clear in the moment that God is inspiring and using you. You may really feel as if the Spirit has spoken into your ear, like Philip’s, telling you exactly where to be and what to do.

Other times – most of the time, I suspect – you or I would tell the story of those moments as accidental. It was a conversation with someone you met because we had to get a job done – not  because God rang your phone with directions to the wilderness road.
I was just curious about that book she was reading, we might say, and then she told me so much about her life, and asked what I thought. I don’t know what I said, or where she went afterwards.

But if the Holy Spirit tells this story about you, it might sound quite different. “I called her to go out to the Home Depot that day,” the Spirit might say. 

Writing your story in a modern-day Acts of the Apostles, Luke might say, “God spoke to him and told him to ask how he could help.” 

And it would be true.

Even Philip might have told the story of his being whisked by the Spirit to Azotus as “I kept thinking about the conversation we’d had, and didn’t notice how far I’d come. Suddenly, I’d arrived in town, and it seemed like no time had passed since I left that man on the river bank.”

These miracles that God does with us and in us often seem entirely commonplace. 

The choice we have is to pay attention ourselves, so that we can hear the story God may be telling with us. 

It’s a gift to notice those moments when we have been Christ for someone else – intentionally or accidentally. When something you did or said (or didn’t say or do) conveyed God’s healing or hope or power, and you get to witness the insight or the joy or the change.

We can prepare ourselves to see, to notice, to experience that presence of God in us by the everyday practices of our faith. 

By reading the stories of God in scripture, so that we just might recognize something similar when it happens to us. 

By praying, so that we practice opening our own hearts and needs to God’s healing and hope and love, and asking God’s guidance.  

By simply looking for God’s presence in the everyday around us, so that we may also recognize God’s work when we see ourselves in the mirror.  

By seeking out and listening to other people’s stories of God at work. By telling our own stories of feeling God’s love and care – tell them to yourself, and tell them to others.

God is going to use us this way.  

Our choice is to practice what keeps us open to God, so when – not if, but when – God does, it will feel natural and joyful, not awkward or strange.  To use the practices of faith to tune our eyes and hearts and ears to notice what God is up to in us, so that we, with Philip and the eunuch from Ethiopia, can share in God’s present and eternal joy.