The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
June 7, 2009
A Sunday in Celebration of Peace with Justice
A Sunday in Recognition of the Doctrine of the Trinity

Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – Isaiah 55: 1-3a, 10-13; 56: 1¹

¹Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. ²Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. ³Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. …

¹⁰For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, ¹¹so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

¹²For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. ¹³Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

^{56: 1}Thus says the Lord: Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed.

Gospel Lesson – John 3: 1-17²

¹Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. ²He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” ³Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” ⁴Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” ⁵Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ ⁸The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” ⁹Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” ¹⁰Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

¹¹“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. ¹²If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? ¹³No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. ¹⁴And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

¹⁶“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. ¹⁷“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Go Out in Joy. Be Led Back in Peace.

Joseph Odhiambo, age 12, and Kenneth Ouma, 18, both lost their mothers during the post-election violence that tore apart Kenya. Today they have “hope and a future,” said Anna Baraza, the Executive Director of the Riruta United Methodist Women’s Community-Based Organization. “They learned to forgive those who killed their mother,” recalls Baraza.

Initially, they believed some tribes were bad and they could not associate with them. We address issues affecting the vulnerable and suffering humanity so the transcendent word of God may speak clearly and powerfully.³

Riruta UMW began in 2004 in Nairobi. Its mission is to give hope and purpose to disadvantaged, marginalized and vulnerable slum women – as well as youth and children – through programs that will address the very real need for socioeconomic empowerment in the face of gender-based sexual violence, substance and drug abuse, along with a whole host of other concerns sadly typical in most Third-World countries.

Baraza appreciates the grant her ministry received from us just last year. United Methodist gifts on Peace with Justice Sunday made it possible. The grant’s focus was to address strengthening the capacity for women to experience peace and justice in the sexual violence rampant in the slums of Riruta. “Gender-based violence is sustained by silence,” she declared. “Women’s voices must be heard.”

The project has also increased community awareness beyond their borders. The Kenya Police are establishing networks all throughout the surrounding community and a group calling itself The Children of Africa Hope Center in the Ng’ando slums reaches out to about 400 children. Even the clergy are preparing and delivering sermons on reconciliation, healing, peace and justice.

The result? Baraza says with passion, “Communities that had vowed never to live together now shake hands and even share a table. With God, all things are possible.” This is what it means to celebrate Peace with Justice Sunday

Coincidentally enough, though, there’s something else happening today: it’s the only Sunday in the Church that celebrates a doctrine! And if you’re old enough and can remember the 1960s-John-Robinson-Honest to God-debates, you may also recall that Robinson said this:

I was once asked a question after one of my talks: “How would you teach a child the doctrine of the Trinity?” It was one of the easiest questions I have ever received.  The answer was: “I wouldn’t.”⁴

So, for a piece of theology which was supposed to bring unity in the church in the middle of Emperor Constantine’s political intrigue while hosting a fractious bunch of bishops who held opposing theological opinions – some even suspected heretics and ecclesiastical dissidents – I’m not sure that this doctrine can claim to be the unifying force that Constantine wanted it to be!

My own understanding of the Doctrine of the Trinity is to simply say that the God beyond us, the God come among us, and the God within us is One and the same God.⁵ In the end our vocation as Christians isn’t to try to fully understand this doctrine; every single day we’re invited to experience it. That’s what will lead us to commit ourselves to being co-creators with God in a benevolent but fascinatingly mysterious universe. Still, it’s often in the ministry of little things where God must be found.

The enjoyment of life in God can’t be restricted to one hour on Sunday morning. Think of the life of a mother of three who stays at home – a life sometimes described as “easy” by men with salaried jobs. Two of the children are in school and one’s still at home. All three need to be “picked up after” – a euphemism for the mother cleaning, fixing and straightening up every single thing that three little human beings touch. Marketing and chauffeuring, shepherding and disciplining, answering questions and cooking for these children fill up untold hours. And odd jobs like re-gluing a torn and crumpled page from the family photo album doesn’t increase the pay.

Busy and often frantic mothers don’t have to get through this first, though, so that they can find an hour (or five minutes) later to “be with God.” Quiet and meditative solitude is important for us all, but it’s not the only place that God exists. It’s in the very gluing, dusting, peeling, lecturing, story-telling, cooking and hugging where incarnations of the divine can be experienced. We might be reaffirming and celebrating the Trinity as just one part of this day, but our communion with God isn’t some future dream. It’s now – in our eating and drinking, parenting and working for peace with justice, in our loving, praying, weeping and laughing together as a family. For now it ought to be enough simply to say that the love of God offers us whatever each of us needs the most. If in this moment we need a mother, God comes to us as a mother. If we are bereft of an experience of fatherhood, God comes as father. Our instincts about how to address God can represent some deep-seated but all too often prejudicial conditioning; but they can also represent an intuition about our deepest needs. God will fill the need of the moment, and yet will also lead us to needs we never knew we had. For me, to celebrate God as Trinity means to celebrate God as community – in people, surely, but also in nature and the entire cosmos. This is a day to celebrate the mystery of the God who transcends our language, embracing us in ways we may still be unable to imagine with our poor dictionary of human caring.

And so prayer becomes the simple act of hearing and joining our conscious voice to the Voice of the uninterrupted and everywhere-present Spirit. The question then becomes, will we let that Voice sound throughout our living? The words of that Roman Catholic contemplative, Thomas Merton, come to my mind:

Then, in the deep silence, wisdom begins to sing her unending, sunlit, inexpressible song…the unique, irreplaceable song each soul sings with the unknown Spirit, as he sits on the doorway of his own being, the place when his existence opens out into the abyss of God. It is the song each one of us must sing, the song God has composed, that God may sing it within us. …if we do not join with God in singing this song, we will never be fully real.⁶

Now, finally, to Nicodemus. I invite you to hear that Nicodemus was a pilgrim, a sincere religious seeker, a highly respected Pharisee, yes, but one who also wasn’t ashamed to remain a student who uses his precious study time to expand his search beyond the standard texts and distractions of the day. I invite you to also hear Nicodemus – again, a well-established member of the religious institution of his day – as a mover of theological boundaries, someone who’s willing to risk leaving behind the so-called “truth” as he and his colleagues have known it, in order to explore something new.

So instead of questioning his motives, as some theologians have, I think Nicodemus’ motives need to be recognized as both open and honorable. Nicodemus – and you and I, too – have got to be allowed to respond to the “new” or the “different” in a variety of ways rather than finding ourselves locked into a doctrine like the Trinity that (We are simply told.) must stand unchanged for all time. How else can he and we discover that our lives and our thinking might be different?

Nicodemus. It turns out he might be the patron saint of the curious, and so for many of us, our patron saint. May he protect the curiosity in us all!

Peace with Justice Sunday, Trinity Sunday, Nicodemus and new birth, and to top it all off, Graduation Sunday! It seems to me that they’re all invitations to us to continue to be curious about life and about our understandings of the sacred. Today is a time to rethink our assumptions with an eye toward an altered perspective, to not conduct an autopsy on a respected religious tradition, but neither to create an icon out of a doctrine that may have outlived its usefulness. Today is a time to look to the future with renewed hope – always open to new possibilities, to constantly consider how life might be different, to let ourselves be reborn yet one more time!

May this day place us in the company of not only spirited but compassionate teachers whose ways of opening doors will, once again, define a new community of hope and grace, of peace with justice, as traditional theological boundaries are pushed, and pushed again – with care and compassion, but also with honesty and creativity.

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