Prayer
Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth, I pray that You, who gave your Son for our reconciliation with You, would grant me peace and a heart open to Your call this day, so that you may speak through me the words that you would have me share with Your people.
We pray that Your Spirit would grow within us, giving us the strength and faith to persevere though the trials of our lives. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our spirits be pleasing to You our rock and our redeemer, and we pray all of these things in the strong name of the Risen Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Reborn, The Spirit Within Us
Today is Trinity Sunday, so named to celebrate one God in three persons, revealed to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Creator and Sustainer, Redeemer, and Guide. It is the First Sunday or Ordinary Time, the Season after Pentecost, which ends with Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the Christian year, before the start of the beginning of Advent.
Just as we shout, proclaim Christ’s resurrection on Easter morning, just as we are fired by the Flames of Pentecost, there is nothing Ordinary about the Trinity!
The idea of Father, Son, and Spirit, gives a richness to our faith, to help us to comprehend the infinite in more discernible ways. When we call out to God the Father, it is the Spirit within us speaking, crying out to our Father, and when we invoke the name of our redeemer, the risen Lord, Jesus Christ, we are completing the triangle, because he is our brother.
(How awesome it that!)
The scripture passages this morning include some of my favorite pieces of scriptures.
1. In Romans 8:12-17, in his letter to the Romans, Paul proclaims our adoption into God’s family as heirs to the riches of Heaven, to life eternal, with our brother, the risen Lord, Christ Jesus. With a spirit of Adoption, a loving Father taking us into his fold, calling us by name, as he wished from the beginnings of the earth.
2. In Isaiah 6:1-8 One of the bible’s greatest answers to the calling of God, where he said simply, “Here I am; send me!”, which is the title of a poem I wrote.
A prophet answering
the direct call to action
by the Lord God Jehovah
to bring truth to the people
foretell a trial they must face
Whom shall I send?
Here I am; send me!
Oh that we could be so bold, so confident, so faithful, as Abraham, as Isaiah, as Paul, each called by God, each going where God willed.
and
3. We have the words of our Savior, trying to speak to the deaf, trying to show the blind Sanhedrin Nicodemus the revolutionary thought, that we must be reborn, of the Spirit, that the water and the Spirit are needed for a true baptism into the faith, in the wonderful, magnificent passages in John 3:1-17.
What Nicodemus could not even begin to understand, the living Christ in his presence, Isaiah proclaimed, the glory of God’s heavenly court. Can you see it, can you picture the imagery Isaiah’s song creates? Can you visualize the hem of his robe, filling the temple? (pause) I was gifted with a poem, The Hem of the Robe, which reads,
Like shafts of light, woven together;
sheets of flowing luminous light
like a wall of falling water
a curtain of silent thundering rain
so must the hem of his robe have been
filling His Temple on earth
flowing down from his heavenly throne
down from high above
filling the temple with light
Isaiah was redeemed and reborn, by his answer. He was living by the Spirit. Isaiah was reborn, as surely as any who have followed. He was redeemed, reborn of the Spirit.
Isaiah was transformed, not by his action; but by the grace of God. Not justified by the Law; but by confessing his sin, submitting his body, his all, to the voice of God, an indwelling of God’s Spirit within him.
Unlike Nicodemus, the unwise teacher, this member of the Sanhedrin, Isaiah was able to see the throne room of God, was able to gain even a glimpse of the Creator’s glory. Nicodemus was blinded by his station, by the Law. He spoke with the same unclean lips as Isaiah.
Where Isaiah was transformed, changed, his unclean lips burned away… Listen to the words of this poem, Burned Away
A live coal in the grasp
of a six-winged seraph
a burning ember of
a sacrifice
touched to the seer’s lips
sin scorched away
so truth could pour forth
untainted and pure
for the nation of God
Nicodemus, coming to Christ in the dark of night, could not.
Even with the Messiah, the living Word of God, the Son of God speaking truth to power, speaking directly to him, he would not see. He could not understand the truth, revealed to him in the words of Christ in the lesson in the Gospel of John.
Nicodemus could not offer himself; he was not redeemed. He was stuck in his place, in the trap of trying to live, to measure himself with the Law. He could not understand and did not want to lose his position, his authority. To be reborn, of the Spirit, that meant everything of his past was loss, as surely as Paul proclaimed in Philippians 3:7 that, after his encounter with the risen Christ on the Road to Damascus, all his gain was viewed as loss.
What Christ was telling him, oh if he could have only understood… I wonder if it is like this poem, written when I read this scripture almost 2 years ago.
He is the one who said it
A minor epiphany
at the dinner table tonight,
reading the devotional
the familiar story, the
wondrous words, of God’s love
“For God so loved the world
that he gave his only begotten son”
Words that nourish, that uplift
that remind us of the Father,
the parent; But, the context,
the speaker, is the story
This is Jesus proclaiming
the love of God in giving
Himself, to save us
this broken world
by His presence on Earth
without mincing words,
with no sugar coating.
I am here, on his earth
because the father loved, loves
will always love
the living Son,
proclaiming
the Father’s
love
There are so many times in the gospels when Jesus seems to be speaking to “Duh-sciples”. How this conversation must have seemed to him.
Beyond His Ken
Like a professor
explaining theoretical physics
to a wide-eyed preschooler,
so must it have been
the divine and the human
Meaning, full nuanced meaning
lost on the listeners
stuck within the here, the now
understanding only the heard, the seen
Nothing beyond his ken
All of us needing that
singular expert witness,
and repeated instruction
And we, using the scripture from Romans, are each called to be born of the Spirit, to live as Isaiah did, redeemed by the grace of God, our lives turned toward the Father, yoked to the Son, walking, sharing, witnessing, with the power, the authority of those flames of Pentecost that we heralded in worship last week.
Heirs with our brother, to the kingdom of God, called as He was, to listen to the Spirit, indwelling within us.
Oh, I pray that we, that you and I , can answer as boldly as Isaiah when we are called by God the Creator - reborn of the Spirit, living as children of God, as the brothers and sisters of Christ.
Here I am, Send Me!
Amen.
