Lily is Kylie's, a good friend, daughter. Kylie and I meet when we both moved to New Haven around the same time and got involved in a bible study lead by another friend who also moved to New Haven in August of 2008. Lily is my third official godchild (I claim a few others) and the 2nd that I have had the pleasure to baptize. And this was the first time that I also preached when I baptized a godchild.
And what a wonderful, yet challenging text to preach on, as it was Trinity Sunday and the gospel was John 3:1-17.
So enjoy the sermon.
Today is
Trinity Sunday, the one day each year that Christians celebrate a doctrine, a
belief, instead of an event. But this
leads to a lot of confusion because how exactly does one describe the
Trinity? Are we worshiping one God or
three? Is it one God with three
personalities or three Gods with one personality. Really the Trinity is hard to explain. And therefore I really enjoy Martin Luther’s
quote “To try to deny the Trinity, endangers your salvation. To try to comprehend the Trinity, endangers
your sanity.” Therefore there is a lot
of mystery to the Trinity.
And there is
a lot of mystery to our scripture text as well.
Our gospel reading from John 3, which is so well known to many is about at
the core the love of God. But great
debates and schisms and church conflicts has been fought trying to understand
what Jesus meant. Even poor Nicodemus
was confused asking twice “how can these things be?”
It is hard
to comprehend just how glorious God is.
It is hard to understand just how mighty God is and why we should
worship this God and why we need to worship this God. It is hard to understand just how we are also
heirs with Christ in God’s kingdom and in Christ’s suffering as our second
lesson tries to explain today. It is
hard to understand just how much God loves us.
Even those well-known verses don’t truly express how much God loves us.
“God loved the world so much that he gave his only son, so that everyone who
believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. 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.” We are loved beyond measure. We
are loved more than a parent loves a child. We are loved beyond understanding.
And that
love for us is beyond our understanding because it is hard to understand
God. In fact I would go so far to say
that we can’t understand God. And it is
alright to say that.
Many people
stop worshipping because they don’t understand God, and they feel like they are
the only one in the church, it must just be them, and so they stop going. But really none of understand God. Lily, little 9 ½ month old Lily, on her
baptismal day, understand God right now as much as any of us truly understands
God. In fact she probably understands
God better than many of the adults in this room, there is no questioning, there
is no doubt, because at her tender age, Lily understands what love is. And God is ultimately love. And today, her parents Kylie and Chris and
myself as her baptismal sponsor and you as the congregation will promise to
help raise Lily in a life of faith, to pray for her, teach her and support her,
and there are a lot of promises to fulfill.
And even if we, each of us in this room, make Lily our own pet project
to support and teach and pray for in her life of faith, she will still not
understand God any more as an adult than she does right now. And that is because we can’t understand God,
we don’t understand God.
Instead we
experience God. And as Lily grows she
will see and experience God in different ways. As we attest to each week at the
beginning of worship, we see and experience God in many different ways. Through prayer and scripture, through deeds
from friends and strangers, through the ways you mention each week when I ask you "where have you seen God this week?".
We may not be able to truly understand God, we may not be able to
accurately explain the Trinity and how the Father, Son and Holy Spirit relate
to one another, but we can know that God is ultimately about love and
experience that love through the waters of baptism, through our family and
friends, through prayer and scripture.
And while striving to understand God might endanger our sanity, striving
to experience God’s love, is just a matter of opening our minds to all the
places God is already at work in our world. If you open you eyes and see, you
will see that the kingdom of God is at hand, here with us.
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