And Then A Miracle Happens

Sermon preached at St. Paul's Cathedral, Trinity Sunday, Yr B
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One of my favorite comic strips is The Far Side. One of the best shows a man resembling Albert Einstein standing in front of a blackboard upon which is diagramed some complex equation divided into three steps. Under the heading Step One are scribbles numbers and equations; likewise, Step Three, at the other end of the board, has similar markings. But under step Two, right in the middle of board are just five words: “And Then a Miracle Happens.” I love it----the notion that something so intriguing, an idea so historic, a formula which explains so much…could be boiled down to a “and then a miracle happens,’ is funny…and refreshing.
I empathize with the Einstein figure—how hard it is to explain something which seems so logical to you, yet it is so difficult to convey. No doubt the real Einstein had times when he wished he could just use Step Two! At times what we know so clearly deep inside is almost impossible to put into words.
It’s the same with certain Christian doctrines...the incarnation, resurrection, ascension, the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and The Trinity. No doubt the Bishops in Nicaea at the fourth century council which gave us the doctrine of the Holy Trinity struggled mightily to find the words to describe our faith. Words we recite each week in our Creed, words which, to this day, cause a lot of consternation both within Christianity and beyond.
Let’s face it, it can be very difficult to explain our faith to another. Just because we have experienced it doesn’t mean we understand it. It can be so big and overwhelming that words fail us and we end up with “Step 2:” and then a miracle happens!
Jesus may have felt the same way speaking to Nicodemus…Nicodemus, you see, wasn’t thinking BIG enough, he was so constrained by his adherence to the law and to the ways things had “always been done” that he couldn’t open himself up to understand the full magnitude of what he was experiencing through the ministry of Jesus. Nicodemus, a Pharisee had been raised to follow the rules—rules designed to please Yahweh a distant, all powerful loving yet also wrathful God. But being pleased isn’t God’s ultimate goal--
God’s ultimate goal is to be in relationship with us. Through the ages of prophets, patriarchs and matriarchs God has been trying to reach us—to connect with us. God wants to experience us and God wants us to experience God.
This is the purpose of the Trinity: God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit gives God various routes to us and we, in turn gain various routes to God. A roadmap of sorts*.

The Trinity gives us, and God, a variety of ways to communicate, to connect, to relate.
Some of us connect to the parental “Father God” because we have caring nurturing parents or we long to have a caring nurturing parent---either way, for some of us the image of God as parent, as Father/Mother is comforting.
For others, the fleshy God, the incarnate word of Jesus is an easier image to connect with---a friend, a companion someone more accessible, more real, more tangible for us.
For others, there’s a sense that God is all in all—everywhere, in all things, of all things and deep within us experienced as intuition, inner voice etc. The Holy Spirit, while not physically present, is deep within us, expressing itself in our innermost thoughts, our soul searching and our heart’s desire.
Our heart’s desire, when we let ourselves feel it, is to receive God’s love, to accept God’s pursuit of us. The Holy Trinity comes for us in a number of ways because, beyond all human reason or reckoning, God wants to reach us!
When Jesus says in today’s Gospel “the wind blows where it chooses” I see an image of God in the person of the Holy Spirit, seeking us out reaching into the recesses of our hiding places to offer to us what God most wants to give: Love.
That’s the real miracle of our Christian faith: God so loves us, so wishes for us to accept that love, that God continues to come after us—as we heard in the Gospel: God so loved the world he gave his only Son (John 3:16)- his incarnate self to see and touch and taste that love, God gave us his eternal and all encompassing self, the Holy Spirit, to course through our very being at all times and in all places. This is a miracle indeed…and one we are called to proclaim…if only we could find the right words!
The three persons of the Trinity are traditionally described as Father Son and Holy Spirit but others prefer: Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier or: Artist, Rescuer, Companion and many other permutations to numerous to mention here. It is a challenge to find the right words to describe the mesmerizing, fantastic and most amazing experience of God working in our lives. This struggle continues to this day—not because God is elusive, but because God is so big, so ever-present that language proves insufficient in describing it.
That is why this Cathedral, each Sunday, offers three distinct liturgies utilizing various styles to express our love of God and God’s love for us.
In the course of 4 hours we in-- three distinct ways---proclaim the Glory of God. We do this because as Jesus explained to Nicodemus: We speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen….and what we know and what we have seen of God is so huge and so varied we must use a variety of words and images to express it. And that’s ok, because it doesn’t matter so much how we say it. What matters is that we experience it; that we delve into a relationship with God dying to our limited human roadmap, allowing ourselves to be reborn into the life of “And then a Miracle Happens”---the Holy and Undivided Trinity, One God Creator Redeemer, Sustainer, Artist Rescuer Companion, Father Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen.



*CS Lewis Mere Christianity considers the doctrines of Christianity to be roadmaps to reality