God is Holy; We Are Not

Trinity Sunday is upon us.  Not an occasion for task-oriented missional preaching, but a time to admit that God’s Person is mysterious, and to let this God BE God.  Since the Age of Enlightenment, we demand rational explanation for all happenings, and thus deprive ourselves of the awe of things beyond.  Readings for this weekend follow up on Pentecost’s experience of the Holy Spirit, yet also take us to new vistas of the sacred.  The preacher’s dilemma is that of how to express flooding wonder in the limitations of human language!

Isaiah tells us of the vision which launched him into a life of confronting idolatry in the sixth chapter of his oracles:  “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple.” (v.1)   And it dawns on him, “I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (v.5)   Kristin Emery Saldine says it well:  “Prophets are often called to speak the word of the Lord to those who have forgotten the distinction between holy and human….God is holy, we are not….Yet it is this realization that opens Isaiah to the possibility of forgiveness.  He is touched by divine intervention and made clean.”   (FEASTING ON THE WORD, B,3:28)

Fast-forward a bit to Paul’s Letter to the Romans.  Chapter 8 is perhaps the most wisdom-packed unit of Grace there is; verses 12-17 meet our imperfections head-on, yet assure us of a loving God who stands by us to the end.  Our human actions and wills are insufficient, unless they are sustained by the Spirit:  God persists in breaking into our hiding-places and bringing us home.  “It is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”  How ’bout THAT?

The Gospel is the account of Jesus meeting with Nicodemus “by night”, John 3:1-17.  Here again is one of those heaven & earth encounters which drive both Testaments.  Like us, Nic wants an explanation; what he gets is a vision of mystery.  My favorite part of this oft-abused passage is verse 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.”  This saving is through our participation in a holiness which cannot be defined or confined by Reason alone…

St Patrick, they say, explained the Trinity by pointing out the shamrock, with three equal leaves coming from one stem.  St Augustine presented a hard-boiled egg:  a shell, a white band of protein, and a yolk.  Perhaps it’s only through such images that we can begin to approximate those things that are beyond speech. God is holy, we are not.  Egg-zactly…

God Bless Us,Every One           Horace Brown KIng