Year B

John 3:1-17

The Rev. Denise Vaughn

Good Advice Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin, a very important figure in the history of our country, as you may know, was a great statesman and inventor, but he was also a great correspondent receiving letters from famous people from all over the world. One day he received what may have been the most important letter ever to come to his desk. It was from the well-known British preacher George Whitefield. Whitefield writes; “I find that you grow more and more famous in the learned world. As you have made such progress in investigating the mysteries of electricity, I now humbly urge you to give diligent heed to the mystery of the ‘new birth’. It is a most important and interesting study and when mastered will richly repay you for your pains.”

The familiar story of Nicodemus and the ‘new birth’, that Whitefield writes to Benjamin Franklin about and Jesus calls us to, are key topics in our Gospel today. But the mystery of ‘new birth’ is not the only mystery we come face to face with today. For today, is Trinity Sunday, a Feast day when we celebrate the mystery of our Triune God – the God we know as Creator, Savior and Spirit. The concept of the Trinity, as a way of trying to understand or grasp the unknowable greatness and mystery of God, grew from the few hints we get in the scriptures and it was developed and refined over centuries of theologians arguing and sometimes physically fighting over the concept of the three in one God.

Great thinkers and theologians have added greatly to our understanding, but no matter what our age or education, this concept of three in one is still hard to grasp. Mainly, because with our limited capabilities and minds, we are trying to describe God and it’s virtually impossible to do. Many today do not accept the relevance of the doctrine of the Trinity, but the concept of God as Creator, Savior and Spirit is a gift from God and an aid to help us grasp the mystery of God’s greatness, God’s love and the way God works in the world.

There are many analogies that try to help us understand. I am a very visual learning person so I have brought something to show you – a statue that when I first saw it immediately spoke to me of what I thought the relationship of God as three-in-one could possibly look like. You can see the basic geometric form of this statue is the circle, which unites the three identical figures, in a flowing, never ending, continuing of one into the other thus representing the three in one and their equality.

This visual or any analogy, as we know, does not come close to a description of the Trinity, but they are at least suggestive because they point the way toward what God means to us using our own experiences of life. Our whole understanding of God has been a development through the centuries of God reveling God’s self to us; with the ultimate revelation being Jesus and through Jesus the coming of the Holy Spirit to the Church at Pentecost. Following the giving of the Spirit on Pentecost until today and I’m sure tomorrow, the Trinity will continue to manifest or reveal the paradox of the varied aspects of the infinite God.

An example of this Divine revelation is found in the Gospel reading today in the very familiar story of Nicodemus, a truth seeker and a leader of Israel’s religious community. He has discerned in Jesus a spiritual power that he has not seen in anyone before that he believes could only come from God. He goes to Jesus in the darkness of night because he is afraid to go openly in the light. He was a Pharisee who lived by the strictest religious rules, and in the circles he moved Jesus was not considered respectable so it looks like he’s taking a terrible risk in going to speak with him.

But he was willing to risk it all for the possibility that Jesus may be the one he was looking for. If he had not been willing to go to Jesus with his question, he could have missed the Divine revelation that possibly changed his life for eternity. We hear Nicodemus tell Jesus he is impressed with the signs and wonders he is doing and Jesus answers with what seems to be an obscure claim; ‘You are not going to enter God’s kingdom unless you are born again. In this mysterious speech, it seems Jesus is saying; the signs and wonders are good yet they are not what is important; what is important is a change, a change that occurs in the heart that can only be described as a ‘new birth’.

Nicodemus is of course puzzled. He asks, ‘How can I be born again Jesus’? Jesus then starts talking about birth and Spirit and wind. He asks Nicodemus to let go of what he already knows in order to be reborn through what he- Jesus has to offer. Jesus invites Nicodemus to be changed “born again’ of water and Spirit, in Baptism. Through the water of Baptism we are reborn by the Holy Spirit, which means we must be willing to be changed and to welcome this new way of life on the terms offered by Jesus. Terms that call us to belief in him as our Lord and Savior and when we do we are changed and then, we can speak of being ‘born again’.

Not because of any innate change in our sinful human nature but because of the new beginning that comes when we recognize the full character of God, the Triune God that is revealed in Jesus, through the Holy Spirit. The God that Jesus came to reveal is a God whose love knows no bounds and who only asks that we receive the gift of God’s self in our hearts and in our minds. Our lives then are reshaped and redefined by the love of God in Jesus which sends us out into the world to bring this message of salvation in our words and deeds to others who are searching like Nicodemus.

We may never know if Benjamin Franklin took up the advice of George Whitefield to study the mystery of the ‘new birth’ but we do know this teaching of ‘new birth’ would not have been strange to Nicodemus who was schooled in the Old Testament scriptures. Again and again the prophets spoke about the new heart that must be created in a person. They spoke of the very experience of which Jesus was speaking.

This encounter must have changed Nicodemus’ life for later after Jesus dies on the cross he and Joseph of Arimathea take Jesus’ body, wrap it in strips of linen with the spices and lay it in the grave. The ‘Good News’ for this Trinity Sunday is simple. God loves us so much that God gave Gods self to us and all we have to do is believe and God the creator, God the Savior, and God the Holy Spirit, comes to live in our hearts and we are ‘born again’ changed for eternity. Have we allowed Jesus to change our lives?