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I’ll never forget the time I went to a presbytery meeting to be approved to start the process of becoming a pastor in the PCUSA. At that first appearance, the questions are supposed to be about the candidate’s life of faith and not about anything deeply theological. But on the day I first stood before the people of Foothills Presbytery in South Carolina, a man whose face I couldn’t see asked me to explain the Trinity. The representative from the committee on preparation for ministry stepped in and said that wasn’t an appropriate question for this stage of the process. The man countered. “It’s in her statement of faith.” So the CPM rep allowed it, to my dismay. I hadn’t had any classes in theology yet, so I didn’t have much to say. I took a deep breath and said, “The Trinity is the three-in-one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
It was a terribly inadequate answer.
And ever since then, my husband Rob teases me about the day I told the presbytery about three-in-one oil.[2]
How many of you have a can of this at your house? It has been around for a long time. It was invented in 1894 for use on bicycles. I thought it was called three-in-one because it has three ingredients, but it turns out there are many more than three, and actually it’s called three-in-one because it was originally marketed as being able to do three things: “clean, lubricate, and protect.”[3]
I was not thinking of this oil when I called the Trinity the three in one, which is just as well since it’s probably not even a good analogy to the Trinity. The Trinity is not God made of three ingredients, nor God in three different applications. Eh…well maybe it’s not such a bad analogy.
In my defense, we sometimes refer to God as the Triune God. Triune literally means “three in one.”
We sang in our opening song today about “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.”[4] Three persons: God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. At least I got that part right in my answer at presbytery.
I resonate with Nicodemus in our scripture reading from John 3. He’s a learned man, a teacher, but he’s not doing very well at understanding what Jesus is talking about. Nic’s answers are kind of like my answer that day at presbytery…inadequate.
Nicodemus seems to have a gap in his understanding of God, and it’s a gap some of us may share. We have a lot of knowledge, but we’re not as comfortable with spiritual experience or spiritual understanding. We can talk about God and Jesus, but it’s harder to talk about the Holy Spirit.
Jesus uses the wind as an analogy:
[5] “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)
It’s easy to miss the point here because today we have science that maps the wind. We know where it comes from and we know where it’s going. We know how fast it’s blowing and we know whether it’s going to be cold or hot, humid or dry. But in Jesus’ day, the wind was a mystery.
The analogy is less about the movement of the Holy Spirit and more about the Jewish leaders’ failure to understand where Jesus has come from. Nicodemus comes to see Jesus because he has a sense that he and his colleagues have underestimated Jesus, but they don’t understand what Jesus is about because they didn’t know he was the son of God.
You’ve probably heard it said that the word Trinity is not in the Bible. It isn’t, but in today’s scripture, all three persons of the Trinity are present, just not grouped together into the word Trinity.
- Jesus is physically present as the one speaking with Nicodemus
- Nicodemus acknowledges that Jesus has been sent by God
- The Holy Spirit’s presence is implied by Jesus’ explanation to Nic about how to see the kingdom of God.
The first person to use the word “Trinity” was Tertullian (155-200 CE), an early C
hristian writer from North Africa. Tertullian describes the Trinity by their actions:
- “God the Father laid out the divine plan,
- God the Son carried out the will of the Father, and
- God the Spirit motivated the will of God in believers “[6]
Tertullian also called this the “household” of God. I like that word household.
When I started learning Hebrew, I discovered that one of the Hebrew words for God is plural. Elohim. Genesis 1 says, “In the beginning, God (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1
Elohim is a plural word. Even in Genesis, we see all three persons of the Trinity. God was there, of course. God spoke, and so Jesus, the incarnate word of God, was there. And the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
We see the Trinity in another story in Genesis. In chapter 18, Abraham is visited by three men. Tradition says these three men were angels, but Abraham calls them ??
This Russian icon shows the three angels being hosted by Abraham.[7] The name of this icon is “The Trinity.” We might not be used to thinking of the Holy Spirit as a person, but this icon shows us three persons, three angels.
Henri Nouwen invited us to meditate on this painting, this icon. “As we place ourselves in front of the icon in prayer, we come to experience a gentle invitation to participate in the intimate conversation that is taking place among the three divine angels and to join them around the table.”[8]
I don’t know about you, but I have never meditated on an icon. If you’d like to try that this week, there are copies of this icon available in the entryway.
Three. 3. III. Today is brought to you by the number three, but so is every day, because in every day we have all three. God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.
Many sermons about Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus focus on the part where Jesus says that to understand the kingdom of God you must be “born of the Spirit,” or “born from above,” or as some translations say, “born again.” Not literally, as Nicodemus hears this, but figuratively. Some faith traditions treat being born again much like being born as a baby, taking great care to note the exact time, date, and place where someone has accepted Jesus and received the Holy Spirit. I wonder what Jesus would think about that? I can imagine that the apostle Paul might equate a legalistic emphasis on being born again with the first century controversy over whether new believers had to be circumcised.
If we were to rephrase Jesus’ words about how to see the kingdom of God in more modern terms, maybe he would say that we need to use more than just head knowledge, more than just our minds, to understand the kingdom of God. We also need to use our heart and our gut. Another set of three. Mind, heart, gut. We don’t all use those three equally, but they all play a part in our responses to God and to the world around us. And the Holy Spirit works differently in each of these parts of our nervous systems.
My favorite way to explain the Trinity is the way C.S. Lewis describes it in his book Mere Christianity. He says that God is over us, Jesus is beside us, and the Holy Spirit is inside us. We’re surrounded. We’re never alone, even when we feel like we are.
A group of three is a community. A team. At weddings, we sometimes read Ecclesiastes 4:12:
“A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.”
The idea here is that the bride and groom are the first two people, and God is the third. This [9]braid of three is an echo of the three persons of the Trinity. There is greater strength, love, and community in a group of three than in just two, or in a single person alone.
Similarly, the twist of the strands in a twisted or braided rope helps not only to keep a rope together, but enables the rope to more evenly distribute tension among the individual strands.[10]
Three people working together help each other to balance the tensions of daily life, and to deal with challenges better. A conversation among three people can be more productive. Some churches intentionally put people together in mentoring groups of three people. Three is a good number for a prayer group. Who would you like to have in your group? Or maybe you already have one?
[11] From the very beginning, God was not alone, and neither are we. God is a family of three. And God created us to be connected with the three persons of the Trinity and with each other.
Writer Rachel Held Evans said, “The Holy Trinity doesn’t need our permission to carry on in their endlessly resourceful work of making all things new. That we are invited to catch even a glimpse of the splendor is grace. All of it, every breath and every second is grace.”
[12]Most of us probably don’t spend much time thinking about the Trinity. Hopefully we’re just used to knowing that all three of the persons of God are at work among us to teach us and guide us and remind us of what Jesus said.
Some of Jesus’ most memorable words are the last two verses of today’s scripture:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may 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.” (John 3:16-17)
God loves the world. God didn’t send Jesus to condemn the world, but to save it.
Standing by the River Thames in London since 1878 is a monument called “Cleopatra’s Needle.” It’s a stone monolith that was built 3,500 years ago for the Pharaoh. When this structure was moved to England, they decided to put a time capsule in the base, full of various aspects of life in Victorian England that would speak to future generations. It included a set of coins, some children’s toys, a city map and directory, a razor, and 12 photographs of the most glamorous women of the day. With all of that they put a verse from the Bible – John 3:16. They did this just in case the world in the future would lose sight or forget the message of God’s love for the world.[13]
If our world needs to hear anything in our day, it is that God loves us all.
And we see Tertullian’s description of the Trinity in these verses. “God the Father laid out the divine plan, God the Son carried out the will of the Father, and God the Spirit motivated the will of God in believers.” – Tertullian
God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, all three working together to help us all know how much they love us all.
[1] Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-in-One_Oil#/media/File:3in1oil.jpg
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-in-One_Oil
[4] Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash ; Hymn #136 Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty by Reginald Heber https://hymnary.org/hymn/WAR2003/136
[6] Rebecca Denova, “Trinity,” World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/Trinity/
[7] Andrei Rublev, 15th century, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(Andrei_Rublev)
[8] Henri Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord as quoted in Nouwen, Henri J. M.. Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit (p. 66). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
[9] Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope#:~:text=The%20twist%20of%20the%20strands,proportion%20of%20the%20total%20load.
[11] Photo by Tony Hand on Unsplash
[12] Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash
[13] https://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/worship/weekly-worship/monthly/2024-may/sunday-26-may-2024-trinity-sunday-year-b#topic7
United Presbyterian Church 
