“God loves you.” That could be a profound, life-changing announcement, or a platitude that does little to assuage our hurt or give courage to a downtrodden spirit. What makes the difference?
It is a platitude if it expresses a belief in the love of a far-distant God dwelling somewhere in outer space. But what makes the statement chock full of life-altering potential is the belief that God’s love isn’t “out there,” a warm feeling for us on a distant star, but has walked the earth and shown that love in very tangible ways. John has told us that God “so loved the world” (3-16) that God gave us the only Son. God’s love, as the old commercial would say, is “up close and personal.” God’s love walked on our soil, made friends with us, ate and drank at our table and died for us. God’s love took our flesh, bone and our blood to give us a share in God’s life.
That accounts for two persons of the Trinity. Where is the Spirit in all this? The Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son and is that gift of love to us. We don’t just assent to a doctrine, but come to know, in a most personal way, about this love because we have been invited into it by the gift of the Spirit. The love of God is not an abstraction; we have firsthand experience of it through the Spirit — God’s presence here and now.
John’s gospel today repeats what we believe about the Trinity and what is continually depicted in biblical passages in both Testaments: God is not detached from our lives, but is intimately involved with us.
That involvement is shown in the frequency of action words in today’s passage. Jesus says he has more to tell his disciples and promises them the Spirit. The gift they will receive is a very present and active Spirit who will: come, guide, speak, declare, glorify and “take what is mine and declare it to you.” What will all that activity be about? It will be the Spirit drawing us into the love of God and, through that encounter, enabling us to live Jesus’ commandment to love God and to then love our neighbor: good friend or enemy; our color skin or another; long-time resident or recent arrival; law abiding or lawbreaking, etc.
We don’t celebrate a doctrine of the church today, but the unfathomable mystery that is God, who chose to dwell among us, “fully human and fully divine,” and then did not leave us orphans, but gave us a continual share in God’s life through the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is this Spirit that continues to connect us to God and one another in love.
Our belief in this relationship should open our eyes and make us conscious of God’s presence, as the mystics say, “closer to us than we are to ourselves.” The doctrine of the Trinity is about divine love being constantly poured into the world. This is not a day for the preacher to search for “explanations or examples” of the Trinity. Today is not about words and formulas, but about celebrating the living presence of our God who dwells in our midst. Today we praise. If we want more information about the trinitarian conflicts in the early church and how the doctrine developed, then tomorrow we can open our books.
I am currently reading a book on our present and recent presidents. In such biographies we learn about the key moments in someone’s life. So also, God has a biography of sorts. When we reflect on Scriptures we discover something of God’s biography, the key moments that relate to us — creation, redemption and sanctification. We learn that God has been at work on our behalf: creating us and our world; rescuing us when we chose to go it on our own, and got lost; and then staying with us, drawing us to God and one another in love. We will express this in our Creed today — not merely a statement of theological truths, but our belief in what kind of God we have and what our God has done and continues to do for us.
We try to describe or explain God to others and our words fail us. God is just too big for words and can’t be squeezed into our verbal boxes. What we can do is share our experience of God with one another: when God has been with us in our pain, joy, longing, love, life-changes, etc. We do our best to name, aided by the lens of Scripture, what we experience of God’s presence in our lives.
These experiences aren’t identical and Scripture reminds us that we need to broaden our notion of God when we speak of and try to describe God. Our Creed tells us today that God is Father, Son and Spirit. But scripture also helps us name God in other metaphors: when we are lost and then found we call God “Shepherd”; when our spirits are parched by long periods of dry prayer God is “Living Water”; when we are frightened God is a “Mother Hen”; when we are alone God is “Friend”; when we have a mighty task to accomplish God is our “Co-worker, “etc. God is One and God is Three and God is still infinitely more — always creating, redeeming and sanctifying us.
In Romans (chapters 1-3) Paul has laid out what the human condition is like on our own — sinful. He then describes how God intervenes through the life of Jesus (3:21-31). In today’s passage Paul begins to lay out the facts of what God has done for us. We have reason to boast, not because of what we have done, but because of God. “The love of God has been poured out into our hearts.”
We already have, Paul tells us, “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Earlier in his letter he told us we had rebelled against God and so were stuck in our sins. Now we are at peace because of God’s initiative. It always begins with God taking the initiative. We have hope that, in God, we will not be disappointed, as life so frequently can do to us. That hope is certain because we are united with God now, despite our “afflictions.” God’s love will not dry up or abandon us.
For Paul, the proof of God’s love and the resulting peace that we have, are because God sent Jesus Christ. If we share peace and love with one another it is not something we accomplish on our own, but because of God’s action in Jesus. Christ shows us the way to God and God gives us the Spirit. The Spirit accompanies us on our journey to God, while pouring out God’s love into our hearts. The three — God, Christ and the Spirit — are all working to sustain us now so that we can enjoy final union with God.