The First Sunday After Pentecost: Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2003
Exodus 3:1-6; Psalm 93 or Canticle 2 or 13; Rom. 8:12-17; John 3:1-16
It has often been said that there is no such thing as a stupid question. There is. The question Nicodemus asked Jesus must be one of the stupidest on record: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
Jesus apparently exercises divine restraint when he merely explains further that being born again means being “born of water and the Spirit.” When Nicodemus asks further, “How can these things be?” this time he asks an important question. To this question, however, Jesus retorts, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” It was a sad state of affairs when even the good teachers of Israel were too dense to realize that the spiritual life demanded powerful, internal changes in the lives of the faithful.
Admittedly, such a call can be daunting. Moses, when called by God to be the instrument of deliverance for his enslaved people, was “afraid to look at God.” Yet the meaning of all life is to enter into a life that is so radically different from the state of tragic, disastrous alienation in which humans live, that Jesus says it is to be “born anew.” One is “born anew” not by good intentions and earnest effort, but by turning one’s life over completely to God in Jesus. By that belief, we receive the Holy Spirit — Jesus’ “own first gift for those who believe,” as the liturgy says (BCP, p. 374) — who then enables us truly to become the children of God and address him in words of deep, familial intimacy: Abba.
The new life is a relationship whose foundation is the perfect, invincible love by which the universe was made and redeemed. It is perfect intimacy with God, Abba, in which we frightened, hesitant sinners find the perfection of joy for which we were made and redeemed.
Look It Up
According to today’s lesson from Romans, what else happens in the lives of the faithful when the Holy Spirit enables them to cry Abba?
Think About It
In reflecting upon the lesson from Romans, note that suffering with Christ and being glorified with Christ are conditions of being counted fellow heirs with Christ.
Next Sunday
The Second Sunday After Pentecost, June 22, 2003 (Proper 7B)
Job 38:1-11, 16-18; Psalm 107:1-32 or Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32; 2 Cor. 5:14-21; Mark 4:35-41 (5:1-20)
