Back in my coffee cart days, I would get into very random conversations with folks, like bartenders or hairdressers do. One morning, a woman told me about her general sense of deflation about the world because she felt there was nothing unknown. The time of big discoveries was done, and mystery was over. She lamented that if you don’t know something, all you have to do is Google it and there it is. It flattened her world.

I totally agree that sounds depressing. However, I don’t agree with her assessment of the world, that there’s no more mystery or undiscovered truths and ideas. But I understand why she would say that. I think our world likes to pretend that the answers are all known or at least knowable. After all, how often do you hear an expert in anything say, “I don’t know.” How often do doctors or politicians or teachers (or whoever should know things) say ‘I don’t know’?

The odd thing is, at least for me, the fastest way for a doctor to win trust is for them to say, “I don’t know, but let’s find out.” Imho, there are huge benefits to lean in to our not knowing thing and yet we tend to be pretty uncomfortable with saying so.

That’s why I love Nicodemus. He doesn’t shut down curiosity and wonder, even if it might upend what he thinks he knows. He doesn’t know something, so he comes in the night to ask. This is my kind of guy.

In response to Nicodemus’ questions, Jesus gives truly complex answers. Nicodemus is essentially asking, “Who are you?” And Jesus doesn’t give the Wikipedia version of an answer. He doesn’t say he’s the Messiah, the Son of God, or the second person of the trinitarian Godhead. He doesn’t say, “I am God incarnate with you as a fully human person who is also concurrently fully God in the same being.”

Not that these answers wouldn’t also be head scratchers, but what Jesus says in the text seems perhaps deliberately cryptic. Seems to me, you would have to know Jesus’ whole story to have a chance of understanding what he’s saying here, which Nicodemus could not have known at this point.  

So, what is Jesus’ purpose in answering this way? I wonder if his answer is meant to be more of a guide to Nicodemus for his own path to discovery, like a map for his journey. Jesus does not answer in a way to shut down further questions. These are answers to open up yet more questions, more curiosity, and therefore more openness to experience and learning.

Nicodemus comes wondering, “What is going on?” And he leaves asking, “WHAT JUST HAPPENED?” And that’s a good thing!

The timing of Trinity Sunday in the church calendar is quite perfect. We begin the church calendar with Advent, waiting for the birth of Christ. Then there’s Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and then Pentecost. We get the whole arc of Jesus life from December to end of May. And then comes Trinity Sunday.

Trinity Sunday is a sort of re-enactment of the Council of Nicea in 325, the first council of the whole church, bringing together people of the entire “world”, aka the Roman Empire, to essentially hash out the identity of Jesus. They too were asking Nicodemus’ question of “Who are you?”

After Jesus’ death, resurrection, and all that followed, the church had to reckon with the ramifications of the story that people witnessed. What does it mean that Jesus healed and forgave sins? What does it mean that he was resurrected? What does it mean, this coming of the Holy Spirit? And that Jesus professed being one with the Father, the one God of the Hebrews. How can a man be one with God while God is still God? And then there’s the Holy Spirit business? What is going on?

Based on Jesus’ answers to Nicodemus, I wonder if mystery and ‘not knowing’ is at least part of the point. Each generation, each culture, each group of people who walk their lives with Jesus get to answer the many questions generated by Jesus’ life for ourselves. We could have our own Council of Celebration, like the Council of Nicea, and ask ourselves and each other:

• Who is God? What is the nature of God?
• What does it mean that our God has relationship (1-in-3) woven into God’s being from the beginning?
• What does the Trinity tell us about relationships in our lives?
• What does God do in your life?
• Who do we pray to when we pray; Jesus or the Holy Spirit or Father?
• Is Christ bigger than Jesus? Has Christ always existed from the beginning?
• Where do you see Christ today?
• What do you expect from God? What does an answered prayer feel or look like?
• Do you expect to feel guidance from God? Comfort? How does this happen?
• How did and does Jesus’ death save us? Why was his death redemptive?
• Did he need to be fully human to save us? Did he need to be fully God for his death to be redemptive?
• What does that tell us about the nature of God that God died on the cross? Or the nature of God that he was born at all in a human body?
• How is a Trinitarian nature of God different than a singular nature? What does this mean for us?
• What does it mean that we are children of God, this 3-in-1 reality?

So many questions and so many more beyond this. My invitation to you is to answer some of these questions. One of the big tenets of Lutheran theology is that we are all priests, all leaders of our own faith journey for the sake of ourselves and our circles of care. We are all pastors, just some of us are more full time than others. So, you too get to ask and answer these questions. We can agree, disagree, and learn from each other, like hearing Lily’s testimony last week about God being like a tool. She’s asking these big questions and answering.

The Trinity is a big question and it is so big, it resists easy answers. So Jesus gave us a map; his life, teaching, death, and resurrection perhaps is the map. But so is our life with the Trinity today. You are an adopted, included, and wanted Child of God. You’re participating in this dance of life, the dance of the Trinity in our world. What do you see? What do you notice? What are your questions?  

Some folks dismiss the Trinity as meaningless. Or just nonsensical. Or clearly polytheistic. What I appreciate about the doctrine of the Trinity is that this doctrine takes seriously people’s witness of Jesus’ life, teaching, and death. When Jesus says, I and the Father are one, we’re listening to that and taking it seriously. When Jesus says he will send the Holy Spirit which will be with us as an extension of him, we’re listening and taking it seriously. The Trinity resists easy and tidy answers. It forces us into the humble position of not knowing and therefore open to learning.

God is, according to the Trinity doctrine, three persons in one Godhead. Inseparable, yet distinct. Does this make easy sense? No. But, it is not unlike the nature of electrons. Do you remember this from physics classes that electrons have the characteristics to be both distinct particles AND waves of energy, at the same time? Does this make sense? Not to normal, non-physicist folks, like you and me. And yet that is what the evidence says and so a whole world of quantum mechanics opens up from this discovery.

When you start learning physics, you learn Newtonian physics. The stuff that we can see and touch and intuitively understand…sort of. When you move past the basics, physics gets weird really fast. Even Einstein called quantum mechanics “spooky.” It’s weird, but that doesn’t make it not so. The Trinity strikes me as a sort of quantum mechanics description of God. Does it make sense? Not really, but if you take the Bible seriously, that’s the direction we go. We don’t fully know the depth of mystery of God and that’s OK. We can keep asking, wondering, paying attention, and watching for God’s action in our lives.

Today we’ll together recite the Nicene Creed, which is the creed written at the Council of Nicea in 325. This council was the first great struggle to defend the early church’s understanding of Jesus’ identity as fully Divine and fully human. We may not understand it all. We may not know if we fully believe every sentence. But we get to wrestle with the questions, ask, listen, learn, be surprised, and then ask again. We get to be changed, healed, and renewed without fully understanding how or why. Is that not grace? I give thanks for Jesus and for God who resist easy answers, encourage us to live in the questions, and the wonderful state of being of not knowing even as we still know. It’s all a dance of faith, trust, and belonging.

AMEN