Love Makes a Trinity

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist


Trinity Sunday
More Light Sunday
Celebrating the One Who Love You Sunday


John 3:1-8


“Love makes a family,” we say in our efforts to describe the great diversity of relationship configurations in which modern American society provides care and support and concern for one another. Including within the church.

“Love makes a family,” we say here at Madison Square, because we have experienced in our own congregation so many of the different kinds of ways that families may be faithfully constructed. To the point that even our efforts to compile a comprehensive list of these many configurations inevitably overlooks beloved members of our community. Which is why the final report of the Madison Square Vision and Values and Priorities statement adopted by your session two weeks ago simply states that “children from all types of families mingle naturally in worship for all ages and in our age-appropriate activities in Children’s Church.”

Which is emphatically true.

Which is why we are observing “The One Who Loves You” Day in this very moment, halfway between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

I learned of this observance when I was speaking with your Interim Pastor Search Committee about what to expect upon arriving at Madison Square. “Celebrate the One Who Loves You Day”—or “Celebrate the Ones Who Love You Day”—came about, I was told, after a member of the Madison Square Worship Committee volunteered with the children’s church several years ago. It happened to be Mother’s Day. This church volunteer thought she would do a marvelous thing by inviting the children to celebrate their mothers on that day, only to end up with one of the children weeping in her arms because that child was parented by two fathers and wanted to know why they could not be included in the celebration. 

Right then and there the reality of modern families hit home for this faithful volunteer among our children. And when she took a second look around the room, she saw love making all kinds of families at Madison Square. Some children were parented by two mothers. Some children were parented by a mother and a father. Some children were parented by grandparents. Some children were parented by foster parents. Some children were parented in ways she did not know at the time.

And in that moment of simply paying attention to the parenting love of God in the lives of the children of the church, the Spirit of God transformed the family values of this faithful volunteer. And led her to conclude that if love also makes a church family, then Madison Square must update its traditions and celebrate everyone who extends the parenting love of our parenting God with the ones who need that parenting love the most.

And so we have.

On most days the ones who celebrate the parenting love of God in this updated tradition at Madison Square will likely be our children. But if we’re honest, on some days it might just be any one of the rest of us. The so-called “adults” in the room. Because don’t we all need the parenting love of God in our lives? Perhaps even more when we’re supposedly “all grown up”? Don’t we all need to celebrate the one who loves us—or the ones who love us—with the parenting love of God?

I know I do.

It is, after all, the parenting love of our parenting God that led a very adult Jesus to call God his “Abba,” or his “Father.” Or, to translate the Aramaic more accurately, his “Daddy.” Which was absolutely an update of the traditions of his time. Because the little boy Jesus knew in his bones what it was to rely on the parental love of God through his “non-traditional family” of an adoptive father and a scandalized mother. And the grown-up Jesus knew he needed to extend that parenting love of God to his own spiritual “band of brothers” (and, I would argue, more than few sisters) who would one day plant the seeds of the church family we have become two thousand years later. So he changed the way we understood God. And he changed the way we understood how to relate with God and with one another. And a primary way of expressing this change is through the language of the Trinity.

The God whose name was too holy to be pronounced became known as in the most intimate of familial terms: Father; Son; Holy Spirit, in the church’s classic Trinitarian formula. Or, as the 5th century theologian St. Augustine would put it: as Lover; Beloved; and the Love that binds them together.

And wow! What a difference that intimate, familial, ever-present divine love has made since we updated our traditions to reflect its ongoing revelation! And what a difference it can make when we continue to update our traditions to reflect its revelation today!

Because if the adult Jesus is, for all time, “God, the Beloved Son,” as we have come to know him in the church’s classic Trinitarian formula; and if the Holy Spirit is, for all time, the love that binds the Loving Father and the Beloved Son together, as the classically conservative fifth century theologian St. Augustine has taught us; then it is not at all beyond the scope of our faith tradition to say today that love makes a divine family, as well. That “love makes a Trinity,” just as much as love makes a human family or a church family.

Because it is not at all beyond the broadly accepted scope of our faith tradition to understand the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as Lover, Beloved, and the Love that binds them together, we can say with absolute assurance that the Christian view of God is that God’s very being is what we might today call a “non-traditional family.” Bound together by the grace of a mutually affirming and life-giving love for all time.

Because love isn’t what a solitary, self-sufficient God does, in Christian experience. Love is who God is! Bound up in a mutually affirming and ultimately life-giving family of grace that invites us to be “born again” into this very divinely human family. In God. And of God. In love. In all of our many configurations. Forever and ever. Amen!

And it is not at all beyond the scope of our faith tradition to say that when Jesus asks us to be “born again,” of water and Spirit, what he is asking of us is to let the Spirit of divine and steadfast love—swirling in a wind that will always blow wherever it chooses—transform our far too narrow knee-jerk reactions of what it means to be the family of God, so that we may participate in God’s triune vision for a divine home that binds our human family together in ways we can only begin to imagine.

Which is what Jesus was asking of Nicodemus in our Gospel lesson today.

The righteous, respected Pharisee, certified member of the religious establishment, Nicodemus knew Jesus was up to something divinely inspired, even when his peers put him down. So under cover of darkness, he approaches Jesus, in our text, to talk about the teaching of the kingdom of God. With the intention of bringing the clearly divinely led Jesus into the respected tradition of the elders, to which Nicodemus belongs.

But Jesus offers the exact opposite.

In the name of the God who is Lover, and Beloved, and the Love that binds them together, you can almost hear Jesus saying, I want to bring you, Nicodemus, and you, religious establishment into the updated tradition of the family of God. I want you to be “born again,” Jesus is saying to Nicodemus, as a participant in God’s holy family. And I want you to invite others to do the same.

Because what we know for sure in the story of Jesus is that spiritual rebirth really is possible. And in fact, it is necessary, for all who would keep up with the divine wind that “blows where it chooses.” And what we know for sure in the story of Jesus is that it is often the most “religious” people who need that spiritual rebirth.

The good news, for Jesus and for us, is that Nicodemus does exactly what Jesus asks him to do. He lets the Spirit of love re-make his participation in God’s holy family. Because although Nicodemus is only willing to approach Jesus in today’s lectionary text from the Gospel of John under cover of darkness, in a “secret meeting,” as a “closeted” supporter of Jesus, you might say, Nicodemus later comes out full force as a defender of Jesus among his fellow Pharisees. And he brings a mixture of myrrh and aloes to anoint the broken body of Christ after the crucifixion. And he aligns himself for all time with the kind of care for the Beloved Son of a Loving Father God that any model brother would perform when confronted with the Spirit-born grace of God’s steadfast love right before his eyes.

And the same thing can happen among the religious establishment of our day, as well.

Because the good news for us, on this Trinity More Light Sunday Celebrating the One Who Loves Us, is that the Spirit-born grace of God’s steadfast love continues to birth us over and over again as God’s beloved family. Especially as we come to the table of our parenting God in our common communion. Where there is always room for one more to “come home” and learn all over again what it is to love the one human family that we most assuredly are. Created by the God who will not ever let us go.

I pray it may be so. Amen.