Sermon — May 30, 2021 (Trinity Sunday)
The Rev. Greg Johnston
I sometimes think that what we want out of religion is Jesus, but what we get is the Holy Spirit.
We want the incarnate God who we can see, and touch, and hear. We get the odorless, colorless wind that gently blows through the world. We want the teacher who speaks to us face to face, who tells stories and gives commandments, however enigmatic or difficult they may be. We get the “Spirit of Truth” who mysteriously guides our consciences and conversations with a “still, small voice.” (1 Kings 19:12) We want the healer who will cure us, the shepherd who will guide us, the politician we can finally trust enough to follow wherever he leads. We get the “wind” who “blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” (John 3:8)
We want the flesh-and-blood certainty of Jesus. We get the wispy wisdom of the Holy Spirit.
It’s ironic that for all our talk of the Incarnation, the incarnate God isn’t really what we Christians have experienced for the last two thousand years. Our two most holy days are Christmas and Easter, but it’s not the Incarnate God of Christmas, born into the world in human flesh, whom we encounter week by week. Nor is it the Risen God of Easter, walking through walls but embodied all the same, emphatically not a ghost but there, in the flesh. The God we get to know instead is the God of the long “Season after Pentecost,” the aptly-titled “Ordinary Time” through which we trudge as we count the passing hours and days and weeks, the unseen Spirit whom we can sometimes feel in prayer but never quite grasp or hold onto.
God’s Spirit blows, Jesus says, wherever it wishes. And as much as we might like to pin her down, the Holy Spirit is in fact as impossible to control or predict as the wind. This can be an unsatisfying God. Sometimes we crave something a little more substantial. But I want to suggest to you this Trinity Sunday the Holy Spirit, the poor Third Person of the Trinity isn’t a lackluster replacement for the Second Person, Jesus. I think it’s the case that what we want is Jesus; but what we need is the Holy Spirit.
There’s a book by the psychologist Alison Gopnik called The Gardener and the Carpenter. The title’s a metaphor for two different ways we look at learning and growth. Gardening and carpentry, after all, are two very different processes. The carpenter begins with a product in mind: a chair, or a table; in fact, a particular design for a chair or table. The craftsman’s skill is in how precisely and elegantly he can take that design from his own mind and create it from a few pieces of wood. The gardener, on the other hand, works with living, growing creatures. She can’t force her flowers or vegetables to grow in precisely the way she plans. But she knows that if she can provide just the right balance of light and water, just the right kind of soil, just the right amount of protection from rabbits and bugs, they’ll grow on their own—and grow into shapes and configurations she never could have imagined.
So are we carpenters or gardeners? do we begin with a pre-conceived notion of the way things ought to be, and chisel and cut them and shape them until they fit our plan? Or do we try to create a garden, a healthy environment within which things can grow and thrive? Gopnik is writing about raising children, but we can ask her questions about any part of our lives.
Do we start with a vision of the way we want our child to be when they’re adults, and focus on how to get them there? Or do we try to create a garden for them to grow in whatever direction they grow? When we start a new ministry or plan a special event, do we begin with an idea of the way it ought to be and try to figure out how to execute the plan, or do we begin with an idea of who ought to be there, and risk our initial vision disappearing as things change? In our various professions and vocations, do we start with an idea of where we’d like to be in five or ten years and pursue it, or do we start with what we love about where we are now, and follow the best parts of it wherever they lead?
The point is not that gardening is better than carpentry, that the goal-oriented carpenter is somehow inferior to the more free-spirited gardener. The point is that they work with different kinds of materials. A pile of lumber, no matter how well-nurtured, will never grow its way into a chair; nor can a gardener know exactly what that year’s mix of rain and sun and seeds will bring. A carpenter is an expert at shaping inanimate objects according to her own will and plan. A gardener excels in supporting animate objects as they grow according to some unknown internal plan.
It would be a bit too cheesy, at this point in the sermon, to note that Jesus was a carpenter. I said that we want Jesus, and we need the Holy Spirit; we want the hands-on teacher who gives us easy answers and tangible results, but we get the invisible breeze who gently guides us on our way. But this isn’t to say that Jesus is a carpenter and the Spirit is a gardener, as if they were in some kind of struggle for our souls. No, the point is that God is a gardener, and you are the garden; that, as in Gopnik’s original use of the image, God is a parent, and you are a child, and it’s God’s job, at a point, to step back and let you grow.
“For all who are led by the Spirit of God,” Paul writes, “are children of God.” (Romans 8:14) “You have received a spirit of adoption,” (8:15) and become “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ,” (8:17) and this is what it means, in our gospel’s words, to be “born again” or “born from above”; not to adopt a particular political or religious identity, but to be born of the Spirit who blows wherever she chooses. (John 3:3, 5, 8) At our baptism, God adopts us God’s own children, destined to grow into the shape of Christ, to grow to be more like Christ, as the Holy Spirit continually guides us in cooperation with our own spirits. And this is relationship we have with God is more like gardening than carpentry.
God plants in us a seed with the stories of Jesus’ human deeds on earth, and then God nurtures the billion different ways in which we respond in love. God’s Holy Spirit tends and waters our spirits as they grow. And time and again, God brings us by the Holy Spirit into the light of Christ in which our souls find their nourishment. The Holy Spirit doesn’t walk among us, or talk to us, or heal us like Jesus did. But the Holy Spirit guides us as we read the Bible and makes the living Word come alive for us again. The Holy Spirit draws us into Christ’s presence in the sacraments and in prayer. The Holy Spirit lays out for us innumerable ways in which to heal one another and the world, and empowers us to carry them out. Like any good parent, God doesn’t try to force us into the shape God wants us to be. God gives us what we need to learn and grow, and a few nudges in the right direction along the way. In the Holy Spirit, God remains present throughout our lives but not in the most obvious way. And then God brings us, at the last, face to face with the “one and eternal glory” of the Trinity; still God’s children, but fully grown, “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:17)
So if you ever find it frustrating that God won’t speak more clearly in your life, that God won’t intervene more actively in the world, remember that Joseph may have been a carpenter, but God is not. The “spirit of adoption” that “[bears] witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (8:16) is the same flighty spirit that “blows where it chooses,” and that that’s no mistake. Because God has given us all that we need to grow up, to grow into our full stature as joint heirs with Christ—and God has given us the space we need to do it. Amen.