Tubbo the clown
has a riddle for you.
With his best W.C. Fields impression,
he shows you four grapes
and asks if you can arrange
all four grapes
so that they are all
3 inches apart,
one from another
- all the same distance
one from another.
Sally thinks she knows
the answer.
She is the school swot
after all.
She arranges them into a square.
Tubbo points out
that the grapes opposite each other
are over an inch further away
than the grapes they are next to.
Kyle makes three of them
into a triangle
and puts the fourth in the middle.
Tubbo shows Kyle
that the grape in the middle
is closer than three inches
to the other three grapes.
Can it be done?
What's the answer?
[PAUSE]
Nicodemus has a riddle for you.
Jesus is telling him
that he has to be born again.
Nicodemus asks,
"can a man enter a second time
into his mother's womb?"
What's the answer?
How can you be born again?
And just what do all these riddles
have to do with Trinity Sunday?
[PAUSE]
Almughty God has a riddle for you.
One God.
Three Persons.
Each Person is God.
All Persons are distinct.
How is it done?
It boggles the brain.
Every time we see Jesus,
we see God.
But the Father is God,
so is Jesus the Father?
No!
He's the Son
and the Father and the Son
can't be the same.
A son can't be the same person
as his father.
By now,
Some brains have given up,
and the sanctuary carpet
is providing greater relief
and making more spiritual sense.
But, be of good cheer.
Surely,
the fact that you don't know
what's going on
makes you realise
that you believe in a God
who is incomprehensible
to the minds of men combined.
Everything
every concept,
every degree of inifinity,
that this universe contains
is minuscule to God.
[PAUSE]
Let's face it.
We can't even understand ourselves.
We are a riddle to ourselves.
We are all bundles
of contradictions,
even to ourselves.
We want to do what's good,
but we do what's bad instead.
We know we mustn't say that thing,
but we say the thing.
We know it's not kind to smirk
at Sally for getting the riddle wrong
but we smirk at Sally
for getting the riddle wrong.
We don't understand ourselves.
We don't know the answer
to the riddle that is us.
How do we expect to understand
The Trinity?
[PAUSE]
We need help from above.
We need help from above
to figure us out,
to make us better,
to renew and refresh minds
clouded with sin
and contradiction,
self-loathing and self-promotion.
We need the one from above.
And we have Him.
And He says,
"you must be born again."
Except He doesn't.
And this is where Nicodemus
gets confused.
You see,
Our Lord and Nicodemus
are conversing in Greek.
And the Greek word for "again:
is the same as the Greek word for
"from above."
Nicodemus hears "born again"
Our Lord says, "from above."
Our Lord is saying
that we need Creation, Redemption
and Sanctification
in order to receive Salvation.
To be born from above,
is to be born of
water and the Spirit
- Baptism.
And Our Lord explicitly commands us
to be baptised
in the Name of
the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
We are baptised,
born from above
through the one God
in three Persons.
It doesn't matter if it confuses us.
We rejoice in the confusion
because, quite frankly,
it makes more sense
than this chaotic and fallen world.
[PAUSE]
Nicodemus' riddle points us
beyond our world
to the Truth.
That's the God we embrace,
even if it doesn't give us
an easy answer to the riddle.
And what about our own riddle?
God knows the answer for that!
Yes.
God knows the answer for that.
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