Sermon: Holy Trinity - 2019

16 June 2019

Text: John 3:1-17 (Isa 6:1-7, Rom 11:33-36)

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Today, dear friends, we ponder a great mystery: the Holy Trinity.  God is one, and God is three: “We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.”  And why is this important?  Because this is how God reveals Himself to us.  Scripture teaches us that God is love, and love requires the love itself, a lover, and a beloved.  How all this works is not just a mystery to us, but a mystery that is beyond our understanding.  For in our world, three is never equal to one.  But God is not confined to our rules of logic and math, for He created logic and math.

God is who He is, just as He told Moses: “I am who I am.”  

We don’t understand everything about God.  But we do know certain things that he has revealed.  He created us.  He loves us.  And though we don’t understand Him, as His creatures, we love Him, we trust Him, and we seek to know what He has given us to know, and to do what He has given us to do.  For in God, our lives have meaning.  Apart from God, there is no meaning.  And this explains why so many people in our unbelieving age are confused, depressed, and seem to have no purpose in life.

In his beautiful expression of appreciation for “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God,” there is a word that St. Paul uses in our epistle reading to the Romans: “inscrutable” – “How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways!” This word “inscrutable” is only used this one time in the Bible.  It basically means “unknowable.”  But it doesn’t mean this in the sense that we just lack certain information, that if God would simply tell us, we would know.  This word means something more like “God’s ways are beyond the capacity of the human mind.”  And there is great comfort here, dear friends, for to live the Christian life doesn’t mean that one has to be an expert theologian or a master of the formal study of philosophy.  One does not have to be able to explain the Trinity to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.  Nobody understands God, because we can’t.  And this is comforting because it takes the pressure off of us.  Our job is not to know everything about God, but to trust God.  And why should we trust in Someone that we cannot know?  Because we know this much, dear friends: God is love.

Moments after a baby is born, he trusts his mother.  He is wired to do so.  In time, he will get to know her, and will develop mentally to be able to speak with her.  Over the course of life, he may even change places with her and become her caretaker, when she becomes again like a child, incapable of understanding, but still able to love and trust her son.

Our relationship with God is different than our relationship with our earthly parents because we will never grow up into equality with God.  He will always be our Father, and His ways will always be inscrutable.

And though the angels in heaven know more than we do, and though they stand in the Lord’s eternal presence, the Lord is still inscrutable to them as well.  They are not the equal of God, but serve Him and carry out His will.  They too sing to the Lord in humility: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory!”  The seraphim cover their face in the presence of Almighty God – even though they are not sinful.  And notice Isaiah’s reaction to being in God’s presence: “Woe is me!  For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”  

Isaiah knows that His sin makes him unworthy to stand in the mighty presence of God.  He has no wings with which to cover his face.  Isaiah knows that God’s ways are inscrutable, and his judgments are “unsearchable.”  He finds himself in a terrifying place: kneeling as a sinner before the altar of God.

This discomfort is precisely because God’s judgments are “unsearchable” and His ways are “inscrutable.”  We like to know what’s going on.  We like to be in control.  But when it comes to God, dear friends, we are most certainly not in control.  And this is a humbling thing. 

Nicodemus, the great teacher of Israel, was likewise humbled in the face of God.  This “ruler of the Jews” to whom the nation looked up to as a master and instructor was so discomforted that he snuck out in the middle of the night to see Jesus.  And here Jesus lays out the Christian faith in its simplicity, and also in its inscrutability, to Nicodemus.  Jesus the rabbi – Jesus who is God and who was with God in the beginning – teaches Rabbi Nicodemus (and us): “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

This is a mystery to Nicodemus, for he has not yet learned what salvation truly is.  It is a complete regeneration by the grace of God, a rebirth.  This second birth is not accomplished at the womb of one’s earthly mother, but at the font of Mother Church, being “born of water and the Spirit.”  And Jesus would further teach the apostles what this mystery meant when He commissioned them to make disciples by baptizing them “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

And again, we don’t demand understanding of God when we baptize a person: whether one day old or a century old.  The job of the person being baptized is to “fear, love, and trust in God above all things,” and the Lord washes him of his sins, and places His own divine name – the name of the Most Holy Trinity upon him: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  The baptized person is born again, beloved of the Father, redeemed by the Son, and regenerated by the Holy Spirit – born again by water and the Spirit.  

But what about Isaiah.  We left him kneeling at the altar in agony on account of his sins.  But remember that God is love.  Even Isaiah’s sins do not remove the love of God from him, dear friends.  For while he is at the holy altar, he says, “one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar.”  Imagine the fear that Isaiah suffers – a poor, miserable sinner staring down a burning coal from the holy altar.  This sacred element is brought to his lips.  And instead of more agony, instead of wrath and punishment, Isaiah finds love.  He finds mercy.  He finds forgiveness.  He finds acceptance.  For Isaiah recounts that the angel: “touched my mouth and said: Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

Isaiah deserved the wrath of God, but instead received forgiveness and mercy.  God is love.  Nicodemus came in shame, but instead of wrath, received mercy.  Nicodemus was the very first person to ever hear these comforting words concerning Christ: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

We cannot possibly understand how God is three and one at the same time.  It is beyond our mind’s ability to know how Jesus is eternal and yet the Son of God, how He is infinite and yet contained in a finite body.  We do not understand the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – but we can and we do confess the Holy Trinity.  And better still, our confession is not some kind of metal exercise, but rather the Trinity is placed upon us as His name is seared onto our foreheads like the burning coal on Isaiah’s lips, taking away our sin, and atoning our guilt, giving us a new birth, and bearing upon our bodies the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  And in this baptism, in this Word, in this reception of the Lord’s mercy on our lips at the holy altar – we receive the Lord’s love, and we trust Him – even though we cannot possibly understand His unsearchable judgments and inscrutable ways.

For this, dear friends, is what the doctrine of the Holy Trinity means to us: “God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.”

We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.  We worship the God who is love, who takes away our guilt, and who atones for our sins.  And though His ways are inscrutable, He so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.  For the Son of Man was lifted up, and whoever believes in Him has eternal life by being born again by water and the Spirit:

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.