The Glory of the Holy Trinity

Good morning! It’s Trinity Sunday the beginning point for the rest of the church year until it begins anew in Advent. It’s an appropriate place to think and meditate on the Holy Trinity. As we’ve walked through the rest of the church seasons, we’ve been walking with the ancients, who knew of God, as revealed to Moses, but then as we’ve moved through Advent to Epiphany, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, was revealed. In Lent and Holy Week, that revelation of Jesus as our atonement, our at-one-ment with God, became clear. In Easter, his declaration as King and all of the hope that comes with his resurrection was made known. And now after Pentecost, the Holy Spirit has come in power bringing his gifts to sustain the Church until the End of All Things. So the glory of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit has been revealed, and here on Trinity Sunday, the Church is in a position to ponder the glory of God as revealed in the Holy Trinity. As we do so, we need to fight the temptation to throw our hands up in the air at grappling with the one and the three of the Trinity as if we have no responsibility to apprehend that reality because it’s too hard. It’s somewhat understandable as we look back at church history, at others who have wrestled with how to formulate the true doctrine of the Trinity in a way that gets it right, it’s understandable as we look at all the ways to get it wrong that we might want to shut our mouths, fold our arms, and check out. But if we do, if we reduce our relationship with the Trinity to an empty “I believe in the Trinity (whatever that might mean)” because we have to, we miss out on the blessings of God’s revelation of himself to the world, and part of our brain dies, part of our heart dies, part of our humanity dies. It’s that serious. We can’t just check out because three and one is hard.

So where can we begin if we want to engage our hearts with the glory of the Trinity? We can begin with a set of words passed down for more than a millennium, words that were only possible after well-meaning exegesis was revealed as heresy, after church fathers were exiled, and heated debate turned into a fistfight at a church council. These words were hard-fought by some of the most brilliant minds of the church and have stood the test of time. I’m speaking of the Nicene Creed. If you want the words and ideas of Scripture that talk about the Trinity distilled into one unified statement, look to the Nicene Creed. Each of the three sections is under the headship of the persons of the Trinity. “We believe in God the Father....” “We believe in Jesus Christ....” “We believe in the Holy Spirit....” All Christian belief flows through the hard-fought doctrine of the Trinity. Phrases like “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God,” might seem unnecessarily redundant, but they put creative heresy to rest. Jesus isn’t a glorious creation from God, he’s God from God. He’s not a lesser degree of God compared to the true God; no, he’s true God from true God. He isn’t some other kind of being or essence, distinct from God, he is Light from Light. The Nicene Creed doesn’t let you use creativity to make up your own version of God with weasel words. It lays out very plainly who God is, in response to creative and sometimes well-meaning heresy. And who God is is what we should be focusing on on Trinity Sunday. But this isn’t a class on the Nicene Creed. It’s a sermon. Sermons should be based on Scripture. While the hard fought words of the Nicene Creed lay out the truth accurately and plainly, Scripture, as our letters from home, lays out the truth to our hearts, beautifully, with awe and wonder. As Christians, the dialog between Scripture and the Creed should be ongoing. Each of them can be twisted and taken out of context to lead us away from the truth. So we need them both, and we need the Holy Spirit to illumine our hearts and minds as we think through the great things of God. So we come to Scripture, and what’s the right question to ask? Tell us about the Trinity? No. Tell us about the greatness of God. Tell us about his great love. Tell us about our adoption, about being saved from the hell that we justly deserve. And Scripture’s answer to those real and life-changing questions points to the Holy Trinity. So the Trinity is not some concept that we need to justify by looking at Scripture, the Trinity is the picture Scripture paints for us of who God is, of what his love looks like, of how his plan of salvation was formed and perfectly accomplished for his great glory and our true joy.

Our passages today give us a taste of this, but we can see it throughout Holy Scripture. We see a progressive revelation of who God is, first to a stuttering shepherd, a murderer hiding in a self-imposed exile. At the burning bush, God reveals himself as the foundational ground of all being, the unmoved mover, “I am who I am,” but he’s not distant and far off. He’s embodied as a flame burning in a bush, making the ground around him holy. So he’s not only the source of being, he’s the source of holiness and a prefiguring of Pentecost when the fire of God made the Church holy by his very presence. While the three persons of the Trinity aren’t fully revealed in this moment with Moses, the outlines of God’s trinitarian self-portrait begin to take shape.

In our Gospel passage , we see the outworking of the plan of God for salvation. Here, the Son acts as the Ambassador Member of the Trinity, laying out God’s heart for the salvation of the world. And he does it by pointing to another member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. He says:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

And he points to the Father’s stance of love for the world in vs. 17, just after our passage here:

“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” As Jesus lays out the plan of salvation he deferentially points to the other Persons of the Trinity. And this adds more detail to God’s self-portrait. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit work together in perfect unity of purpose, with perfect interplay, with perfect love within the Trinity, for the Trinity. Before God is love towards us, God is love among the Three Persons of the Trinity. There is nothing lacking in God’s love within the Trinity even before God acts to save us. God exists in perfect love, even if nothing else ever existed. But that perfect love, perfect unity, perfect power, is also perfect creativity and made a world and people in their image. And when it was corrupted through sin, the Triune God graciously moved in perfect unity to bring about a perfect salvation that would make creation incorruptible forever, by drawing us into union with God and making us holy, just like the ground around the burning bush, by his presence.

We see a picture of this in Romans. Our hearts are pierced and stitched into God by the thread of the Holy Spirit. And we get this sense of adoption. Our stance towards God isn’t hostile any longer, but our hearts look to God as a beloved child looks to her loving father. Our cynicism melts. We’ve changed teams. We’ve changed families. We’ve changed citizenships. We’ve changed identities. We are at home with God, because the Triune God moved in perfect unity, the Father sending, the Son going, the Spirit giving sight to see God’s love for us, proven for us with a wooden stake in the ground where God himself hangs with the stance of welcome and acceptance, friendship, love, and adoption, so that those who can’t be saved by concepts can be saved by sacrifice, by being present, by love. The perfect plan of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is not a mental exercise, but an outpouring of himself in love, so that you can be in his presence and thereby changed forever into the holy being of love God wants you to be. Blessed be God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever. Amen.