Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The text this morning is from Genesis, the first and second chapters:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Thus far the text.
Dear friends in Christ,
Today being the Sunday of the Holy Trinity, the Sunday, and our God, from which we as our beloved congregation derive our name, we should spend some time delving into this Trinity. After all, in the first three verses of the entire Scriptures, we see a picture of the Trinity.
First, God created the heavens and the earth. Of course, from the creeds, we know this is a picture of our beloved Father. The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Of course, we see that our dear Holy Spirit is here, doing what He does best, hanging out around the water. And God said… this is our dear, precious Jesus Christ, the Word of God, speaking out into the universe and creating all things, everything from no thing but Himself. He speaks and the universe is shaped to His will.
This is our Trinity, and they are there as we see all through the New Testament, they are there from the beginning of time, and before. They are there in the first lines of Scripture. They are there, for they have always been there, and so they shall always be. For just as we confessed today, the Trinity is uncreated, infinite, and eternal. They have always been, they are, and they shall always be. As such, it’s no surprise we find them in the very beginning of the Scriptures, for even there they inspired Moses to write about them, that man may seek them and find there the joy that is beyond compare in understanding just a little bit about them.
You see, today is Trinity Sunday. We need to know about the Trinity. We need to. We need to know that is they who create, preserve, and sustain us. The faith that has been given to us about this Trinity is important, and it’s serious.
The Trinity is important to understand, at least as much as they have revealed to us, for getting the Trinity wrong leads us into false doctrine and false thinking. False doctrine, false thinking, they are sins. We all have these types of sins, though, for we cannot help ourselves.
But let’s think about it this way, we all have a working knowledge of the roof that is laid over our head. Look at it, it’s beams are supported by nails and pressure and angles. We may not understand everything about it, how it was built, how it was put into place, how it stays there, but I guarantee you, as soon as you saw something wrong with it, you’d know, right? If you saw a truss hanging down one Sunday, you wouldn’t walk into the church, would you?
The Trinity is the same way; we may not understand everything about the Trinity, for they have not seen fit to reveal everything about themselves. What was the universe like before it was created? What is eternity like? How is it possible to be three person but only one God? We don’t know everything, but as soon as we get something wrong about them, or someone else does, we know something’s up.
That is why today and every year, as a critical point of our faith, we confess our creed today, the Athanasian Creed. It is a 1400-year-old creed that was written to combat a certain heresy called Arianism. Arianism taught that the Son of God was created, that He was less than the Father. This may not sound too bad, but if that’s the case, it ruins quite a bit of everything.
All of the sudden, if Arianism is true, if Jesus is less than the Father, we need to ask was His sacrifice enough? After all, if Jesus is a creature, created in the beginning, as we read in Genesis, we know that no creature could redeem another creature. And if Jesus is a creature, then, Jesus could not have redeemed humanity because He is, in essence, not the God we thought He was.
When we hear this heresy, we know that it’s not right. We may not understand it completely, but we know it’s not right. That’s because the faith that has been granted to you by the Holy Spirit in your baptism, where He was hanging out over the waters, recognizes this. It knows what is false.
Or what if I told you that we worship three Gods? Or what if I told you that Jesus Christ is Lord, but not the Father or the Spirit? Or what if I told you that Jesus and the Spirit had nothing to do with creation? Or what if I told you that the Father and Jesus have nothing to do with creating or sustaining your faith?
You see, you recognize falsehoods. You recognize heresies. That’s because you have faith. And this faith is important, and we work to describe the object of our faith. Putting our faith into words is good, and it helps us recognize what is true and what is false, even if we don’t always understand all that is true.
The problem with these falsehoods about the Trinity is that when you change the truth, you change the God you worship. Not that God changes, but you change the God you imagine. That’s why we work to get this right, because we don’t want to get it wrong, leading us into heresy, distrust of God, distrust of His promises, distrust of His Word. These things lead only to hell, never to His arms of love, never to eternal life.
But, Pastor, you say, I’m not sure I CAN believe everything rightly. After all, I am a sinner. I am a sinner whose ability to know and love my God is small. And yes, you’re right, for I am the same. But even for our sins, even our sins of thought, not just word and deed, even for our sins where we aren’t believing the right thing, Jesus died for these sins.
There is no sin Jesus has not died for. There is no sin that is not covered in His blood. And as such, even as we think about God and perhaps even think the wrong thing, we come to His Word where He has told us plainly what we should know, and no more. When we see, then, our sin reflected in His Law, we repent. Then we come here, and with the voice of Jesus, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, I pronounce to you that ALL your sins are forgiven. It’s not just the sins you DID this week, it’s not just the sins you FELT this month, it’s not just the sins you have spoken this year, it is ALL your sin, from birth until death. It’s all the sin you have, it’s all the sin you don’t know, it’s all the sin you can’t comprehend. But Jesus does. He knows that sin, even the sin of wrong doctrine, and He forgives you, for He has brought you to repentance of your sins.
Your faith, the faith given to you in your baptism, where you had the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, your faith desires to keep killing your Old Adam, your sin. And so it does. But this Old Adam, man, he loves to come back alive. And so our faith continually works within us, because God is continually at work within us. It works to kill our sins, for our sins have already been taken by Jesus Christ upon the cross. And it works to make us right, for we are resurrected into Christ’s resurrection in our baptisms.
You see, we are killed to our sin and raised to new life, a perfect life, a whole life of complete trust and faith in God. We may not see it all yet, but it is there. It’s like a painting waiting to be revealed. It sits just out of view, but you know the painting is finished. You trust that the painting is there. So it is with our perfect trust. It is finished, by Christ. We trust it’s there, we trust it’s for us, but it’s hard to see. We shall soon see it, but not fully yet.
Our Jesus, our Trinity even, work to help us trust, work to help us have faith and hope. And they work even to show us rightly who they are. That is why we look to this Athanasian Creed today, for while the writer was not inspired the same way as Paul was when He wrote his letter to the Romans, the writers of the Athanasian Creed speak truthfully about our God, and so we may know more about Him and what He has done for us. But they also help us know when things are false. And when those things are false, we are given the ability to run away, to seek after truth. And so we hang our hats, so to speak, always on the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, all for you. For this is what the Trinity is always working to point us back to: Jesus for you, always, for your sin, for your doubt, for your fear, for your disbelief, that you would be forgiven those things and be brought back into the true faith as we find it in the Scriptures. And so it is, that we trust this, in Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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