The Holy Trinity

The Holy Trinity (A)

June 7, 2020

Text: Matt. 28:16-20

            Every Divine Service begins in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  That is to say, we begin in the baptismal water, immersed in God’s Name and in the very communion of Persons in the Divine Trinity.  There we are where God has placed His Name upon us, to mark us as His own, redeemed by Christ the crucified, temples of the Holy Spirit, children of the heavenly Father.  It begins with a death.  Old Adam is drowned and dies with all sins and evil desires as we confess our sins to God.  We are crucified with Christ.  Then the pastor declares that our sins are forgiven in the stead and by the command of our Lord Jesus Christ, who died and is risen from the dead, once again in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  And now there has been a resurrection.  We are raised with Christ in the Holy Absolution.  A new man, a new creation in Christ, emerges and arises from the baptismal waters to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.  Remember, it isn’t just that you were baptized on the day your parents brought you forward or you ambled up to the font.  It is that you are baptized, present tense, ongoing reality.  So you daily die as you drown Old Adam in repentance and confession of sin.  And you daily emerge and arise as you live by faith in the Holy Absolution won by Christ on the cross and given to you in the Word and holy Sacraments.  And that whole reality is played out concretely here and now at the beginning of the Service. 

            And then what?  What takes place right after the Confession and Absolution?  The teaching!  The Service of the Word!  It is the teaching of all things whatsoever the Lord has commanded.  And so you see how that which is happening here today, now, among you, the Divine Service, is the fulfillment of our Holy Gospel from Matthew 28.  Jesus tells His Apostles, His “sent ones,” there, on the mount, that as they go… after all, He has sent them!  Now they are to go, and as they go… “while going” the text actually says in Greek, “while travelling and going about their business”… they are to disciple-ize all the nations.  Jesus gives His Apostles, His officially sent ones, the authority to do this very thing, the authority He Himself has been given, the authority He has always had as God, now bestowed on Him by the Father as a Man.  And this authority is to be exercised in a very particular way.  Baptize.  In the Name.  The Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  And teach.  Not just anything, but the things I have commanded you.  And not just some of the things, but all of the things, whatsoever, that I have commanded you.  Even the things that are hard.  Even the things you don’t like.  Even the things that are beyond your comprehension… like the Trinity!  So we in the Apostolic Church are to do, grounded in Baptism, sins forgiven, now given to hear and learn the Word, keep it and treasure it. 

            And then what?  The Promise.  “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20; ESV).  This, too, happens concretely in the Divine Service.  Where and how?  At the altar.  Under the bread and wine.  The very Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, given and shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins.  The crucified and risen Lord Jesus meets you, not just spiritually, but bodily, and invades you in the eating and drinking, to be in you, to possess you, to enliven and strengthen you.  And where Jesus is, there is the Father, and there is the Spirit.  For Jesus is the eternally begotten Son of the Father, and as the Son now covers you with Himself in Baptism, and is within you, entering by your ears in the Word and by your mouth in the Supper, the Father now looks upon you as He looks upon Jesus, His beloved Son with whom He is well pleased.  The Father holds you within His bosom, and from the Father and the Son proceeds the Spirit who is poured out upon you, who takes possession of you and fills you with Himself.  And you are disciple-ized.  Right here.  Right now.  In this gracious encounter with the living God in His Service of Word and Sacrament.

            But this is not just a Sunday morning reality.  Luther tells you to begin each day, each morning as you wake up, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  You begin each day in the baptismal water, immersed in God’s Name and as God’s own Child.  You begin each day in repentance and the forgiveness of sins, in the reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection for you.  And it is in that reality and confidence that you go.  You get up and get to work and go about your daily life.  And while going, you confess the faith into which you are baptized and you love and serve your neighbor in your vocations, the callings, the relationships into which God has placed you in the world.  And in this way the leaven of the Christian faith works its way through the world.  In this way, you are salt, to season and preserve the world, and light, to enlighten the world to the Gospel of forgiveness and salvation in Christ.  To light the way here, to the font, to the teaching, to the disciple-izing, and the bodily presence of Jesus with and for His people. 

            So what happens here in the Divine Service goes out with you into the world.  You stand firmly rooted in your Baptism, immersed in the Name and salvation of God.  But so also, you go, and while going, you speak and act as Christ’s mouth and hands in the world.  And when you come home again from your daily work, before you go to bed, you once again invoke the Name, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Just as we end in the Name with the Benediction: “The Lord bless you and keep you.  The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you.  The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and + give you peace” (LSB p. 202).  “The Lord, the Lord, the Lord.”  You go out with His Triune Name, sins forgiven, new life bestowed, His saving presence with you always.  So you go to bed each day with His Name upon you, all sins covered by the blood of Jesus, secure in the life He bestows no matter what should happen in the night, knowing He is with you always, even through the very valley of the shadow of death. 

            Man cannot rationally comprehend what it is that God is one God, yet He is three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  This is not an article of doctrine to be understood, but to be believed and confessed.  Now you’ll bring out your children’s books about apples and eggs and shamrocks, and for the deficiencies of those as illustrations, I will simply refer those of you with a sense of humor to the Lutheran Satire video on St. Patrick’s bad analogies.  For the rest of you who have forgotten how to laugh, I will simply warn you here that each one of those illustrations ends up in one or more ancient heresies, so maybe let’s stop trying to illustrate what is beyond our mortal capability to grasp, and simply believe it and confess it as it has been revealed to us in Holy Scripture. 

            This morning we did just that in the Athanasian Creed.  We confessed the one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, neither confusing the Persons nor dividing the Substance.  We confessed the incarnation of the eternally begotten Son of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and all that He has done for our salvation by His life, death and resurrection, and is doing to deliver us on the Day of Judgment when He comes again in glory.  We confessed our Triune God, who has created us and all things in heaven and on earth, redeemed us as His own by the blood and death of Christ, and sanctified us to lead holy lives here in time and there in eternity. 

            Now, some of you have hang-ups about this Creed, and I suppose we should briefly address the objections.  The first is its length, which you just need to get over.  You have nothing better to do than confess the sublime things God has revealed to you about Himself. 

            Second, many people get tripped up by the word “catholic.”  This is not a reference to Roman Catholicism.   The word “catholic” comes from a Greek word that simply means “according to the whole,” as in according to the whole doctrine of Christ which should be taught and confessed by the whole Church of Christ of all times and places, as Jesus Himself says here in our text, “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (v. 20). 

            Then there are a couple more serious concerns.  After confessing line after line about the incomprehensible mystery of the tri-unity of God, we say “Therefore, whoever desires to be saved must think thus about the Trinity.”  The concern, I suppose, is that maybe you have to have a certain rational grasp of very complicated dogmatics to be saved.  Fair enough if that were true.  But remember, this Creed was written and is confessed by those who baptize infants.  So it can’t mean that, and never has.  Infants can’t grasp complicated dogmatics, obviously.  The point is, this is the God in whom you are to believe and whom you are to confess… this God alone, this Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in three Persons.  You cannot be saved by any other god than the One this Creed confesses.  Which is simply what Jesus says: No one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6).  And what the Apostles declare: There is salvation in no one else.  There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).

            Finally, there is the line toward the end about those who have done good entering into eternal life, and those who have done evil into eternal fire, which is to say, hell.  But this is simply a summation of Matthew 25 with the sheep and the goats.  By grace alone, through faith alone in Christ, all the bad the sheep have done and all their deficiencies are cancelled out by Jesus’ righteousness and covered in the blood of Christ.  So they are not mentioned, those bad things and sins.  Evil does not follow Christ’s sheep into eternal life.  Only the good God has accomplished through His Christians follows them.  But the goats are without Christ.  They have rejected Him.  They do not want Him.  So they only have their own works.  And all human works outside of Christ are only evil all the time.  And they only lead to eternal fire.  So there is nothing said in the Athanasian Creed that is not from the Holy Scriptures.  This is simply the scriptural truth, which is precisely what we are to confess. 

            And what a joy to confess it.  It is the sublime reality in which we are grounded and live each day and for all eternity.  It is the sublime reality bestowed concretely here and now in the Lord’s Church, in His Divine Service.  There is only one Name, as there is only one God, but this one God is three Persons.  And we are baptized into Him, immersed in His Name, taken into His unity, into His eternal communion.  It is a splendid mystery, an incomprehensible reality.  And we speak it again as we trace the sign of our salvation upon the body He has redeemed: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son (+), and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.