The Holy Trinity

The Holy Trinity (A)

June 4, 2023

Text: Matt. 28:16-20

            The Divine Service is the concrete realization of Jesus’ Words to us in our Holy Gospel.  The Service begins in the Name Jesus here gives, the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Think about what that means.  From the very start of the Service, we are planted in the baptismal water, immersed in the very communion of Persons in the Divine Trinity.  Where God has written His holy Name on us, to mark us as His own, redeemed by Christ the crucified, temples of the Holy Spirit, children of the heavenly Father. 

            And then a death.  The confession of sins.  Old Adam is drowned and dies with all sins and evil desires.  We are crucified with Christ.  And then a resurrection.  The pastor declares that all our sins are forgiven in the stead and by the command of our Lord Jesus Christ.  You are raised as a New Creation in Christ’s resurrection, to live before Him in His righteousness and purity, once again, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Confession and Absolution is always a return to Holy Baptism.  Baptism, remember, is not just something that happened to you one time.  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.  Confession and Absolution, individually, and in the Divine Service, and daily repentance and faith in the Gospel, is the concrete exercise of that reality.  Death with Christ.  Resurrection with Christ.  In the Name of our Triune God.  So, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”… that’s you… “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19; ESV). 

            And then what?  What happens next in the Divine Service?  The teaching!... “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (v. 20).  The Service of the Word!  Jesus sends, first of all, His Apostles, His sent ones, to do this very thing.  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.  The Gospel is to go out from Israel into the whole world.  Jesus authorizes His Apostles do this with the authority He, Himself, has been given.  All authority in heaven and on earth.  The authority He has possessed from all eternity as God with the Father and the Holy Spirit.  The authority the Father has now bestowed upon Him as a Man.  And this authority is to be used in a very particular way.  To baptize.  In the Name.  And to teach.  Not just anything, but “the things 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!  Now, we in the Apostolic Church are inheritors of this, and so we are to do.  Grounded in Baptism, sins forgiven, now given to hear and learn the Word, keep it, treasure it… we go forth and teach it, and confess it.  The Service of the Word: Psalms, hymns, the Scriptures, and the preaching… “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

            And then what?  The Promise: “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (v. 20).  Where does that happen, concretely, in the Divine Service?  At the altar.  Under the bread and wine.  The Service of the Sacrament!  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.  He 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 in Him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily (Col. 2:9).  And so, with Jesus in you, and you in Him, 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, right when you wake up, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Each day immersed in the baptismal water, God’s own child I gladly say it, in repentance and forgiveness, in the reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection for you.  And so, in this reality and confidence, 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, the responsibilities into which God has placed you in the world.  You are God’s mask.  He is hidden behind you, doing the work for your neighbor. 

            And then, when the day is done, and you come home again, before you go to bed, you once again invoke the Name, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and commend Yourself to Him.  It is the Divine Service of your life.  Just as the Service concludes with God putting His Triune Name upon you in the Benediction, “The LORD bless you and keep you,” etc., “The LORD, the LORD, the LORD,” so you go to bed each night 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 valley of the shadow of death. 

            Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three Persons, one God, one Name in which you live and move and have your being.  Man cannot rationally comprehend it.  This is not an article of doctrine to be understood, but to be believed and confessed… and lived in.  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 say what God says in Scripture, and worship and adore. 

            This morning we did just that in the Athanasian Creed.  We confessed the one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, 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, “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.  We’re worried this is works righteousness.  But no, 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 so, as we go, we speak it again and trace the sign of our salvation upon the body He has redeemed: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son X, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.