EDITOR'S NOTE: On Oct. 23, 2021, I was ordained as a minister of word and sacrament in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and installed as pastor at Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. I also served the same church for four years from October 2017 to October 2021 a synodically authorized minister. The journey together these past four years has been an amazing one, full of learning, growing and a deepening of my theological mind. This sermon took place on June 7, 2023.
This week's gospel: Matthew 28:11-15
The Report of the Guard
11 While they were going, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests everything that had happened. 12 After the priests[c] had assembled with the elders, they devised a plan to give a large sum of money to the soldiers, 13 telling them, “You must say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ 14 If this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” 15 So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story is still told among the Judeans to this day.
The message:
I wonder just how much ink has been spilled, and how much oxygen has been exhaled, in an effort to explain the Holy Trinity to us from our earliest days of Sunday school?
Seriously, think about it? … The books, the Sunday school lessons, the confirmation classes, the adult small groups … the sermons. … The effort is incalculable!
Some people spend their entire professional lives trying to explain … the mystery of the Holy Trinity.
And I ask you for what? … Do you actually feel like you have any better grasp of who or what or why the Holy Trinity … is the Holy Trinity? … Despite all the effort?
I suspect not … and you wouldn’t be alone.
While you will never find the word “trinity” in our Bible, a common academic definition is:
“The Trinity, is the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead, and this doctrine is considered to be one of the central Christian affirmations about God. It is rooted in the fact that God came to meet Christians in a threefold figure: (1) as Creator and Father as the Hebrew Bible tells us; (2) as the Lord who, in the incarnated figure of Jesus Christ, lived among us as the “Resurrected One”; and (3) as the Holy Spirit, the helper in the power of the new life.”
Does that help you much? … Well, me neither, and in theory I get paid to understand it.
While preparing for tonight’s message, a speaker on one of the podcasts I use as study material said this: “It’s a hard Sunday if it’s your ambition to make people understand the Trinity.”
Well, Faith Family, I will not try to make you understand the Trinity. … That’d be fairly presumptuous of me, considering I will never have a firm grasp on the Holy Trinity.
So, instead, I would like to suggest a switch in tactics.
Rather than arrogantly suggesting that we can know an infinite, unknowable God … I instead suggest that we try experiencing that same God.
And I would fall back on tonight’s Gospel to help us with this effort: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” … Amen.
There you have it, Jesus was already talking about the Trinity hundreds of years before some church official somewhere coined the phrase “Holy Trinity.”
But notice … Jesus didn’t tell us to sit down and write very eloquent treatises on the nature of the relationships between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to help us understand the Trinity.
No, not at all. … Jesus instructed his disciples -- and thus also us -- to go forth and baptize all the nations. … All the people. All the neighbors. Regardless of who they were. … Jesus didn’t draw up any boundaries as to who was in and who was out.
That was how he invited us into an understanding of the Trinity.
Jesus … through his commands about what we were supposed to do … already showed us what the Holy Trinity is.
For the record, don’t page back through your bulletin tonight in the hope that one of our readings will provide you the “Aha” moment you may be looking for.
If you do, and you DO find the answer, please share it with me. … We’ll be the two most famous people in history.
No, what Jesus is trying to tell us is … to leave those books on the shelf, and don’t even attempt those Sunday school craft experiments aimed at helping us understand the Holy Trinity.
All of that is unnecessary.
In a simple sentence, Jesus tells us all we need to know in our gospel tonight: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
What does the Trinity mean? … To me, it’s pretty simple.
It means that God is among us. … God was there before everything was created; God walked among us as a human; and God actively pursues changes in everyday events still today.
The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. God’s presence before, now and into the future.
So we learn that the Holy Trinity very much has to do with our everyday human encounters of God … AND … and this is important … it has to do with our everyday encounters with each other.
The Holy Trinity is a human experience. … It is a faith experience. … It is an experience of willingness to defy all logic by believing in an unknowable God but a God who is willing to be known in our messy, selfish, daily human stuff.
The Holy Trinity is about us … Faith Family. … So, let’s stop looking to the academics and the theologians to help us develop an understanding or definition.
Rather, turn right now, to that person sitting closest to you, stare deep into their eyes and know to your core … that you are staring into the eyes of God, the eyes of Jesus … the eyes of the Holy Spirit.
Faith Family … the early church didn’t need academics and theologians to help them understand a concept for which they didn’t even know existed.
They simply drew upon experience to help them understand how God works. … They didn’t measure stuff.
They didn’t try to quantify God, or stuff the Trinity into a textbook or develop a confirmation lesson about it.
As faithful believers … they just innately knew that the Holy Trinity is connected to mission.
Each of us bears the image of God. … You bear the image of God. … Your neighbor bears the image of God.
And so if each and everyone of us bears the image of God, then isn’t it fairly simple to understand that it must be our personal relationships with each other … that define the Holy Trinity?
It really doesn’t seem all that radical to me. … It doesn’t seem to have to be that complex to me.
The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. … God is composed of the relationships of the three … AND by the nature of our faith … we are invited into that Trinity.
You are invited. … You are invited. … You are invited. … I’m invited. … Everyone is invited into the Trinity. …
And somewhere in that invitation is the implicit command to baptize our neighbor with love and understanding into the Kingdom as well.
And that is the Good News for this Holy Trinity Wednesday, June 7, 2023. … Amen.
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