Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝

If you don’t realize how necessary it is for us as Christians to be clear when we confess our faith in the Holy Trinity, then it would also be difficult to understand why those Jewish teachers pushed themselves to the verge of stoning Jesus to death. It was certainly more than a power struggle or that they felt threatened by a new guy on the block; those leaders were not merely jealous of His popularity. These Jews were hardened heretics, anti-Trinitarians. They could not accept the mystery that no one can explain, but we all must believe anyway. Their ears were shut to the Bible, especially the Old Testament, the Bible that clearly proclaims to all generations the One God in Three Persons. Therefore, they and all who even down to today reject the Trinity, it’s no different from rejecting God. That is why the Athanasian Creed, as it stays true to what the Bible says, condemns anyone who will not keep the catholic faith, that is, the faith of the whole Christian church, whole and undefiled, faithfully and firmly.

It’s not a rule that we must follow just because God is all-powerful and we’ve got to play the game of life His way. He knows that your eternal life with Him is impossible unless He takes care of it all from start to finish. And the way that salvation is delivered to you is through the faith in Christ that He plants within your heart in Baptism, the faith that believes everything the Bible teaches and reveals to you about God the Holy Trinity. The moment you have something you need to do to take away your own sins, that’s the moment you are lost forever. Likewise, if there is any modification to what the Bible teaches about the Trinity, then it most certainly means that man’s futile way of trying to save himself is working its way in, and the spiritual damage would be widespread and devastating. It is that important to know this doctrine and believe it, even though it is impossible to understand it completely.

But God does not leave you clueless and bewildered about His mysterious identity, either. He wants you to know Him as He has revealed Himself to you, nothing more than that. And the Bible’s way of revealing the mystery of the Holy Trinity includes something you desire and crave as one of God’s creation. That is this simple, yet unfathomable sentence: God is love. He certainly demonstrates the qualities and actions of love, that is, we can surely say God loves us. But it’s more than that. God Himself is love. He didn’t even create love, like He created everything else, including human emotion. Love is who He is and has been for eternity. This is much deeper than our concept of love that we describe merely in emotional terms.

For God to be love, He then cannot be isolated or singular. For the fullness of love to exist, there must be a lover, one who is loved, and there needs to be the love they share with each other. Three elements are needed. Though it cannot be grasped or explained in our human minds, God is all three of those, yet He is not three different deities, contrary to what the Muslims and others claim we Christians say, but He is one God in three distinguishable persons. These three persons match up with what is required for love to exist, but we’re still talking about One God who is Love Himself. The Father loves the Son. This is an eternal relationship. The Father has always been the Father, because the Son has always been the Son, and the two of them together have always been and always will be One God. Finally, there’s the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, or the Love that the Father and the Son share. This Holy Spirit has the same relationship with both the Father and the Son, and that relationship that is found in the Bible, is defined in the three Creeds as “proceeding.” The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, because He is the love between the Father and the Son.

Clear as mud, right? Well, that is almost as good as we can do as human beings in talking about it. But thankfully, when God reveals Himself to us, He desires more than just for us to understand it and try to speak about it. The Holy Trinity, complex as He might be, perfectly defines what love is, yet He wishes to include you in that perfect, complete love relationship. The Lord is not satisfied with being love all to Himself. You see, it was God’s design from the very beginning of creation: “Let Us make man in Our image, in Our likeness.” It’s the reason why God said that it was not good for the man Adam to be alone. Because God Himself is not alone; He loves and He wishes to share that love with His most precious creation, and He wishes His created human beings to share that love in a most intimate way with one another as male husband and female wife. Therefore you were created to love, even as you and the entire human race was brought into existence so that you could be drawn up into the Love that God is. The Father loves the Son, remember? Well, the Father desires to include you into that same love, so that He loves you in and with His Son.

Now wait a minute… you are not God, nor are you equal with God the Holy Trinity. You have a definite beginning to your existence. It would be ludicrous to suggest that God would create someone, and then that being would be equal to Him. The Father did not create the Son, as one ancient heretical teaching imagined. So how is it possible for God to bring you into the eternal Love that He is? It was accomplished when God the eternal Son took your human flesh and was born of the Virgin Mary. He joined Himself to you and you would be in communion with Him, taking part in God the Father’s love for the Son, so that it is also God the Father’s love for you. This is the divine plan into which Adam and Eve were placed together in the Garden of Eden, before there was sin, before there was death.

Sin and death disrupt the love that God the Holy Trinity wishes to share with you, His creation. He cannot allow sin to exist in His presence. He must cast it away forever, or else He would cease to be God, He would cease to be Love. But sin was what Adam brought in, through the help of the serpent and of his own wife. And for that, Adam and all his children (including you and me), excluded themselves from the Love and life that God is and that God gives. And when you exclude yourself from the Holy Trinity, you have nothing in your future but everlasting death. This is what you do every time you look out for yourself for personal fulfillment, when you seek out your own benefit, when you disregard your family and your neighbor. In this rebellion against God and the Love that He is, your life has instead been better described as a life of hate. You have deep down hatred for God and for each other and were it not for the force of law to hold back your sinful nature, this world would have been engulfed in eternal death eons ago.

Your sin, death and hatred that are seated within your human nature had to be destroyed, if there were to be any hope for you to be together in communion with the Holy Trinity and the Love that He is. And so God’s love for you expanded, as love often does. The Son who in God’s eternal plan would come to take on your flesh, would be the same Son who would die for your sin. And when Jesus Christ, the God of Love, died on the cross, He murdered sin, death and hatred. He brought life back into the dying world when He rose from the dead on the third day. And He continues to bring the Life and Love that He is back to you, even though you had lost it.

You cannot explain the mystery, the unexplained reality of the Holy Trinity. You cannot adequately describe even the Love that God is. But, even better, you have become a part of that mystery, and the Holy Trinity alone made it happen. As the water of Baptism into Christ’s death that was poured over you took away your sins, as the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” were spoken, as the Holy Spirit, new life and salvation entered into your body and soul, you were then included into the Love of God the Father for God the Son. You have Holy Communion, meaning you and all those baptized Christians who publicly believe this, take part in this Love that God is, right here at this altar. The Body and Blood that God the Son lived in, died in, and ascended in, that Body and Blood is what brings you into that Love. Yes, it forgives your sins, and that remains the most important thing. Above and beyond that fulfilled promise, that Body and Blood brings you in close contact with the Holy Trinity.

It can get uncomfortable at times when you get cornered and you’re asked to explain the doctrine of the Trinity. Aside from what the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds say, there’s little more you could possibly explain, especially to an unbeliever. The best would be to say that God the Holy Trinity loves you, to describe what Jesus has done for poor, miserable sinners like you, and point to Holy Baptism as the point of contact we as God’s redeemed people have with the Divine, Trinitarian mystery. The confession of faith concerning the Trinity is really telling the good news about Jesus. It is not some disconnected, obtuse doctrine that we would be OK without. It is the Love of God within His own threefold unity and that Love extended toward us that it took a whole Bible to reveal, after thousands of years it hasn’t been fully understood, yet it is a reality that you who confess it eat and drink at this communion rail.

In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Readings:
Prov. 8:1–4, 22–31 Does not wisdom cry out
Psalm 8 O LORD our Lord, How excellent is Your name in all the earth!
Acts 2:14a, 22–36 Men of Israel, hear these words:
John 8:48–59 before Abraham was, I AM.