The Lord be with you!
Blessed be the Holy Trinity and the Undivided Unity!

The Festival of the Holy Trinity begins the extended season after Pentecost. It features the color white on our church paraments and pastor’s stole, because the only way we could know the Holy Trinity is through knowing Jesus Christ. His pure life and sinless sacrificial death are represented in white at Christmas and Easter, so also on this festival day of Holy Trinity.
Another tradition on this day is the substitution of the Athanasian Creed into the Divine Service liturgy. This Creed has been officially accepted as the doctrine of the whole Church, because it accurately and carefully teaches the doctrine of Holy Scripture. God has revealed to us His Name, and His Name is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Let us pray the Collect for Holy Trinity:
Almighty and everlasting God, You have given us grace to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity by the confession of a true faith and to worship the Unity in the power of the Divine Majesty. Keep us steadfast in this faith and defend us from all adversities; for You, O Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, live and reign, one God, now and forever.
Amen.

Genesis 1:1—2:4
Is there one God or three? The Bible answers this question many times, but the most dramatic story featuring the Holy Trinity, one God in Three Persons, is the Creation account. The creative love and desire of the Eternal Father is expressed in spoken Words by the Eternal Son, with the Eternal Spirit of God, that is, the Holy Spirit, hovering, swooping over the chaotic waters at the crucial moment of “Let there be Light!” Then, after each day of creation is documented into history, we hear the conversation that the persons of the Holy Trinity have with one another: “Let us make man in our image…” All mankind, created good and in the image of God, now after sin once again restored to that image in the forgiveness of Jesus Christ, is God’s intended self-expression. Did you see talk about race in this reading? I didn’t either! It has no bearing or difference on God’s plan for all people. Race shouldn’t make any difference for us in the Church either!

Acts 2:22-36
This is Peter’s Pentecost Day address continued. The crowd may have known Jesus as a great Man attested by miracles, wonders and signs. But now, with the event that they could not deny happened—the miraculous arrival of the Holy Spirit with His own wonders and signs, they have no conclusion to make, other than that same Jesus is Son of God, who was crucified, is now raised and glorified to the right hand of the Father. Once again, Scripture speaks explicitly about the Holy Trinity!

Matthew 28:16-20
This is the last chapter of Matthew, where our Catechism reminds us is the words of Jesus that command, that is, give us the gift of, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. Matthew did not name all three names of the Trinity anywhere in his Gospel book until this point, when all was fulfilled and Jesus completed the work for which He was sent by the Father to earth from heaven. And how is the Trinity named? Together with the gift of Baptism. That’s how we know the Trinity, through the confidence that we are baptized, forgiven, and included into God’s family, the Church.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity can often sound esoteric and theoretical. We have to suspend our human reason and accept upon the Bible’s say-so that there are three Persons, that is, three distinct entities, but only One God, one essence and not three. How is this? We can only say that it is this way, that’s all. We have so much going on in our world today, is it even worth-while to speak about this subject when we have other pressing matters for the Church to address? In fact, the Holy Trinity is the perfect answer to coronavirus, senseless violence and anything else that grabs our attention. God the Holy Trinity does not stand way above us but constantly helps, forgives and reassures us as we face the sin that is in us, and that is all around us.
Thanks be to God the Holy Trinity!

Here’s Hymn 953, stanza 2:
We all believe in Jesus Christ, / Son of God and Mary’s son,
Who descended from His throne / And for us salvation won;
By whose cross and death are we / Rescued from all misery.

In the name of the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Pr. Stirdivant

Sermon for the Festival of the Holy Trinity: June 7, 2020 jj
Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝

Could you say that the year 2020 has been up to this point “spiritual”? What is it to be “spiritual” anyway? We could have enough emotion or energy or drive that motivates us to do whatever we determine to be healthy and beneficial and noble. “Spiritual” people may possess some mystical force or feeling that allows them to rise above adversity, to do the most with what they have, to reach the pinnacle of their capabilities. Recently we’ve found anything but “spiritual” in our lives, certainly not in the news. Most decidedly, spiritual things have been sorely lacking in our world of the past several months.

This word “spiritual”-the world uses it because it desperately wants to say that something pious, something religious, something godly and other-worldly lies behind the motives and goals and intent of a certain person or organization or idea or cause. Spiritual has to do with spirit. And there are two kinds of spirit. The human spirit, which leads you to believe that every good you do and every evil you overcome is because of your own inner strength and willpower and innate goodness. “Everyone has a spark of goodness. Everyone deep down is a good person. Seek the good that lies within every human heart.” That is what the human spirit says, and that is what it sincerely believes. And that is what lies behind the talk you hear so much about, not to leave out self-esteem, self-worth, self-interest, self-motivation.

For at its core, the human spirit is self-centered. It’s about whatever makes you feel good, and whatever you think makes you better. And with the utter meltdown of human society that we’ve had to experience lately, the human spirit very glaringly fails to meet its lofty goals. The human spirit looks at Matthew 28, the appointed Gospel for today, and sees marching orders for a Christian to follow so he can demonstrate to others how committed to “Growing and Going in the Gospel” he really is.

But diametrically opposed to the human spirit is the other spirit-the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God does not draw you into yourself and does not urge you to seek the good that lies within you. Because Paul said in Romans, “For I know that in me-that is, in my flesh-lives no good thing.” For even if my human spirit strongly wills and desires to do true and honest good, I can never achieve or accomplish this on my own strength and never to the degree that I would desire. For in the end, “the good that I want to do, I do not do; but the evil I want not to do-that is what I keep on doing.” (Rom 7) For this reason, the Spirit of God opposes your human spirit and works mightily to discipline it.

The Spirit of God does not want you turning into yourself; and the Spirit does not use your desires to motivate and drive you. He knows that our troubled world of sin is not only out there, causing chaos and violence on the streets, but it’s also in us, in you, in the human spirit. Instead, the Spirit of God turns you away from yourself to God. And not just to any god or anything that can sound godly, but to God crucified-the God who unites Himself so intimately with you so that He becomes the very sin that lives out of your every thought, word and deed.

This is the only God who is able to save you from your selfish human spirit, the only God who can save you from coronavirus, from evil people in government authority, from rioters, even save you from yourself. Only this God can overcome doubts even in those first eleven disciples who worshiped Jesus on the mountain peak. For this is the God who suffers your sin in His body; the God-in-flesh whose self-sacrifice appeases the Father’s desire for your blood as punishment; the God who willingly dies the death you must die; the God who endures your sickness and hell, your self-doubts and sinful lusts, your despair and grief-every evil that your evil human spirit papers over with its high-sounding words. The Spirit of God draws you in through your Baptism into God crucified. He calls you to look to Him in time of need and in the hour that God has appointed. Call on Him and He will deliver you, even from yourself.

The Spirit of God urges you to fix your eyes on God crucified even when things are going well-so that you credit and glorify not your spirit but this Holy Spirit. For it is this Holy Spirit who opens your ears to hear and take to heart and hold to the God in your flesh and sacrificed on the cross you must bear. And yet, in doing all this, the Spirit does not promote Himself. For unlike your spirit, this Spirit does not exist for the sake of Himself, to be noticed or applauded or celebrated. The Spirit of God, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, exists only to draw and lead and take and carry you to the Son of Man who is crucified. This leading and carrying that the Spirit of God does-it is not transporting you back in time to lock in on a past significant historical event. This leading and carrying that the Holy Spirit does-it is to bring the God crucified to you, into your heart and mind, into your flesh and blood, into your skin and bones.

Consider this: we say “Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” but we experience God in the reverse direction. For it is the Holy Spirit who immerses us in Christ Jesus so that we have access to the Father. It is the Spirit who cleanses us in the blood of Christ so that we are reconciled to our Creator. And it is the Spirit who breathes back into us the Life that is Christ Jesus so that we live in God our Father.

The Spirit’s desire is to take out the hard-hearted stony heart of your human spirit, and to replace it with the fleshy spirit of Christ. The fleshy Spirit does not float around in the sky or move on the ever-changing winds of emotions or speak in visions or voices or events that no one sees. The fleshy Spirit is fleshy because He deals with flesh- He serves your flesh and blood that has been planted and buried in the flesh of the crucified God, and His crucified flesh and blood is planted into your flesh and blood. In this way, you live in Christ just as He resides and lives in and through you. All because the Spirit of God opens our ears so that we hear and see that we are bathed in the blood of the crucified God, and feed, thankfully, once again feed on His true and actual Body and Blood.

Perhaps now you understand more of what lies within the command that Jesus gave to those eleven disciples in the so-called “Great Commission:” Go and make disciples, baptizing and teaching them. But this is more about what God does and continues to do in His Church rather than your personal statement of mission. Being baptized has nothing to do with getting caught up in the moment, or getting your head on straight, or making a fuller commitment, or determining to match your spirit with God’s Spirit. And being born of water and the Holy Spirit does not mean having a different type of spirit to focus on when your spirits are down or when you need to rise to the occasion. Jesus put it very well in John 3: that which is born of flesh is flesh. Which means that whatever comes from yourself, your self-interest, your self-desires, your self-willpower is still of the selfish human spirit. But that which is born of the Spirit (capital S) is the Spirit. He breathes into you the breath of Life-the Life God died to present and offer and give to you. It is this Spirit of God who calls you back to Christ, the God who was crucified, so that, gathered together with all the Faithful, you might feed on Him.

For this is the Triune God at work in the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. There the Father begets you anew. There the Son cleanses you from all sin and delivers you from every death. All because there, in the waters of Holy Baptism, the Holy Spirit gives and delivers you into your Lord’s very own Body so that you also become true sons of God and are born of God. He is your only peace in all time of adversity and prosperity, during life and in death, when things go well and when things get scary. And He is yours in baptism by the Holy Spirit, a baptism that is remembered constantly in the forgiveness of sins that punctuates your daily life and vocation.

And because of this Baptism by the Spirit of the Triune God, we can now say and sing with St. Patrick and Christians of every age:
I bind unto myself today
The strong Name of the Trinity
By invocation of the same
The Three in One and One in Three.

To this Holy Trinity alone belongs all glory, honor, worship and praise, now and forever.

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

Readings:
Gen. 1:1—2:4a In the beginning, God created
Psalm 8 When I consider your heavens, the work of Your fingers
Acts 2:14a, 22–36 This Jesus God raised up, of which we are all witnesses.
Matt. 28:16–20 baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit