The Holy Trinity

Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In worship, we speak about our triune God a lot, about our God who is One in Three and Three in One. We begin our worship with the greeting from Paul’s letters: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. We end our worship with a blessing in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All through worship, in blessings and creed and prayers, we call upon our trinitarian God.

Today is the Sunday in our church year when we ponder what it means that we worship the Trinity.

Disclaimer right up front: We will probably never completely understand the mystery of the Trinity. Nicodemus meets Jesus in the dark, which hints at his confusion. What a perfect reading for Trinity Sunday, when we admit a level of confusion about what exactly the Trinity is and how it works and how it affects our life and faith.

Then again, as one commentator pointed out, a god we could completely understand wouldn’t be much of a god.

As I was pondering the Bible readings for this Trinity Sunday, I was approaching them with the question: How is it good news for us that God is revealed in three persons?

One answer is this: God is high, mighty, lofty, beyond our human realm and understanding, and at the same time close, present, caring, forgiving, involved in the world, in the community, and in individuals’ lives. The term theologians use for this is that God is both transcendent and immanent.

The reading from Isaiah gives a wonderful illustration for this aspect of God. In a vision, Isaiah sees God sitting on a throne, high and lofty, clouded in smoke, surrounded by seraphim whose praise of God is so loud that the thresholds shake. Truly a vision of God being way above human existence.

And yet, this amazing God cares about what is going on with God’s people. The first line of our Bibel reading states that this all happened the year King Uzziah died. This anchors the event in real time. King Uzziah had reigned over Judah for decades and was one of the better kings, bringing stability and economic growth to the nation.

Now he was dead. The nation faced uncertainty about the future; who would be the next king and how would he rule? At the same time, military superpowers to the north and southeast are threatening the nation. An unsettled time.

It is at this time that God reveals himself to Isaiah. God cares about his people and enters their experience and assures them of God’s presence and faithfulness in their anxious and unsettled existence.

In our gospel reading, Jesus utters the most famous verse in the Bible: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. God, the Creator of the universe, sends his only Son, and that only Son is now talking one on one with Nicodemus to help him come to faith. Amazing, isn’t it?

This is one way in which having a triune God is true blessing to us: Knowing that the powerful God who created heaven and earth is the same God who knows us and cares about us and supports us in challenging times. God is the Spirit that blows where it chooses, and God is the Son who takes the time to talk to a searching man in the middle of the night.

Another way in which the Holy Trinity is good news for us is this: The fact that God is One in Three and Three in One shows that God in his very being is a God of community. God reveals himself to us in three persons in order to call us into community, with God and with each other.

During COVID, we all have learned how important, even essential community is for our spiritual, emotional, and physical health. God is hard at work to draw us into life-giving community.

God wants to be in relationship with us. All three Bibel readings today point to this fact. In the Old Testament reading, God reveals himself to Isaiah, cleanses Isaiah from sin, and calls Isaiah to be a prophet. In the gospel story, Jesus talks at length to man trying to understand this new concept of God Jesus is preaching.

It is in Paul’s letter to the Romans, though, that our relationship with God is highlighted the most: By the power of the Spirit, we are children of God; we received the Spirit of adoption; we can pray to God any time and call him “Abba”. We are part of God’s family forever.

Every time I read this passage where Paul talks about us being adopted into God’s family, I have to think of my mother’s friend Sigrid and her two children. Sigrid and her husband tried for years to have children, without success. Eventually, they adopted a baby boy. Not too long afterwards, as happens now and then, they did get pregnant and had a little girl.

When these two children were teenagers, they did what most siblings do: fought a lot. One day, the girl wanted to get at her brother and said to him, “You are just adopted, but I am their real daughter.”

Without missing a beat, the boy retorted, “They had to take you, but they chose to take me.”

That’s us in the eyes of God. God didn’t have to adopt us, but God chose to. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the endless love of God, we have been chosen. The Holy Trinity wants us to be part of God’s family. Forever! That is good news, indeed!

All three Bible readings before us today speak not only about the blessing we receive from the Holy Trinity, but also about the transformation the Holy Trinity effects in us.

Isaiah is transformed when the seraphs touch him with burning coal and cleanse him from all guilt and sin. Experiencing both God’s might and God’s grace moves Isaiah to volunteer to be a prophet, to speak God’s word to a nation in turmoil.

Jesus tells Nicodemus that we must all be born anew, born again, born from above. By the power of the Holy Spirit, guided by a lovingly patient Jesus, we become people who reflect the kingdom of God to the world. God so loved the world, meaning God loved the world in this way, that his Son gave up his life to save all people. Being born anew through the Spirit will implant that kind of sacrificial love in us.

And indeed, that transformation does take place in Nicodemus. At the end of today’s story, he seems to leave in confusion. Later, though, he will risk his standing among his peers when he speaks up for Jesus’ rights. And after Jesus has died, Nicodemus throws all caution to the wind and helps Joseph of Arimathea to bury Jesus’ body. Nicodemus has been born from above and transformed into a spirit-led child of God.

Paul urges the Roman believers to follow the guidance of the Spirit and not fall back into fear and deeds of the flesh.

Which is so easy to do. The world’s ways and temptations and anxieties are constantly pulling us back, away from life in the Spirit.

Isaiah’s people are worried about political uncertainty. How we can relate! Our politicians seem unable to work together for the common good, and democracy is under threat both here and in many other countries around the world. Isaiah mentions that he lives among people of unclean lips; we live with cyberbullying, hate-speech, name-calling, microaggressions, and conspiracy theories.

God’s response it to call prophets to speak the truth, to remind people of God’s love and will, to invite people into a better way of living together in community with each other and the Trinity. God calls Isaiah. God sends Jesus. God calls Paul. And God calls us.

We are today’s messengers of the blessing of the Trinity. We who are tremendously blessed by the Trinity, we who are born of the Spirit, transformed by Jesus’ love, forgiven of our sins, adopted as God’s children, called to reflect the kingdom of God in the world, sent to preach God’s word to people who are searching and a nation in turmoil.

I am closing my exploration of the Holy Trinity with this quote from theologian N. T. Wright in his book “For All God’s Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church”. He writes:

 “The Trinity is not something that the clever theologian comes up with as a result of hours spent in the theological laboratory, after which he or she can return to announce that they’ve got God worked out now, the analysis is complete, and here is God neatly laid out on a slab. The only time they laid God out on a slab he rose again three days afterwards. On the contrary: the doctrine of the Trinity is, if you like, a signpost pointing ahead into the dark, saying: ‘Trust me; follow me; my love will keep you safe.’”

Amen.