Feast of the Holy Trinity
John 3:1-17
✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠
There is a strong temptation in times like these to let news headlines determine what we talk about and meditate on, even here in church. Much is unsettled and troubled in the world: conflict in the Middle East, disorder on the streets of our cities, budgetary issues both in our homes and our government. These things can dominate and consume our attention and energy. But in the church we focus our meditation and our attention first and foremost on God’s Word. For the Word of the Lord endures forever. Only the wisdom that it imparts can help us to see ourselves and our world rightly. Apart from the Word there is only delusion and division and the lure of this or that political ideology. But in the Word we find peace and truth. For there we find Jesus, the One who is the Truth, who shares in the humanity of all people, who restores good order and unites us in Himself by the Gospel. The answer to what ails us and the world is to be found only in Christ.
So on this Holy Trinity Sunday, we begin by directing our attention to the nature of the only true God–the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 1 John 4 says that God is love–not just that He is loving in some sappy sense, but that He actually is love, within Himself. He is the perfect union of persons in one divine essence. And He is therefore by nature the God who gives of Himself in order to redeem us fallen human beings. We heard it in today’s Gospel reading, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” The God who is love demonstrated that love by giving His only Son to the death of the cross to save us and all who believe.
There can be a temptation, though, to take that John 3:16 verse, which beautifully sums up the Gospel, and reduce it to a sort of trite meme or bumper sticker, as if Jesus just wants everyone to be nice, as if He were just some flower child hippie. That’s not the Jesus of the Bible. So let’s not forget the context in which this is spoken–Jesus is talking to Nicodemus. Nicodemus doesn’t understand what Jesus means when He says, “you must be born again.” And unfortunately, many don’t understand Jesus’ words still to this day.
To a lot of folks, being born again means having a spiritual experience of God centering on inner emotions. They say that being born again means making a religious choice, a decision to follow a certain way of life. But if you think about it, none of that has anything to do with birth.
When you were born the first time, you weren’t even aware of exactly what was happening. You didn’t make a choice to be born. It wasn’t about your emotions, except maybe for the fact that you were fussing and crying. When you were born in the flesh, you were helpless, dependent, not capable of making decisions at all. Jesus uses that metaphor of fleshly birth to teach us about spiritual birth. Just as your first birth was your parents’ doing, so your second birth is God’s doing. Life and birth is not something you do, it’s something you receive. Our life with God is entirely a gift from Him; we are dependent on Him for everything, as an infant is dependent on his parents. That’s why Jesus said on another occasion, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:15)
This is what our Lord also is teaching Nicodemus here: “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” As in the beginning when the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters to bring life to creation, so the Holy Spirit hovers over the baptismal waters to bring about new life and a new creation. As a baby is given birth from the watery womb of his mother, so also a Christian–baby or adult–is given rebirth in the watery font of our mother, the Church. Titus 3 says: “[God the Father] saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by His grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.”
Jesus commanded the apostles to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Note that Jesus doesn’t say to baptize “in the names” of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but rather “in the name,” singular. His Jewish listeners knew what He meant by saying “the name.” For that is what they called God, a Hebrew word, pronounced HaShem, that translates “The Name.” It was the name that they didn’t speak for fear of misusing it. But we are given to speak it and confess it: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One name, one God, three distinct Persons. That’s the truth and the beautiful mystery of the Holy Trinity.
We Christians are under a lot of pressure to back off from our Trinitarian Creeds, to compromise our belief that this is the one and only God, or to retreat from Jesus’ words that He is the only Way to the Father and eternal life. We are encouraged instead to just pray to a generic “God.” We are pressured to treat Jews and Muslims–and sometimes even Buddhists and Pagans–as people who pray to the same God as we do. But all religions do not lead to the same God, just as all roads don’t lead to the same destination. Unless we worship the Trinity, we are walking the wrong path. If people deny that Jesus is God, they are praying to a false god. If they are praying to a “life force in the universe,” they are praying to a false god. If they deny the personhood of the Holy Spirit, they are praying to a false god.
And let me add that this is not just ivory tower stuff. This is very practical and relevant. For only in the true God is there real life and actual love. Only the Holy Trinity is the God of pure grace and mercy. Every other religion tells you in some way that you have to earn your own way into divine favor by what you do. Every other so-called god is a delusion and a lie that ultimately leads to the destruction of those who embrace it. For the Scriptures say that when people worship false gods, they are actually worshiping demons (1 Cor. 10:20) posing as angels of light (2 Cor. 11:14). Satan and the demons love religion and spirituality, as long as it draws you away from the Jesus of the Bible to some other false Christ and false belief. The devil doesn’t necessarily try to get rid of Jesus, just to redefine Him and corrupt His words. That’s why every religion tries to claim that Jesus is on their side and co-opt Him in one way or another.
I’ve noticed a small example of this trending lately on social media under the theme, “Read the red words.” The red words, of course, are the words of Jesus in the Bible in red print. People will quote sayings of Jesus about loving your neighbor or feeding the hungry as a political statement regarding the current illegal immigration situation. And we should undoubtedly pay attention to those words of Jesus. But we dare not ignore all the other words in red calling people to repentance for their sins and to stop their pharisaical virtue signaling--those words tend not to get quoted so much. But here’s the thing: what’s implied is that the rest of the words of the Bible in black are somehow less important or can be ignored. However, if the Bible is the Word of God, and Jesus is God, all the words in black are His words, too, written by His chosen apostles, including the ones condemning lawlessness and calling people to honor the authorities as ones who bear the sword by divine authority.
If we really love our neighbor, we want them to know the truth, the full truth. And the truth is this: we all must be born again–all of us. Next time somebody says, “I was born this way,” you can say, “Yeah, I know. We’re all natural born sinners. That’s why Jesus said you must be born again.” Our first birth inevitably leads to death. We are born under the curse, turned in on ourselves. We cannot escape from judgment by our own efforts and merits. This is the reason that Christianity is not merely about getting your life together; it’s about getting a whole new life, the life of Christ. You can’t fix or reform your way into heaven. Your old Adam won’t allow it. He’ll just try to use religion to his own perverse advantage. No, according to Scripture your old Adam must be drowned and die through daily contrition and repentance, so that a new man may emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever. St. Paul put it this way in Galatians 2, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live by Christ who lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
Jesus gave Himself for you, lifted up on the cross like the bronze serpent of old, so that everyone who believes in Him would be rescued from the lethal venom of sin and have eternal life. It is only through Jesus that we come to fully know the Holy Trinity. Christ is the One who reveals the Father. Christ is the One who sends the Holy Spirit. He is the One who shares fully in our humanity so that we may share fully in His divine life.
So let us remember and affirm this day what the Christian, Trinitarian faith is. We believe in the Father who created us and the Son who redeemed us and the Holy Spirit who makes us holy. We believe in the Father who loves even us sinners, in His one and only Son who redeemed us with His precious blood, and in the Holy Spirit who pours out that love upon us by water and the Word. We believe in the Father who reaches out to us fallen creatures in mercy, whose Son takes on our nature and bears our judgment and saves us, whose Holy Spirit unites us as one holy, Christian, apostolic Church in the preaching of the Gospel and the holy supper. It’s all from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit; and then back again in the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father.
This is the catholic faith, with a small “c,” what the church in all times and places has taught, the Scriptural faith which binds us together as one people of God, whatever our background may be. Whoever does not believe it faithfully and firmly cannot be saved. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him” (John 3:16-17).
✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠