TITLE: “The Divine Love of the Holy Trinity”

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Our text for this morning is from the Gospel lesson just read from John chapter 3 as follows: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

This is a great Sunday in the church year. One of the best in fact. But it is for that reason that it is also one of the most difficult. We confess the Athanasian Creed, a glorious but very deep confession of the Christian Faith. This morning we had the baptism of little Ryan into the Christian faith. The choir confesses some of our most ancient and wonderful parts of the liturgy. All of these things circle around like constellations around the great star of the Holy Trinity.

What is the Holy Trinity? Well, to start off, the Holy Trinity is not a what , it’s a who. The Holy Trinity is God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God in three persons, blessed Trinity, as the hymn confesses. Now I don’t know about you, but once you start talking about one God in three persons, I start to feel a little like I’m walking out into Lake Michigan. I’m fine as long as I can see the shore and feel the floor of the lake. But there’s just a sense that things get deep quickly, perhaps even too deep for us to understand.

It is for this reason that we often assign certain jobs or tasks to the persons of the Trinity. God the Father is the creator, God the Son is the redeemer, and God the Holy Spirit is the sanctifier. Now that is handy in some ways, but it’s also misleading. After all, even in the story of Creation we hear that the Spirit hovered over the waters, and that God created all things by His Word. So even when we start to categorize and put things into boxes, we’re already treading water.

So how are we, Christ’s Church, to understand God? The simple fact, dear friends, is that you don’t. You don’t understand God. Furthermore, you can’t understand God because of your sin and blindness. St. Paul write sin our Epistle text, Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!

This is, of course, a part of our problem as sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. We want to understand, to rationalize, to fit everything to get, to think things through, to put God into a box and to have everything nice and simple and easy and clean. But God, dear friends, will not be bound by us. We, rather, are bound by and to Him.

This is what Nicodemus came to understand as he visited Jesus at night. He came wanting all the answers to the what , but Jesus gave him the who. Jesus said he must be born again or better still born from above . This is our relationship to God. We are God’s offspring. But even more, we are His workmanship, we are His adopted sons and daughters, born from above by water and the spirit, as Jesus said to Nicodemus.

Now maybe you don’t realize this, but this is a big load off of your life. God knows you can’t put your life together. God knows you can’t get everything right. God knows you’re messed up, that you need Him desperately. God knows. And so to make perfectly clear your relationship to Him, He uses the story of birth. You had no choice when you were born. You weren’t even consulted! Your life, like all life, is a gift from God, and is not subject to your approval.

Now if that is true for earthly birth, how much more is that true for your heavenly birth! God bears you in His Church, plants the seed of the Word in you by water and the Spirit, and eternal life springs up in you. And it’s all His work. You are just along for the ride. In fact, after God does all of this great work in you and for you, He then gives you all the credit for it! Well done, good and faithful servant , he says to you. Well done? It is well done because you have been born from above by water and the Spirit.

This is God’s work, God’s economy. We can’t understand it. It is completely, wonderfully senseless and ridiculous, laughable even. But we laugh with Him, because He gives us all things. And it is exactly for that reason that our Creed says that we worship the Holy Trinity. For we can never understand God’s love. We can only receive it. That is what those great words mean to you and I

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life.

Those words are Spirit and life for you. Those words, in a nutshell, give you Jesus. Jesus, sent by God to die so that you might live, now comes in the power of His Holy Spirit to you. We don’t understand God. But thank God that we worship Him, and receive all of these good and glorious things that He has given to us in His Son Jesus Christ.

This is why we worship the Holy Trinity, for no one and nothing has ever loved us like this. Believe it for the sake of the One who gave His only-begotten Son over to die so that you might live. Amen.

The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in true faith, unto life everlasting. Amen.