Video of the Divine Service is here. The sermon begins around the 34:20 mark.

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

It is fairly obvious that Trinity Sunday is not really like the other Sundays in the festival half of the Church Year. Starting with Advent and running through Trinity, those other seasons and Sundays all celebrate events: the appearance of Jesus in glory, or the birth of Jesus; His revelation and what He has come to do; His temptation, suffering, death, resurrection; His ascension; the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on all flesh on Pentecost, so that all people might hear the Gospel in their own languages. Those are all concrete events. But the Holy Trinity does not seem to be the same kind of thing. And when we say the Athanasian Creed, when we hear the Collect for the day, when we hear the Proper Preface, and we’re talking about the Trinity in Person and the Unity in Essence, it is easy to start thinking that this whole thing is an abstraction. It can almost seem like God is off somewhere in heaven, distant and abstract. It’s almost like God is a self-contained object, and we are the ones who try to figure out God; as if God were the passive object, and we are the active subjects!

But Christians did not come up with the Trinity in the same way that ancient philosophy speculated about the Unmoved Mover, or God, or the Perfect, or the One. No one sat down and tried to figure out what the Christian God would be like, and decided that we should believe in a Trinity, just to be different. We do not know God that way, and, anyway, as the psalmist says, “His greatness is unsearchable” (Psalm 145:3). We do not know God by speculation, but we know God because of His revelation to us. “One generation shall commend your works to another, and declare your mighty acts. One the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate. They shall speak of the might of your awesome deeds, and I will declare your greatness” (Psalm 145:4-6).

Our God is not distant and abstract, but from the beginning, out of His love, He got right down into the dirt of creation. He fashioned Adam out of the mud, and “built” Eve from his side. He put His Spirit into the man and he became a living creature. He is not abstract or separate or distant; He is intimately tied to His creation as its Creator, and to you as your Creator. And if that were not enough, He continually speaks to His people. He comes down to deliver Israel from Egypt. He stands on the Rock as Moses strikes it and water comes out. He puts His glory in specific places, like mountains and tents. He goes with His people in a fiery-cloudy pillar. None of this is abstract, but concrete and physical.

Do you think that Isaiah ever thought that God was an abstraction? When he saw the Lord sitting on the throne, and the thresholds of the temple shook, and he said that he would die because he had seen God—no one dies from an abstraction. And the angel brings a burning coal from the heavenly altar and touches Isaiah’s lips—physical and concrete. Your sins are forgiven and your guilt is atoned for. And if all that were not enough, God does not even remain as Creator to creation, but the eternal Son actually becomes part of His own creation in the flesh and blood of Mary. He takes on a human body that is like yours in every way, in its limitations, getting tired, and hungry, and thirsty—in every way except that He was without sin. But there’s more: He suffers, and bleeds, and dies, and is buried. All the way down into your sins and death. Into your separation and rebellion. He dies because He is crucified by sinners and unbelievers. He is not separate at all, not abstract, not distant. This is as close as anyone can get—closer, in fact. Because He rises from the dead, and then He does not remain only by Himself, His body, His relationship to the Father, but He joins you to Himself more closely than any other human relationship, so that you are baptized into Him, His life becomes yours, His holiness, His sinlessness, His communion with the Father—all yours in Him.

So that this will be yours, He sends the Holy Spirit, as He promised. Even though we might be tempted to think that the Spirit is the most abstract, He does not simply float around in the ether. Jesus promises that the Spirit will bring to your remembrance everything Jesus said; the Spirit will give you all that is the Son’s, and the Son has everything that is the Father’s. And now He gives all that to you: brings you to Jesus, gives you faith, keeps you in that faith, delivers you through this life in Christ to the life to come in Christ. That Gospel, those languages, that water, those words, are not abstract, but concrete and physical.

None of this is due to our speculation about what God must be like, because of how we might like God to be. No one made the Holy Trinity in his or her own image; no one would have thought of it at all. Human reason recoils at the thought, hates it, does not believe it. But God in the flesh, the only God who is face to face with the Father, He has made Him known. Only as the Word is made flesh do we know this God, and in no other way.

If we thought that it was a mystery when it seemed that the Holy Trinity was a distant abstraction, and we could not understand how it could be, so we made up analogies and images and illustrations involving plants and fruit and geometric shapes, how much greater the mystery when we discover not an abstraction, but a personal God joining Himself to us so that we might be rejoined to Him! Plants and fruit and triangles and circles do not confront us, but God Himself in flesh and blood. So there can be deeper understanding as we meditate on the great acts of God and on His wondrous works, but the end and fruit of that is simply worship. Worship of the God who made us, and gives us everything we need and more. Worship of the mystery of God made flesh to redeem us from sin and make us His own forever. Worship of the Spirit who gathers us by the words of Jesus into the communion of God. Only worship of what He has done, what He does. As David said, God is always with us, so that we will not be shaken. We will not be abandoned to death and hell. We dwell in the hope of God made flesh, the hope of resurrection. God makes known to us the paths of life, when we had only death. His presence makes us full of joy and gladness, when we had only sorrow. This God with us in concrete and physical water, words, bread and wine; body and blood and divine life; this God will bring us to the vision of what we have now only by faith. The mystery will not go away, but neither will the communion with our God, present with us forever.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7, ESV). Amen.

– Pr. Timothy Winterstein, 5/24/24