Sermon for Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2015

Text: John 3:1-17

            Beloved in Christ, every so often you hear critics say, “No one can really know God. He is beyond our comprehension.” And the critics have a point. We can discern that there must be a God, but that doesn’t mean that we naturally know much about Him. We can discern from the vastness of creation that He must be mighty. We can figure out from the conscience implanted in us that He must be holy. But to understand who God is, what He is really like, what He thinks, and so forth is beyond our ability. Trying to figure out God on our own is like expecting a kid who hasn’t even learned three plus four to know how to build a particle accelerator and interpret the results of the experiments. God’s nature is so beyond us that we can never figure Him out on our own.

            To be sure, some religions openly boast that they are just speculating and guessing about God. They use their reason and experience to come up with some sort of answer. But when you ask them how they know, they have to admit that it is simply their speculation and they know nothing for certain. But that is sort of like taking a math problem where you don’t really understand the principles at work and just writing down a number because it seems rather good and hoping that you’ll convince your teacher just to accept it. It is no wonder then that the skeptics say that every religion is just people guessing at what God might be like.

            And that is where the skeptics err. They are right to say that it is difficult to learn much about God and that many religions are just guessing. But the Christian faith is not our guesswork as to what God must be like. It is founded in something deeper: His own revelation. And this is more than just God imparting information to a person wise enough to apprehend it. No, this is God coming into our midst and being the revelation itself.

            That is what Jesus was trying to get Nicodemus to understand: “No one has ascended into heaven except He who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” Now Nicodemus was willing to compliment Jesus and say that He was a “rabbi” and “a teacher come from God,” someone with the hand of God upon Him as He did great miracles. But Jesus rejected those kind words. He said that Nicodemus didn’t know anything about the kingdom of God, indeed was outside of it, if he thought of Jesus simply as a great “teacher come from God.” Instead Jesus wanted to be acknowledged as the one “who descended from heaven,” in other words, one who was true God. In other words, He was not just another teacher, passing on third-hand knowledge of God, that is, passing on what he had read or heard from a prophet who had heard something from God. He was also not just another prophet, that is, someone hearing God but passing on his best interpretation of what he thought God had said. Instead, He was true God in every sense of the word and, therefore, able to open up to us everything that He wanted mankind to know about God.

            Yes, there are still things we don’t know about God because He has chosen not to reveal them. We will never know everything about God, for we would become easily confused with the information. Nevertheless, Christ came so that we would know everything that we need to know about Him in order to live faithfully in this life and the life to come. And so the most basic thing that we can do is to listen to His words, not as words of a great teacher, but as words of God in human flesh. As we hear those words, we are directed to where He would have us go. He told Nicodemus that he need to be “born again” in order to “see the kingdom of God.” Jesus further explained what He was talking about. He was talking about being “born of water and the Spirit”—holy baptism, as we call it. This is how God wants to work in us, in order to begin a new life in us so that we can begin to appreciate the truths that He teaches us in Christ Jesus.

            That is because baptism is more than a simple ceremony or a ritual bath. It is the way that the Holy Spirit imparts new life in us by giving us a second birth. This birth isn’t like the natural birth that we received when our mothers had us. Instead, this is a heavenly birth. Once the Holy Spirit has started this new life in us, we are no longer completely earthly minded. We can begin to comprehend the heavenly truths that our Lord teaches. More than that, we are made part of God’s kingdom and thus know about it from the inside. In baptism we are united with Jesus Christ, His death, and His resurrection. Thus, we know God in a deep way, for we have been made to undergo the most profound things that God incarnate underwent. But we also learn about the Father—who is called “God” in this passage—for we learn about His kingdom. We also are led and shaped by the Holy Spirit, who brings us to faith through this holy washing. Thus, baptism does more than just teach us about the three Persons in the Trinity. It leads us to experience the work of the Trinity.

            Once baptized, we turn our attention to the words that God has spoken. We learn the heavenly things, the real spiritual matters rather than just the child’s play. We pay attention to the words our Lord spoke. We also listen carefully to the Old Testament prophets, for Christ approved of their message and said that they pointed to Him. We also hear attentively the words of the apostles, for Christ Himself commissioned them. If Christ had never come, the words of the prophets and apostles would lack full authority. They might be divine, but how would we know for sure? But because Christ, who is God in human flesh, has come and spoken and given His stamp of approval to these prophets and apostles, we now listen to them as speaking with divine authority.

            As we listen carefully to the Scriptures, we learn to speak clearly about God. And that is all we are doing when we confess the Holy Trinity. Our teaching that God is Triune—three in one—is not some speculation on our part. It is simply stating in short-hand what the Scriptures have to say about God. The more you read the Scriptures, the more you see Jesus Christ distinguishing Himself (the Son) from the Father and the Holy Spirit. We see that in today’s gospel, where He talks about the Father sending the Son to save the world and where He speaks about the Holy Spirit’s work in giving new birth. Furthermore, elsewhere we see that each of these Persons are truly and fully God, not partially so. And yet the Scriptures emphasize that there is one God, not three Gods. How that can be, we freely admit that we do not fully understand. But we know that we won’t solve the problem by simplifying the Trinity to fit our terms, either by reducing the three Persons into one Person or by diving the one Godhead into three.

            We teach the Trinity because that accords with the explanations that God Himself has given about what He is like. Occasionally you hear people say that the doctrine of the Trinity was something Christians invented three centuries after Christ’s birth to fit in with Greek philosophy. That is the argument, for example, that Dan Brown has made in his Da Vinci Code. He argues that nobody had ever worshipped Jesus as divine until in 325 A.D. the Council of Nicaea met and tried to reconcile the Bible with Greek philosophy. You hear similar things when TV programs try to explain the origin of Christianity. But, of course, that is sheer fiction, fiction worthy of a novelist, not a historian.

            What do I mean? First of all, I do not know how anyone can say with a straight face that the first time people thought of worshipping Jesus Christ as God was in 325 A.D. I don’t even need the New Testament to prove that Christians worshipped Christ as divine from the earliest of days. Even non-Christians knew that Christians worshipped Christ as God. Pliny, a Roman governor, mentions that fact in a letter to the emperor around 112 A.D. There is also a famous graffito in Rome from around 200 A.D. that says, “Alexamenos worships his God,” and it shows a caricature of someone on a cross. Sure, it is a mockery of Christianity, but it wouldn’t make sense if Christians didn’t worship Christ as divine. And then there are theologians such as Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian, who all lived in the 100’s A.D. and whose main writings had the explicit purpose of proving the divinity of Christ. In fact, Tertullian was the one who coined the term Trinity, long before the Council of Nicaea. But we don’t have to go that far afield. Even the most skeptical critics believe Paul’s letters were written within three decades of Christ’s death, and it is clear that Paul thought of Jesus as divine. So the argument that the divinity of Christ and the Trinity are latecomers to Christianity is preposterous.

            Furthermore, the other argument, namely, that Christianity borrowed the idea of the Trinity from Greek philosophy only makes sense to those who have never read Greek philosophy. There is nothing like the Trinity in Greek philosophy, where three persons share one essence. In fact, that contradicts the rules of philosophy. However, those who opposed the Trinity often were heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. For example, Arius taught that Jesus was a godlike being, but not fully God. That sounds a whole lot like the Demiurge in Plato’s Theaetetus.

            Before we draw this sermon to an end, let me address one more question: what difference does this all make? Quite a bit. God doesn’t want us to live in ignorance of Him. He has created us to enjoy life and fellowship with Him. The Father sent the Son, and the Son willingly went to the cross under the Spirit’s guidance, all so that we could be freed from death and everlasting condemnation. To know God truly in the way He should be known is nothing other than life. To know Him as we ought is the basis for all true prayer. Therefore, may you hear God’s Word attentively and learn what you could never have learned on your own. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.