Sunday 31st May – Trinity Sunday – Pr Robert Voigt – transcript

Trinity Sunday is always a difficult topic. Who can understand the Trinity? Our pastor, Adrian, decided that he’d have a rest and to get a professional theologian in to take his place. But he couldn’t find anyone, so he invited me.

Even though it is so difficult to understand it, it’s important every year that we talk about what we can understand and why it’s important that we accept the Trinity. I don’t know if you realise, but in the Christian world today, the Trinity is considered the first number one theological statement. If you don’t believe in the Trinity, you are not Christian. That’s how we decide that, for instance, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Christadelphians and others, we do not consider them Christian because they do not accept the Trinity.

Unitarians don’t accept the Trinity. And there’s a whole heap of people who don’t. Quakers and other people, they don’t accept the Trinity because they can’t understand it and therefore they don’t.

It really all started back in the early 300s AD when a bloke called Arius, who was a Priest, began teaching that Jesus was created by the Father. Now most theological statements we have today, like the creeds, only came about because of heresy. We wouldn’t even have them if it wasn’t for the fact that somebody started teaching something that wasn’t scriptural.

Up until the early 300s, it was generally agreed. that Jesus was the eternal Son of God, that the Spirit was the eternal Spirit who was sent by Jesus. But Arius started teaching that Jesus was created and therefore while he was a God, he was not the God. And therefore there was only one God. Jesus was a God and the Holy Spirit was more the power of God. And as a result of that, and it became quite popular, they held a council in 325 AD known as the Council of Nicaea, from which we get the Nicene Creed.  There they agreed on what we believe about the Trinity. And the best they could do was this.

Imagine using human words to try and describe God. We’re pretty silly sometimes, we even try, but we have to when there is a heresy. “True God from true God, begotten, not made. He was not created”. He was not a part of creation. “He is true God of one being of one substance with the Father. Through him all things were made”.

In John’s gospel. It says,

Nothing was made without him. And therefore, everywhere in Scripture, in the New Testament, it’s clear that Jesus is clearly claiming to be a part of the Trinity.

As a result, in the 1200s, this is the earliest manuscript, you’ll see it in the British Library, the earliest manuscript of the Trinity Shield. Up the top on the left you’ve got Father, down the bottom, Filius, (Son), and up the top, Spiritus, (Spirit), and there you’ve got the Latin there “non est”, Father is not and Son is not, Spirit is not, but they are God.

Next picture –  Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in one. Well now, you’ve got that clear in your mind, I can go home, I think I’ve done my bit and we can clearly appreciate now the Trinity and really understand God himself.

Well, I wondered what text to pick for Trinity Sunday and all I wanted to do is talk about the Trinity is to evoke, bring up worship in us and praise and thanksgiving.

If you attended the Revelations series with Dr Noel Due at Redeemer you might remember how the 24 elders cast their crowns before the throne. Absolute worship and praise And they give everything to God and to the Lamb who sits upon the throne. That’s what we want to do in some small measure today.

I chose this text.

And so today the question is, to whom will you compare me at a time in the world where the West is rejecting God? In the east, in Asia, down in Africa, South America, in so many places, the Christian church is going gangbusters as people come to appreciate this God who comes to us. But people are rejecting him. He’s saying, who are you going to replace me with? Because the one thing human beings can’t do is live with no God. And if they can’t believe in the only true God, they’ll make their own. And people have always done that. And that was part of the problem with Arius because what he taught was that if God, if Jesus was only a god, then that’s very similar to the Greek gods.

Do you remember the Greek gods, Zeus and all the others? Because these gods were made in the image of humans, most blokes who made up these gods, they figured that if you’re Zeus, and you’re a male and you’ve got all power, well, they saw Zeus then as being rather “randy”. I can’t think of another word that actually is less offensive than that one. And that every now and again he’d look down and see a beautiful woman and he’d go down and he’d get her pregnant. And that’s how we get the demigods of the Greek. So you’ve heard of Hercules, you’ve heard of Achilles, Pericles, even Helen of Troy was supposed to have been the daughter of Zeus. They became demigods. They were half human, half divine. And so they couldn’t die, but at the same time they could be thrashed and knocked around and get into trouble and all that sort of thing. But they were created.

So today we come to the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, eternal, not made, not created, always existed, always will exist. And as great as he is, we can’t begin to comprehend his greatness and the wonder of his being.  So, what we do is what humans have done all over the ages. We’ve tried to put God in a box in a sort of a way that we understand. I do know some Christians who actually say that because Jesus said, “Whatever you ask for in my name, I’ll give it to you”, they actually think that therefore if they pray for it, God owes them and he’s got to do it. That’s God in a box.

Because God does as he pleases and God doesn’t have to respond in any way at all towards what we do and say. God is God regardless. But we put him in that box and say that God can only do this through us. Others say, I can make miracles, I can speak in tongues, I can do all sorts of wonderful things. But we’ve still got him in that box which says, I decide. what he does with me. I decide how he works in this world today. And you know we can’t do that very well, can we?

This is a photo from NASA, when you consider this is a photo of the Milky Way, our galaxy, (and that arrow does not point to Earth), it points to our solar system. The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. When you think that here we are on this one planet and we’re like ants running around on it, and we are one planet in the solar system where it takes how many years to go from Earth to the end of our solar system, travelling at about 40,000 Ks an hour, takes about four years to get out there, I think something like that. Just how amazing that is. And our solar system fits into this galaxy and takes about 100,000 years to get around. Just blows your mind to pieces.

This God we worship, this God made it all, created all things. And all created things declare the glory of God. They show the work of his hands if we’re able to see it. And at the same time, this God who has made everything and who is so incredible – made us! He created us.

We think about God and pottery and think about that God got his hands dirty like he did with Adam and Eve, making them out of the dust of the ground in a real way.  Psalm 139 talks about that he knit us together in our mother’s womb. It’s that idea of the potter taking the clay and molding it in a unique way every single time to make you and me.   This amazing God knows each one of us intimately by name. He knows you, he knows who you are and he knows what you are.  He knows what you think.  He knows how you believe and what you do with this knowledge that God is so great you can’t surprise him because he knows us that well.

But we are the clay. We are the work of his hands. And like Paul, I can only say, oh, how great are God’s riches and wisdom and knowledge.

How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his ways. Way back in Exodus, when they crossed the Red Sea, they sang the song

So, how today have you come here today? You’ve said you’ve come to worship but how do we worship?

We need to recognize This God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit is beyond anything we can understand and yet this God has come to us. He has come to us in Jesus. He has come to you and me and said, You are no good rotten sinners. I’ll die in your place. I’ll take the punishment.

I will do everything necessary to break the barriers between you and me and I will bring us back into fellowship. And that word fellowship is such a precious word for us when we’re talking about God and us. We are back in fellowship with God.

Adam and Eve broke that fellowship and they ran for their lives and hid. But now in Christ, we are in fellowship with this triune God who comes to us. And now when we sin, when we do anything, we don’t have to run away. We run towards him. We don’t run away because we’re frightened of punishment. We run towards him for forgiveness and for reassurance of his love and his undeserved love and grace and mercy. Because this God, who is so awesome, so amazing, you know that little ditty

He is! … and I want you to know that I think that God’s Word wants you to understand that you are in fellowship with this Trinity. You are in fellowship with God Himself who has come to you and He created you and sustained you and then sent His Son Jesus coming to us so that He could take our place.  Jesus sending the Holy Spirit because we’re too stupid to believe on our own. And he provides us with faith and gives us the ability then to love and serve the Lord.

There’s a guy painted a picture back in the 15th century, 1400s, Rublev. Artists have a great deal to answer for in a way because they’ve always tried to picture God. And that’s why we’ve got some of our weird ideas, you know, the idea of God an old doddering old man with a really long beard. That’s where some of the ideas came from. Usually most of our ideas of God came from art. So if you’ve been to the Sistine Chapel or ever seen the ceiling, you see there a picture of God that’s got muscles just like mine. Oh, you have seen that, have you?   So there he’s a big bulky bloke with a white beard and everything else looking powerful. And that’s how we depict him. But here, what Rublev has tried to do is simply say, look, God is a trinity, Father, Son and Spirit, and they’re in fellowship. They’re in a unity far greater than we can understand, but they’re in a wonderful unity.  The picture shows one bowl to signify one God. But the strange thing is, if you can see it, that just below the bowl, there’s a little rectangle. People for years wondered what on earth that was because this is an icon and in the Eastern Orthodox churches and Russian churches icons are considered sacred and holy. But this one they think did something quite unique. It had a mirror so that when you looked at this painting you saw yourself in the gap with the Trinity.

You are in unity with this awesome, incredible, indescribable, unknowable in so many ways God, and you’re in fellowship with them and with that one God. That is spectacular. I think that’s quite amazing. And that also shows us the one thing that we often take for granted in our churches, and that is the gift of unity. As God is one, so his church is one. There is only one head and one body for the church. There is only one spirit, one Lord, one God and Father of us all.

Paul says in Ephesians 4.

but then it means that what is precious to us is we are in unity with other Christians, with all Christians throughout the world. And how often do we mess that up? When you think the number of denominations we’ve got. When you think we’ve had a split in our own dear, lovely LCA recently. When you think how often this congregation has had conflict, fighting mostly over the Constitution, rarely over what the Bible says, and where we don’t take this unity seriously enough.   As we are one with God, so we are one with one another.

Jesus never quoted to us. He only gave one new commandment. And it wasn’t

 “Love your neighbour as yourself”.

It was

That’s the new commandment. Loving your neighbour like yourself means sometimes your neighbour had better watch out if you’re not feeling in a good mood. Loving others the way Jesus loves us changes everything. And it is that love that enables a unity of all kinds of different people.  People who can come together and with one voice and with one heart and one mind, worship the God of all who loves us beyond anything we can imagine. Who has come to us, to you and me in the spirit and has named us and claimed us and calls us now to walk in this unity and in this love that is spectacular when you think about it.

Jesus in his high priestly prayer said this (he’s talking to the Father). I have given them, that is you, the glory you gave me. You have the glory that the Father gave to the Son, so that they may be one as we are one. I am in them and you are in me. So if you’ve got Christ in you, you’ve got the Father in you. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me. I’d better read that again. May they experience such perfect unity. Yeah, well, perfect is not what we’re going to do. But the unity is really important, isn’t it? Yes, we fail. Yes, we’ll fight. But it’s how we go through those times and how we come out of them that matter, that re-establish unity even when there’s conflict.

Wow. Isn’t that just amazing? Yeah, I know. You’re good Lutherans. Just sit there. hardly a smile, I thought a twinkle in the eye maybe, or they always say Lutherans smile loudly. Isn’t this just the greatest thing to be reminded of? I know you know it, but isn’t it just the most amazing thing to be reminded this God, this holy, indescribable God, three in one, comes to us, lives in us.  This is what Paul says also.

And Christ lives within you.

See, Spirit, Christ, all one. So even though your body will die because of sin, the Spirit gives you life because you’ve been made right with God. The Spirit of God. I mean, look at Trinity running all through this. The Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, He will give life to your mortal bodies by the same Spirit living within you. Praise the Lord. Let us worship Him with all that we are and have. God grant it. Amen.

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