Isaiah 6:1-7/Romans 11:33-36/St John 3:1-17
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
In May, the Year of our Lord 325, when Emperor Constantine convened the First Council of Nicea it was, in part, to combat the false teachings of a man called Arius. Arius and his followers, known as Arians, held the position that the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, was of a different substance from the Father. In other words, that He was the first created being; not eternal with the Father, but made.
Three hundred eighteen bishops, that is, pastors attended. Among them was a young assistant to the Bishop of Alexandria named Athanasius. Only 27 years old, Athanasius already grasped the magnitude of this controversy with Arius and was a steadfast defender of the true, orthodox Christian faith. Three years after the Council of Nicea, he succeeded his mentor as Bishop of Alexandria and presided for the next 45 years of his life.
Now the Council of Nicea was the first ecumenical council since the legalization of Christianity in AD 313. Constantine sought to keep peace in his empire and peace within the Church was beneficial for political stability. This is the same council in which Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, punched the heretic Arius for having denigrated the two natures of Christ. St Nick spent the night in jail. He returned the next day, publicly repented and was forgiven. He then joined the other bishops and whole council in condemning the lies and false teachings of Arius. Legend has it that the council members sang in unison what is now the Nicene Creed and Arius, unable to bare the true teaching of the Holy Trinity and the person and work of Jesus Christ, tucked up in the fetal position and cried. The devil, that spewer of false teaching and lies, cannot handle the pure doctrine set to music and chant!
Arius was excommunicated and his teaching was uniformly condemned, but he found quarter with allies who had not attended the Council in Nicea. Sadly his false teachings concerning Christ were supported by other bishops in the empire and promulgated. But upon the death of Alexander, Athanasius succeeded his pastor as Bishop of Alexandria and continued to defend the truth concerning Jesus Christ and the Blessed Holy Trinity against the false teaching of the Arians. During his 45 years as Bishop, Athanasius spent over 17 years in five exiles by four different Roman emperors. He also fled the city six separate times when threats were made on his life. Athansius was not martyred but died peacefully in his own bed in AD 373.
A century latter Arianism continued to rear its ugly head and another creed was written to combat the false teaching. This Creed reiterated the confession made at Nicea, but delved further into the mystery of the Holy Blessed Trinity. It confessed the orthodox faith of the whole Christian Church and of Athanasius who has spent many long years combatting false teaching. Though anonymously written, the Creed was named after this steadfast defender of Christianity. You confessed it today.
All of this is to say that doctrine matters. Pure teaching matters. “Whoever desires to be saved, must above all, hold the catholic faith. Whoever does not keep it whole and undefiled will without doubt perish eternally.” Foundational for the faith and absolutely essential for salvation is the true and proper confession of the Blessed Holy Trinity and the right confession of the two natures of Christ, including His person and work. If one does not confess these, one is not a Christian.
This is not some academic exercise, irrelevant to our Christian lives. The Holy Trinity is not merely a doctrine to which we assent; a piece of divine trivia that happens to be true but doesn’t actually make much difference. This is what Nicodemus thought. He assumed Jesus to be a Teacher from God, a purveyor of knowledge and doer of signs. A rabbi. He is a Rabbi, but not merely. He is the eternal Logos, the sole-begotten of the Father, co-equal, co-majestic, co-eternal with the Father; not created, nor made, but begotten. And that makes all the difference.
Last year as I was sitting in the waiting area of the IU Dental School, for my children, I flipped through a magazine and ran across an ad. Full page, color. It showed three silhouetted soldiers, dressed in full military gear. At the top of the page was written: Precision Saves Lives. I liked it. The statement is true theologically and the fact that it was three men of course struck me as an allusion to the Holy Trinity. I tore the page out.
My point is this: Words matter. Precision is important. It saves lives. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not an intellectual playground for pastors to sit and pontificate among themselves. It is not irrelevant, but of utmost relevance. The truth is there is nothing more irrelevant than a religion that claims to be relevant. Or to say it another way, there is nothing more relevant than the irrelevancy of God, the Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity.
For this is the catholic faith, apart from which there is no salvation. If Nicodemus was right, if Arius was right, and Jesus was only from God and not God in the flesh, then your faith is in vain and you are still in your sins and this whole thing called Christianity is a cruel, miserable joke; the Gospels are a lie, the Epistles a farse, your Baptism worthless and the Supper a facade!
If we do not have a right trust and true confession of Christ and His relationship to the Holy Trinity, its not a minor problem, its the problem. For if we don’t have a right trust and pure confession of Christ and the Trinity we have nothing. Consider: if the Son of God is created, then He is a creature, and no creature, however holy, could possibly die to atone for your sins. No sheep or ram or goat or holy man could die for you. Only the blood of the eternal Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, of one substance with the Father, who came down from heaven, was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary and was made Man, could redeem you.
For you are begotten of flesh. Conceived and born in sin. By your nature you do not comprehend the person of Christ nor the Holy Trinity. In fact, of your flesh, you hate and rebel against the pure teaching and orthodox faith. Flesh, without the Spirit of God, is idolatrous and covetous. It hungers, not for the true and holy Triune God, but for itself. And so it is itself consumed. It is cannibalistic because sin is the ultimate flesh-eating virus; like Arius who cowered at the pure preaching of the Word in the Nicene Creed.
Without the Spirit of God your flesh is undone. And if you presume to go to the Holy, Holy, Holy God apart from Christ and Him crucified, then you are undone all the more quickly - like Isaiah who wailed of his predicament before throne of eternal God.
By itself, apart from birth from above by the Spirit, your flesh is blind and stumbles around in the darkness, a perpetual nighttime of ignorance and unbelief - like Nicodemus who could not comprehend the things of God.
Today, Holy Trinity Sunday, we do not ask how to make our religion more relevant and attractive to the modern or the post-modern, but we are bold to proclaim and publicly confess than nothing can be more meaningful to the secular man than the irrelevancy of the Triune God. The God who means nothing to the world is the God who made the world and without this God this world has no meaning. That which is born of flesh is flesh. And all flesh is as the grass.
But the Spirit of God breathes where He wishes. The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty. And the only Son of the Father reveals to you His love. These two, the Son and the Spirit, speak of what they know. The Son and the Spirit bear witness to what they have seen. For they who are co-equal, co-eternal, co-majestic with the Father are within the Blessed Holy Trinity and constitute the divine council, convened from all eternity.
No one knows the mind of God, no one has been His counselor, as St Paul writes. No on has ascended into heaven, Jesus says, except He who descended from heaven.
God is love. The Father loves the Son from all eternity, and the Son, the Beloved, loves the Father from all eternity in the personal Bond and perfect Unity of the Holy Spirit. It is for the sake of this divine, eternal Love that God created the heavens and the earth, made man in His image, male and female.
And it is for the sake of this same divine, eternal Love that the Father sends His Son to redeem and save fallen creation. In this love the Son goes willingly to the Cross. Without the Cross you cannot know anything about God. In the Cross you see not only the man Jesus innocently and cruelly put to death, but in the Cross you see the heart of God who is not only your Creator, but also your Redeemer. Only in the Cross do you begin to know God. For the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ is the door into heaven and the window into the heart, mind, and soul of God.
Through the Cross you see the Lamb of God seated on the divine throne, surrounded by myriads of angels and adored by all the saints. In the Cross you see the prophets and the apostles, the martyrs and all the faithful. For “the glorious company of the apostles praise Thee. The holy Church throughout all the world does acknowledge Thee: the Father of an infinite majesty, Thine adorable, true and only Son, also the Holy Ghost the Comforter.” Here at the Cross you hear the song of the angels, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Sabaoth, heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory. Here at the gate of heaven you see not only yourself as a person of unclean hands, but you also see yourself and all humanity reconciled to God in Christ.
We could not celebrate the Holy Trinity any earlier in the Church Year than today. It is always in connection with the Feast of Pentecost, because the mystery of the Holy Trinity could only be made complete with the coming of the Holy Spirit. As Jesus said to Nicodemus, In this way God loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For the Crucifixion of Jesus is the true Pentecost and the true celebration of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity comes from the throne of God, but that throne is not far off in the heavens, inaccessible. The throne is the Cross set up in the midst of sinful humanity. From the throne of the Cross Jesus prays for us and all sinners: Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.
From that Cross you have learned to pray, Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. From that Cross, Jesus grants us the Father’s absolution and by the power of the Holy Spirit we forgive those who sin against us.
Last semester I was invited to be part of a panel discussion on pluralism in Christianity. During the Q and A the presenter cited John 17 as to why the Father and Son cannot be of the same substance, because Jesus prays that the Father make us one with Him even as They are one. “See,” he asserted, “we aren’t and can’t be of one substance with the Father, therefore Jesus can’t be of one substance with the Father.”
He was mistaken. Blessed be the Holy Trinity and the undivided Unity because He has shown mercy to us. The unity of Christ Jesus to the Father is by nature and essence, but your unity in Him is no less natural. It is a unity of adoption by grace. The strong Name of the Holy Trinity is bound to you and you are bound up together in Him, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. By Holy Baptism You are taken into the mystery of God and enabled to pray with Jesus, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” By Baptism you have fellowship in love with the God who is Love. And wherever this Gospel of the free forgiveness of sins is preached, there the Holy Spirit is present.
For as Jesus is in the bosom of His Father as the beloved Son, so the Spirit it lodged in the wounds of Jesus and from those wounds comes the Holy Spirit to you. The Spirit comes from the side of Jesus in the water of Holy Baptism and the Blood of Holy Communion. There are three in heaven: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are three witnesses on earth: the water, the blood, and the Spirit. And these three lead you to Christ and Christ leads you to the Father. Blessed be the Holy Trinity and the undivided Unity. Let us give glory to Him because He has shown mercy to us.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
In May, the Year of our Lord 325, when Emperor Constantine convened the First Council of Nicea it was, in part, to combat the false teachings of a man called Arius. Arius and his followers, known as Arians, held the position that the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, was of a different substance from the Father. In other words, that He was the first created being; not eternal with the Father, but made.
Three hundred eighteen bishops, that is, pastors attended. Among them was a young assistant to the Bishop of Alexandria named Athanasius. Only 27 years old, Athanasius already grasped the magnitude of this controversy with Arius and was a steadfast defender of the true, orthodox Christian faith. Three years after the Council of Nicea, he succeeded his mentor as Bishop of Alexandria and presided for the next 45 years of his life.
Now the Council of Nicea was the first ecumenical council since the legalization of Christianity in AD 313. Constantine sought to keep peace in his empire and peace within the Church was beneficial for political stability. This is the same council in which Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, punched the heretic Arius for having denigrated the two natures of Christ. St Nick spent the night in jail. He returned the next day, publicly repented and was forgiven. He then joined the other bishops and whole council in condemning the lies and false teachings of Arius. Legend has it that the council members sang in unison what is now the Nicene Creed and Arius, unable to bare the true teaching of the Holy Trinity and the person and work of Jesus Christ, tucked up in the fetal position and cried. The devil, that spewer of false teaching and lies, cannot handle the pure doctrine set to music and chant!
Arius was excommunicated and his teaching was uniformly condemned, but he found quarter with allies who had not attended the Council in Nicea. Sadly his false teachings concerning Christ were supported by other bishops in the empire and promulgated. But upon the death of Alexander, Athanasius succeeded his pastor as Bishop of Alexandria and continued to defend the truth concerning Jesus Christ and the Blessed Holy Trinity against the false teaching of the Arians. During his 45 years as Bishop, Athanasius spent over 17 years in five exiles by four different Roman emperors. He also fled the city six separate times when threats were made on his life. Athansius was not martyred but died peacefully in his own bed in AD 373.
A century latter Arianism continued to rear its ugly head and another creed was written to combat the false teaching. This Creed reiterated the confession made at Nicea, but delved further into the mystery of the Holy Blessed Trinity. It confessed the orthodox faith of the whole Christian Church and of Athanasius who has spent many long years combatting false teaching. Though anonymously written, the Creed was named after this steadfast defender of Christianity. You confessed it today.
All of this is to say that doctrine matters. Pure teaching matters. “Whoever desires to be saved, must above all, hold the catholic faith. Whoever does not keep it whole and undefiled will without doubt perish eternally.” Foundational for the faith and absolutely essential for salvation is the true and proper confession of the Blessed Holy Trinity and the right confession of the two natures of Christ, including His person and work. If one does not confess these, one is not a Christian.
This is not some academic exercise, irrelevant to our Christian lives. The Holy Trinity is not merely a doctrine to which we assent; a piece of divine trivia that happens to be true but doesn’t actually make much difference. This is what Nicodemus thought. He assumed Jesus to be a Teacher from God, a purveyor of knowledge and doer of signs. A rabbi. He is a Rabbi, but not merely. He is the eternal Logos, the sole-begotten of the Father, co-equal, co-majestic, co-eternal with the Father; not created, nor made, but begotten. And that makes all the difference.
Last year as I was sitting in the waiting area of the IU Dental School, for my children, I flipped through a magazine and ran across an ad. Full page, color. It showed three silhouetted soldiers, dressed in full military gear. At the top of the page was written: Precision Saves Lives. I liked it. The statement is true theologically and the fact that it was three men of course struck me as an allusion to the Holy Trinity. I tore the page out.
My point is this: Words matter. Precision is important. It saves lives. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not an intellectual playground for pastors to sit and pontificate among themselves. It is not irrelevant, but of utmost relevance. The truth is there is nothing more irrelevant than a religion that claims to be relevant. Or to say it another way, there is nothing more relevant than the irrelevancy of God, the Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity.
For this is the catholic faith, apart from which there is no salvation. If Nicodemus was right, if Arius was right, and Jesus was only from God and not God in the flesh, then your faith is in vain and you are still in your sins and this whole thing called Christianity is a cruel, miserable joke; the Gospels are a lie, the Epistles a farse, your Baptism worthless and the Supper a facade!
If we do not have a right trust and true confession of Christ and His relationship to the Holy Trinity, its not a minor problem, its the problem. For if we don’t have a right trust and pure confession of Christ and the Trinity we have nothing. Consider: if the Son of God is created, then He is a creature, and no creature, however holy, could possibly die to atone for your sins. No sheep or ram or goat or holy man could die for you. Only the blood of the eternal Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, of one substance with the Father, who came down from heaven, was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary and was made Man, could redeem you.
For you are begotten of flesh. Conceived and born in sin. By your nature you do not comprehend the person of Christ nor the Holy Trinity. In fact, of your flesh, you hate and rebel against the pure teaching and orthodox faith. Flesh, without the Spirit of God, is idolatrous and covetous. It hungers, not for the true and holy Triune God, but for itself. And so it is itself consumed. It is cannibalistic because sin is the ultimate flesh-eating virus; like Arius who cowered at the pure preaching of the Word in the Nicene Creed.
Without the Spirit of God your flesh is undone. And if you presume to go to the Holy, Holy, Holy God apart from Christ and Him crucified, then you are undone all the more quickly - like Isaiah who wailed of his predicament before throne of eternal God.
By itself, apart from birth from above by the Spirit, your flesh is blind and stumbles around in the darkness, a perpetual nighttime of ignorance and unbelief - like Nicodemus who could not comprehend the things of God.
Today, Holy Trinity Sunday, we do not ask how to make our religion more relevant and attractive to the modern or the post-modern, but we are bold to proclaim and publicly confess than nothing can be more meaningful to the secular man than the irrelevancy of the Triune God. The God who means nothing to the world is the God who made the world and without this God this world has no meaning. That which is born of flesh is flesh. And all flesh is as the grass.
But the Spirit of God breathes where He wishes. The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty. And the only Son of the Father reveals to you His love. These two, the Son and the Spirit, speak of what they know. The Son and the Spirit bear witness to what they have seen. For they who are co-equal, co-eternal, co-majestic with the Father are within the Blessed Holy Trinity and constitute the divine council, convened from all eternity.
No one knows the mind of God, no one has been His counselor, as St Paul writes. No on has ascended into heaven, Jesus says, except He who descended from heaven.
God is love. The Father loves the Son from all eternity, and the Son, the Beloved, loves the Father from all eternity in the personal Bond and perfect Unity of the Holy Spirit. It is for the sake of this divine, eternal Love that God created the heavens and the earth, made man in His image, male and female.
And it is for the sake of this same divine, eternal Love that the Father sends His Son to redeem and save fallen creation. In this love the Son goes willingly to the Cross. Without the Cross you cannot know anything about God. In the Cross you see not only the man Jesus innocently and cruelly put to death, but in the Cross you see the heart of God who is not only your Creator, but also your Redeemer. Only in the Cross do you begin to know God. For the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ is the door into heaven and the window into the heart, mind, and soul of God.
Through the Cross you see the Lamb of God seated on the divine throne, surrounded by myriads of angels and adored by all the saints. In the Cross you see the prophets and the apostles, the martyrs and all the faithful. For “the glorious company of the apostles praise Thee. The holy Church throughout all the world does acknowledge Thee: the Father of an infinite majesty, Thine adorable, true and only Son, also the Holy Ghost the Comforter.” Here at the Cross you hear the song of the angels, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Sabaoth, heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory. Here at the gate of heaven you see not only yourself as a person of unclean hands, but you also see yourself and all humanity reconciled to God in Christ.
We could not celebrate the Holy Trinity any earlier in the Church Year than today. It is always in connection with the Feast of Pentecost, because the mystery of the Holy Trinity could only be made complete with the coming of the Holy Spirit. As Jesus said to Nicodemus, In this way God loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For the Crucifixion of Jesus is the true Pentecost and the true celebration of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity comes from the throne of God, but that throne is not far off in the heavens, inaccessible. The throne is the Cross set up in the midst of sinful humanity. From the throne of the Cross Jesus prays for us and all sinners: Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.
From that Cross you have learned to pray, Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. From that Cross, Jesus grants us the Father’s absolution and by the power of the Holy Spirit we forgive those who sin against us.
Last semester I was invited to be part of a panel discussion on pluralism in Christianity. During the Q and A the presenter cited John 17 as to why the Father and Son cannot be of the same substance, because Jesus prays that the Father make us one with Him even as They are one. “See,” he asserted, “we aren’t and can’t be of one substance with the Father, therefore Jesus can’t be of one substance with the Father.”
He was mistaken. Blessed be the Holy Trinity and the undivided Unity because He has shown mercy to us. The unity of Christ Jesus to the Father is by nature and essence, but your unity in Him is no less natural. It is a unity of adoption by grace. The strong Name of the Holy Trinity is bound to you and you are bound up together in Him, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. By Holy Baptism You are taken into the mystery of God and enabled to pray with Jesus, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” By Baptism you have fellowship in love with the God who is Love. And wherever this Gospel of the free forgiveness of sins is preached, there the Holy Spirit is present.
For as Jesus is in the bosom of His Father as the beloved Son, so the Spirit it lodged in the wounds of Jesus and from those wounds comes the Holy Spirit to you. The Spirit comes from the side of Jesus in the water of Holy Baptism and the Blood of Holy Communion. There are three in heaven: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are three witnesses on earth: the water, the blood, and the Spirit. And these three lead you to Christ and Christ leads you to the Father. Blessed be the Holy Trinity and the undivided Unity. Let us give glory to Him because He has shown mercy to us.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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