Sixth Sunday of
Easter, May 14th, A+D 2023
Our Savior’s and Our
Redeemer Lutheran Churches
Hill City and Custer,
South Dakota
No Other God Will Do
Acts 17:16-31, 1 Peter 3:13-22,
John 14:15-21
In the Name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Grandpa Beecher
liked to drink buttermilk and eat smoked herring or sardines, just before bedtime. A strange fact about my father, which, when
it came up at dinner a couple of decades ago immediately aroused interest in our
then 8 or 9 year-old daughter Madeline. Our
kids never met their grandfather, so this little tidbit offered a window into who
my dad was, what he was like. We
naturally want to know something about where we’ve come from, about our
grandparents, our ancestors. So my kids
always loved to hear stories about Grandpa Beecher, and visit the ranch where
he grew up, and use the few tools of his that I have, stamped with his
initials, BWW.
Behind our desire
to know about our grandparents and ancestors lies the desire we all have to
know about God, about the Creator and Ruler of the universe, who He is, what He
is like, what He thinks of us.
Christians correctly look to the book of Genesis and the rest of the
Bible to learn about the Creator whom we cannot see. Not yet, anyway. Non-Christians look for answers in all the
wrong places. But they do look, in
native fables and ancient myths, in false religions, or in the pontification of
the high priests of scientism.
According to Darwinists,
our origin lies in an elegant, convoluted and ultimately foolish theory filled
with inconsistencies and impossible odds.
What evolution does do well, however, is to maintain the chief article
of the evolutionist faith, that God must, above all things, be kept out of the
discussion. Which, since God does exist,
is pointless.
Schemes to know
the Creator vary widely. Athenians with
a whole city full of idols hedged their bets with a shrine to “The Unknown God.” Every religion, evolutionists included, want
to learn about the unseen One who has caused us to be here. Well, Good News for all the seekers out
there. Today, from Jesus and from Paul
and Peter, we have some wonderful insights into who our Creator is, what He’s
like, and what He thinks of us. Beautiful
and difficult insights, and also very good news.
Jesus lays the
groundwork for what we refer to as the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Some people like to argue that the Church
made up the Trinity, the teaching that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
three distinct and co-equal divine persons, but who at the same time are the
one true God.
Three in one, one
in three, tri-unity, or Trinity. It’s
true the word ‘Trinity’ is not in the Bible.
But the teaching of the mystery of the three-in-one God is all over the
place, including on the lips of Jesus. “Hear,
O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is One.”
So thunders God’s Word from Genesis to Malachi, and throughout the New
Testament. And yet at the same time,
Jesus says: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to
be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth…”
Jesus, God’s Son, promises His Father will send the Holy Spirit. We are commanded to baptize in the One Name
of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. “I
and the Father are One,” states Jesus, “He who sees Me has seen the Father.” The Holy Trinity is simply the term the
Church faithfully developed to refer to the One True God in three divine
persons, as revealed by Jesus Christ.
The words ‘Triune’
and ‘Trinity’ were developed by the Church to serve as short hand to refer to God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is needed
for us to talk about God, necessary for theology. If you doubt, try having an in depth
conversation about the God of the Bible, but each time you want to refer to
God, say God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Always saying the full Name of our three in
one God would quickly become unwieldly. And
yet it is vital to identify God correctly.
So the Early Church coined the terms Triune and Trinity, good, faithful
shorthand to refer to the One True God.
We also need to learn
all that we can about the true God, to understand ourselves. God is our Source, for He is the Source of
everything, the great I AM, the Source of Being, from whom all the creation
comes. Knowing who God is helps us
understand ourselves, because God creates in keeping with His character. As Paul says, “in Him we live and move and
have our being.”
“Let us create
man in our image,” said One Person to the other Persons within the Godhead,
hinting from the start at the “more than one-ness” of the One True God. And so we were created, male and female, in
the image of God. Our first parents were
not gods. They were definitely less than
God, derivative, different. Creatures. But, unique in all creation, we are creatures
made in God’s image and likeness.
There is enough to
discover in this wonderful mystery for dozens of sermons. Today let’s simply consider this fact: God is
Father, Son and Holy Spirit; relationship is a reality in God. Which means relationship is also part of who we
are. We are created for relationships,
first husband and wife, then parents and child, then brother and sister,
neighbor, friend, all because God, within Himself, is in
relationship.
The Father loves
the Son, and gives all things to Him. The
Son loves the Father, and desires above all things to serve Him. The Spirit flows from both Father and Son and
desires above all things to give glory to the Father by telling people about the
Son. Our innate desire for relationship
is not a weakness. It is not an
evolutionary adaptation. Our desire for
relationship is a reflection of God, and of how He made us to be.
God is life. He
himself gives life to all mankind, our breath and energy and all we have. And so we are alive, designed to live
forever.
God is just,
loving the right and the good, and hating evil.
God is just, and so we are moral, created with a longing for right to prevail,
and for wrong to be defeated.
God, who is love,
pure and good, is in constant service within Himself, the Father, Son and
Spirit serving each other in perfect joy.
God serves in relationship, and so we also are designed to serve,
husbands created to love and serve and protect wives and children. Wives likewise are created to love and serve and
support husbands and children. Each one
of us is called into a variety of relationships, vocations, in which we have
opportunity to serve others, everyone benefitting from the mutual service of
everyone else. Our relationships of
service are a reflection of who the Triune God is.
Of course, here
we find the scary part. As we take to
heart how God has created us to love and serve and live rightly, the reality of
our lives becomes frightening. We are
all tempted at this point run off to gods of our own imagination, be they
mythological or scientific, or just watered down, false versions of the
Christian God. We are tempted to run away
from the True God because we fear the reality of our brokenness. We are exposed by the light of who God is,
and who we are supposed to be. Learning about the True God strikes fear in
us. Knowing God and knowing ourselves
becomes a life threatening problem, for we daily deny the Trinity.
We were made by God
to love, made for justice, to always choose the right, made to serve others. But, we do not. Far too often we are instead selfish,
self-centered, desiring evil. We use
people in relationships. We like to
claim that they did it first, that we didn’t start it, and that might be
true. But it doesn’t matter. We are not who God has made us to be. We do not live as God expects. So, our lives are in danger. By our thoughts, words and deeds we reject God
and His way, and that is eternally dangerous.
Because the loving and just God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is the
only source of life.
It’s depressing,
the way we are. Depressing, and, if we
pay close attention to what God says about the wages of sin, also very frightening. For the Triune God tells us
in His Word that the wages of sin is death, separation, being cut off from God
and all His blessings, everlasting suffering.
This fearfulness tempts us to turn to a different idea of God, to turn
to a god who is less demanding. More
like us. A god we can deal with. Our reading from John’s Gospel comes from the
Upper Room, on the night when Jesus was betrayed. It is instructive that Judas Iscariot gave in
to the Tempter on this night at the end of Holy Week, when Jesus revealed so
much about God. Judas couldn’t handle the
God Jesus described, and so he betrayed Him.
Knowing the true
God is frightening, and the temptation to deny Him and run away is great. But don’t do it. Don’t dumb down your idea of God to fit
within your logic, or to try to hide from your sin. Because, while the Trinity is bad news for us
because we are sinners, even
more, the Trinity is good news for
us sinners. The Gospel, the good news of
salvation for sinners, is embedded in and flows from the reality of God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
For God, who does
not live in houses made by human hands, who does not need anything from us,
none the less desires to live with us. We are His most cherished thing in all
Creation. Jesus tells the disciples that
the Spirit is already dwelling with them, and would soon be in them. The Spirit dwells
with them because Jesus, who is one with the Spirit, dwells with them. And the Spirit will dwell in
them, after Jesus is glorified, after Jesus is lifted up on the Cross. Christ’s atoning blood is what makes true
intimacy with God possible for us sinners.
Indeed, God’s desire to live with us, to be in close, loving
relationship to humans like you and me, this is the cause behind the whole
story of Christ and His Church.
The goal of this
story is God dwelling with and even in mankind.
The problem of the story is our sinfulness, by which we reject and cut
ourselves off from God. The Hero, the
protagonist of the story, is Jesus Christ, the only begotten and eternal Son of
God, who comes into our world, who becomes a human being without giving up any
of His divine nature, in order to fix the problem our sin creates, by shedding
His precious blood on the Cross, for us.
Only a man, a human being, could do the work and pay the debt required
by human sin. But none of us sinners are
capable of the perfect life required, not even to pay our own debt. Let alone to atone for the sins of the whole world. Only God could complete a task this
great.
If Jesus Christ is
less than truly and fully God, then we cannot be sure God is truly and
fully reconciled to us by His life, death and resurrection. Non-Trinitarian religions must always include
in their way of salvation a requirement for works on our part. But the work of salvation is too great for us. Our sin stains every attempt we make to
appease God. We need Jesus to be fully
God, so He can be fully, 100%, our Savior.
And Jesus is
truly and fully God, who became a human, born of the Virgin Mary, God
enfleshed, to save us sinners, to finish the work, all the way, for us. As Peter tells us this morning, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the
righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to
death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.”
This Trinitarian Gospel is the reason for
the hope that is in you. It is the
promise of your Baptism, which now saves you.
The Good News of Salvation depends on God being the Trinity.
For how could God the Father send the God
the Son to be conceived in the Virgin Mary by the power of God the Holy Spirit,
if God was not Triune, three in one?
How could the Spirit be sent from the
Father, be given to you in your Baptism, or deliver Chirst’s forgiveness to you
by His Word, if God was not Father, Son and Holy Spirit?
The three-in-oneness of the Godhead is how
God has revealed Himself, and it is also very good news for you. Because it is God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, who has completed and who delivers real and complete salvation, to you. No other god will do.
So we rejoice to
claim the Name of the Trinity, placed upon us in our Baptism, because in this
God we daily find forgiveness for sins, real and eternal life, the free gift of
salvation. We rejoice, standing ready to
give the reason for our hope, knowing all the while that confessing this God
may, like Paul in Athens, get us in trouble.
The reality of the Triune God will be rejected by many, because it is
above and beyond the capacity of human logic to fully understand or explain. Confessing the Trinity also means confessing that
we are creatures, less-than and dependent-on God for all things, a dependence
that human nature hates. But dependence
on the Holy Trinity is blessed dependence, for with the Trinity always comes
the Cross and Resurrection, God’s solution for our problem of sin and
separation.
Confessing the Trinity
and the Cross and Resurrection may get us in trouble. For many, it seems too exclusive, and too condemning
of human sin. So be it. Stick with your confession of Cross and
Trinity because it is true, and because it is your salvation. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who
comes to serve us, here, in this and every place believers gather around His Word. The Triune God meets us here, to feed us at
this table, to wash new believers at this font.
This is the place
of Law and Gospel, of Truth about mankind and the Truth about God, the Truth of God’s merciful
Way. This Truth is the aroma of death to
those who disbelieve. But to all who
believe, to all who sorrow for their sins but look to Jesus in hope, to all who
are being saved, this merciful Truth is the very aroma of life,
in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Spirit, Amen.
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