The Glory of the Trinity - Sermon for Holy Trinity Sunday

Holy Trinity Sunday 2025     
Our Savior’s and Our Redeemer Lutheran Churches
Hill City and Custer, SD
The Glory of the Trinity

   The last words I heard my father say were: “I’m sorry kids.”  My father was, in the words of my brother Bill, “the best dad.”  But he died just before Shelee and I got married.  His last words to us, from an emergency room bed, were an apology that his death would cast a shadow on our special day. 

   My father had, in many ways, spent his life making good things and special days possible for my mom and for us kids.  That his death would tarnish our wedding day made him sad.  His last words revealed that even as his earthly life drew to its end, his thoughts were not only for himself, but also for others.  What a way to go.     

   Now, my family, including my father, was, and is, far from perfect.  Like yours, I’m sure, there have been enough miscommunications, failures and fights to write a Netflix miniseries.  I remember hiding in the corner of the upstairs hallway, watching in awe as my two oldest brothers tried to punch each other senseless.  And don’t ask me about the way the youngest of us five siblings behaved towards his sister and brothers.      

   Nevertheless, there were times, by God’s grace, when you could see a wonderful family in us, as my father served my mother and us kids, as Mom served my father and us kids, and as we kids respected and obeyed and worked for our parents, and even occasionally loved and cared for each other.  It wasn’t ever perfect.  Sometimes the idyllic image of each member serving the others was all but invisible.  But sometimes you could see it. 

   My dad usually didn’t talk much, but he loved to work.  Sometimes he might say very little in the course of a day, but he was always accomplishing something for us.  My mom, on the other hand, loved to talk.  She served as the principal speaker of family plans and policies.  Mom and Dad made decisions together, and then Mom told us how things were going to be.  Dad backed her up. 

   So, we kids usually did what we were told, helping out around the house, at church, and wherever else being a Warner took us.  The result was many good things accomplished, and many special days enjoyed. 

   In a limited and imperfect way, the love of a good family offers us something of a picture of the Holy Trinity, especially as revealed through the Gospel of St. John.  Take a tour through John and pay attention to the words ‘glory’ and ‘glorify.’  You will discover that each person of the Trinity spends their time and energy glorifying the other two.  Like a family serving each other in order to share in good things and special days, John’s Gospel reveals a God where each of the three Persons, within His respective role, serves and glorifies the others. 

   The Father glorifies the Son, by giving all things to Him.  The Son glorifies the Father, by doing His will and speaking His Word.  The Spirit who comes out from the Father is the truth-teller.  Jesus says the Spirit will glorify Him, by reminding the Apostles of all Jesus has done.  Jesus does not speak from his own authority, and neither does the Spirit.  The Spirit takes from what belongs to Jesus, which in turn Jesus has received from the Father.  The mutual love and service of the Trinity is glorious.

   God is love, as each person of the One True God serves each other willingly, unselfishly, and joyfully.  And it is only from God, who is love, that life comes.  The Triune God creates and sustains us and all of creation, because to give, to love, to care for His creation, these things are of His nature. 

   We can begin to consider the nature and relationship of the Trinity by considering all that is best about human families.  But when we consider the perfect love of God, it becomes clear how and why this comparison falls short.  The love of our families falls short.  But, there is no failure to love, no failure to serve in God.  There is no bickering, there are no misunderstandings.  And most of all, in God there is no death to shatter the family. 

    My mom and dad were good parents, and we had a good family life, even though we had our sins and problems.  But eventually, even though I still needed them, my parents died.  They could not continue to serve my brothers and sister and me.   They could not continue to give us the love that we needed and desired.  All too soon, they died. 

   Everyone deals to some degree with a lack of love and care from their parents.  Sadly, some parents cannot or will not love and serve their kids. Sometimes it happens because parents die.  And, whether the need for love is acute, as in the case of a young child, or less outwardly pressing, as in the case of an adult child, still, the inability or failure by parents to serve and to love always hurts the child.

   God created the family as the safe place of love and care.  But, when parents fail to love and serve, and when children fail to honor their parents, loving, serving and cherishing them,  for whatever reason that human family love fails, the members of the family suffer pain.  We see how we fall far short of the perfection of the love of God, revealed in the Holy Trinity. 

   Now, all of this may strike you as an interesting problem to consider.  High and lofty ideas.  Interesting and high and lofty, until anger and fighting, failures and problems burst into our family life.  Most especially, illness and death remind us that falling short of the love of the Holy Trinity is not just an interesting problem.  The day to day threat of pain and suffering, the reality of fear, these can make us doubt the goodness of God.  

   There is a painful paradox that we learn when we have family problems, when we realize our failures, or when death touches us.  It is strange and sad that our families, which teach us to hope for love and life, are all too often also the source of our greatest sorrows.  The good we receive and the potential for good we see in our families makes more bitter the pain caused by our failures.  Because of hurts inflicted on each other, and because of sin and death, we fail to realize the potential we hope for in our families. 

   In this paradox of human family life we begin to see why there is a paradox in Jesus’ life.  Jesus came to show us the Father’s love, to reveal to us the Holy Trinity, to grant us the Holy Spirit, and to enable us to share in the glory of God.  But to do this, in order to give love and life to dying people, and to restore the family of God, the Son had to die in our place. 

   Ouch.  There is always this sharp edge to Jesus’ glory talk in John’s Gospel, because for Jesus, His glory is the Cross.  Jesus came to restore to us the love and life of God, by overcoming sin and death for us, on His cross.  He came to live and die in order to reveal to the Jews, and to all peoples, how deep and high and wide is the love of God.  So great is God’s love that He would give His only begotten Son into the Cross, so that whoever simply trusts in Him would not perish, but live, forever.  Whoever believes that God loved the world in this way will not perish, but will have eternal life, the eternal life that is God, and that God shares with His family. 

   To achieve His goal, to reach His glory, Jesus had to arrange for His own death, and in a particular way.  God’s plan was not for Jesus to be killed as an infant by Herod, nor to be stoned by a mob, nor to be thrown down the cliff of the hill that His hometown, Nazareth, was built upon.  No, Jesus needed to die under the condemnation of His own people, and in a very public execution, suffering under the worst punishment offered by the most powerful government on earth.  Cursed is everyone hung on a tree, declared Moses, (Deuteronomy 21:23) and so Jesus’ death had to be on a Roman Cross. 

   And so, the “just right” time for Jesus to come was when the Jewish people had warped the religion taught by Moses, turning the faith of Israel into salvation by their own works.  This corruption was most famously taught by the Pharisees, but it lurks within each one of us.  The “just right” time for Jesus to come also had to be when the Jews were not free.  The Jews of Jesus’ time, for all their culture and structure and self-importance, lacked the authority to execute their own heretics.  While mighty Rome ruled over the Holy Land and limited the freedom and authority of the Jews, while there was a Roman governor who restricted authority for capital punishment to himself, this was the right time. 

   Into this time came Jesus, God’s Son, hidden under the guise of a wandering rabbi.  The Jews were Jesus’ family, and should have welcomed Him.  But when our LORD preached against the errors of those most prominent itinerant teachers, the Pharisees, He made enemies.  When Jesus came, making Himself out to be greater than Moses, greater even, than Abraham, the great father of all God’s people Israel, Jesus was rejected by His kin.

    In a debate with the Jews, Jesus proclaims, “before Abraham was, I AM”.  I AM is the Name the Angel of the LORD revealed in the burning bush to Moses, the personal Name of God, that was so holy to the Hebrews, they stopped even pronouncing the Word, but replaced it with another when reading the Scriptures.  Jesus claims this Name for Himself, which is to say, He claimed that He, a man born in Nazareth only three decades earlier, was God Himself. 

   The die was cast.  The Jews who heard Jesus’ claim picked up stones to kill Him, but it was not yet time.  Jesus passed through their midst, in order to die another day, in a different way, to die the death that would reveal the glory of God, hidden under shame and suffering.  For the glory of God is to show love and mercy, and the Cross of Jesus is the fount of mercy for sinners.  The Cross is the eternal antidote, God’s solution for our problem with sin and death, His way to bring us back into His family.       

   I began talking about my father, who was the best dad.  He was a good earthly father, not for what he did, but rather for who he was, who God made him to be.  You see, when my dad was in his thirties, he met a girl, and through her he was brought into the Church.  Because of God working through my mom, my dad was baptized.  Because of God working through my mom and dad, we kids were raised in the faith. 

   Because God can work with what seems like very inferior material, even a youngest son named David, I have been given the privilege to serve Christ’s Church, to preach the Good News of the Trinity.   To preach of the God who is life and love, to preach of the God who sought the glory of the cross in order to have you as his very own child.  God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, has forgiven all your sins and failures, He has overcome illness and death.  The LORD has done all this, for you, because His glory is to serve, His glory is to love, to love you, your family, and the whole world, in Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.