Divine Communion

It's Trinity Sunday!

Transcript

The Gospel According to John, chapter 16. The gospel according to John, chapter 16. And when you found John 16, go ahead and stand with me for the reading of the Gospel text this morning.

Notice these words and you'll remember that all through Easter we were actually in John 13 through 17. And so here we are once again, landing on Trinity Sunday here in John 16. Notice these words. Jesus said to the disciples, this is verse 12 of 16. I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them.

Now, when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears. And he will declare to you the things that are to come. And he will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason, I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

So come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your spirit, and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit, did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit, we may be truly wise and ever enjoy his consolation through Christ our Lord. Amen. And you can be seated.

Well, here we are at Trinity Sunday, and as I mentioned, it's one that some pastors sweat. And for right reason, as you just heard in the Athanasian creed, if you don't believe in the Holy Trinity, Trinity and unity, and unity and Trinity, then everlasting hell awaits. And it's being serious, because it's taken taking that to mean you're actually worshiping a different God. And so that's a problem, of course. And so it's worth sweating over a little bit.

And yet. And yet it's an invitation, is what I'd like to say to you today. Not to not say anything about God, because, in fact, thankfully, God has provided the language about Himself to us in his word and in the revelation of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago. And so here's the way I think I want to begin this sermon is to say this. If Jessica married me for my hair, then that's going to be a problem, because my hair is not the same, actually, as when we met, because, quite frankly, I had a lot of hair at that point in my life and when I met her, and.

And I don't have as much anymore, to put it frankly. And then also, it's not even the same color. So if she married me for my hair, then she's just simply out of luck. If she married me because of my bulk, which, you know, I like to think that I was a little more bulked up than I am now at that point. Then again, she's out of luck.

I've gained some weight to cover up that bulk, you know, and same thing with the jawline and everything else as it goes. Okay, being 44, changed. She's changed, but there's something that remains. And so one of the things that we look at in abstracting, things, which, as some would note, the Holy Trinity is an abstract doctrine. Well, maybe so.

Okay. But the thing that you abstract is the thing that doesn't change. All right, so stay with me here. Everything that you can see changes because everything that you can see is material. But there's a part of me that, thankfully, Jessica loves beyond the changing, transient material existence that I have, which I think she likes that pretty good, too.

And I try to keep it in okay shape, but she likes me for me. And the me part of me cannot be seen. Exactly. Does that make sense? I think we all can see that sometimes when we look in the mirror and we say, boy, I'm really changing, but I'm still me.

There's something that hasn't changed all through the changing. And the technical way to actually say that is subsisting. There's something that subsists through the changes. And if you remember from the Athensian creed, it happened to actually say that word subsisting. Right.

Which is. Which is the philosophical technical term for what exists through the changes, the you that makes it through all those changes. Right. And so, thankfully, Jessica can see through what is just visible and physical to something that is there. Character wise and person wise.

And when we come to God. Yes. Like Aristotle or others, we can trace back natural causes to some unmoved mover or first cause. But the scripture doesn't go there. It goes beyond that and actually names God, something we can't do by tracing out science or looking at what's often called natural revelation.

What we can know about God through nature. Well, one of the things we can't know about God through nature is that God is a holy trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One God, three persons. Three persons, one God.

Remember our little symbol that I've given to the kids? You know, you see this symbol, these hand gestures, oftentimes in icons. In fact, I don't think. Yeah. Actually, look at there on the bulletin on the front of the Bulletin.

If you. If you actually got a bulletin, the icon for the Holy Trinity has. Has. All of them are doing this peace sign, you would think, but it's actually not a peace sign. Remember, it's actually the two natures of Christ, human and divine, which again, the Athanasian creed just bore down on that.

He has two natures in one person. All right? So he has a human nature that was taken from Mary and conceived by the Holy Spirit and a divine nature that never did not exist. Okay, Is eternal. In other words, everlastingly begotten of the Father.

And so three persons, remember? And the two natures, okay? Any which way you do that, you end up with that same understanding. And it's helpful. It's helpful to actually remind us of.

Of our faith, the faith that saves. And so. So here's what we can say then, is this. There's a lot of religions that we share a lot of commonality with, okay? In other words, across the board, when you study religion, a lot of religions are going to say there is a God.

And we would say, yeah, absolutely, there is a God. You know, Buddhists, they believe there is a God. Okay? Sikhs, they believe there is a God. Muslims, they believe there is a God.

So. And on and on, right? They also would oftentimes go as far as saying God is one. Now, not necessarily in a monotheistic way. Some of them would be monistic, others would be pantheistic, which is to say that all is God and God is all things.

Now, we wouldn't. We don't say that. Okay? That's not what Christians. But it's still a oneness, understanding.

In other words, they would say God is one, even though they mean it differently. Just like when we say, yes, there's a God, but yet we mean a different God than what they're saying, which again, is why we continue to come back to this foundational, this essential, if we can use it, subsisting doctrine that moves through all of time with us, and that is that God is one. Yes, but the Father is God and the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, and that's not a contradiction. Now, that's difficult, though, isn't it? And in fact, again, thanks for using Athanasian creed today because it really helps us here.

None of us can comprehend this fully.

In other words, it's incomprehensible, which just came out of our mouth moments ago. And yet that doesn't mean we give up. You know, I can't really know everything there is to know about Jessica, my wife, that it's really just impossible to know everything that she knows and to relive everything that she lives. But that doesn't mean I give up and say, oh, well, I guess I just won't even try. No, it's actually an invitation.

Persons are not only unrepeatable, but they too are incomprehensible. You can never fully guess the other person, you can never fully plan the other person. No matter how much mathematics are done, that's an impossibility. Persons are unique, they are special and of course ultimately valuable because they are persons in the image of the three personal triune God. And so I kind of want to begin a little heavy by dropping us in the, in the deep end just to, to point that out.

Now what I'd like to do is then just move straight to Proverbs where we have that, that uncreated sort of wisdom that's mentioned here that now he actually does mention being created. And there's a poetry here to the whole thing. But, but really what we're dealing with in Proverbs is before the beginning. Did you notice that before the mountains, you remember in the text, before the mountains were formed, before he drew the lines of where the ocean is to go, and so on and so forth, the master worker was working, okay, Wisdom, who is personified here as Christ working. I was there and notice when he drew the circle of the.

So I was there, but he is doing this. It's a co creation between Father and Son, which is exactly what Paul is going to tell us in the New Testament. In fact, he says it this way concerning Jesus. Everything was created through him and by him and for him, Him. He was in the beginning, as John would say.

Right? And so, so we have here really a before the beginning, what was God doing, so to speak? He was being God and that is he was relating, conversating as God with God. We saw a couple weeks back that God prayed to God. Remember, Jesus prays to the Father.

That's God praying to God. Because prayer is communication in language to God, submitting ourself to him, just as Jesus did to the Father. Okay? Again, we can connect everything to the Holy Trinity because He, God is the center of all things. He is essential to all things and the bedrock and foundation of all things.

And so one of the ways that Satan, Augustine and others have actually tried to help us think about before the beginning, but also in the beginning is this to say that God the Father is the speaker, the Son is the Word spoken, and the Spirit is The breath of the word spoken, hence from, you know, proceeding from the Father and the Son. And so, and I think this is helpful because the Father here is the source of all, and the Son is the eternally spoken Logos or word of God. And then the Spirit is the love and life and breath of God, of that love that bonds together Father and Son. Now, again, I know that we're abstracting and so everybody's stuck in their mind, you know, so to speak, if you're tracking along even this far. And I respect that and understand that, and I can feel in the room some people falling off, and that's fine, you know, but let's gather back in each time and say, why are we talking about this at all?

Is because if we don't get this part right, what we're not getting right is not a part at all, but rather God himself. This is how God has revealed himself to us, and we must stay within those guardrails and, and those confines, no matter whether we can understand it or not. You know, how it is getting into something new, perhaps, like pickleball. Pickleball was something new that I got into. Let me think about this.

Last year, okay? And when I got into pickleball, you know, I got out there and said, okay, you know, this seems to be something like a cross between tennis and maybe ping pong, which I still maintain that that's pretty much what it is. However, all of a sudden, something new was introduced to me. Don't get into the kitchen. And I'm thinking, where is the kitchen?

Right? And what does that even mean? Okay? And I didn't really understand what it meant until you start playing, because, you know, until you get into something, it's just abstract, you know, like, if anybody ever tells me, like, hey, I want to teach you this new card game, I'm just like, let's just start playing. Because I really.

I can't just visualize it in my mind. As we built this house that we finally have moved into now, the builder, Jessica, would come to me and say, what do you want to do in this room? I said, I can't see it. I'm sorry, I just. I can't see it.

Show me some pictures and then we can work from there. The point is that sometimes you have to use the right language for things, even when you don't fully understand the rules. Everybody with me on that, you start, you know, and this happens in a. In a kind of peer pressure way. If you get into a sport or something like that, you hear people saying, if you go to a Saints game with me, we're going to be saying who that say they gonna beat them Saints, right?

And you're like, you don't know how important that is. Maybe later on you realize how important it is, but you start saying it and start saying it correctly. That's what I'm saying. The Scripture has given us the correct way to speak about God. And we must speak about God in these ways.

And they actually are doorways for our understanding of God to be opened wide and not shut closed. You see, again, today we remember that this doctrine of the Holy Trinity is actually an invitation to know God Himself fully as he has revealed himself.

And so when we look at our psalm reading for today, Psalm 8, right in the center after, again, we sort of are directed to the heavens as well here. So you have natural revelation. And then you get this question, what is man that you should be mindful of him.

Well, the reason God is mindful of man is because God has become a man. Remember our right. He has the Son of God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity. Jesus has taken on human nature for all of time. In other words, he's drawn in human nature to himself and yet is not diminished as again we set at the nation creed.

And so in our beginning, he crowns us with glory and honor. He makes us in his image. Not the trees, not dogs, but humans alone are made in the imago dei, the image of God. And after his likeness, there's something in us that can share in God's very nature. Because ultimately God himself comes down to share in our nature.

That's the good news, is that we can't climb up to God, but rather that God comes down to us to rescue us, to draw us into that eternal conversation between Father, Son and Spirit. If the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Spirit. Sorry, the Son loves the Father by the Spirit, who is the love between Father and Son. Then we are drawn into the very life of God, the very love of God. And that's why our Romans reading says it this way.

The love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Because ultimately, as we know, and John will tell us, God is love.

Now again, for God to be love, not just to do love, there has to be a beloved and there has to be a lover. So you have lover and beloved, and then love itself. And again we have Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One God, three persons. Three persons, one God.

And so then we look at our John 16 reading. And right in the middle of all things. So we talked about before the beginning, what's God doing? Not twiddling his thumbs, but he's being God. He is complete and perfect and not static and not alone.

He's actually three persons. He's a Holy Communion himself, a divine family himself. And notice the family language that God provides for us to speak about Him. But then, right in the middle of all things, Jesus comes, as we have seen. And here's what he says.

He says, look, there's many more things that I would like to say to you, but you're not ready for them yet. And this just simply means that the Holy Spirit is coming and he will lead us into all truth. Who? The Church, into all truth. And so these creeds that we say are the church, the Church's response, really, to hammering out these doctrines and this data, this language that God has given to us.

In other words, just like me learning pickleball, the language was given, the rules were given, and now I live into them. Here's the cool thing. It might be difficult to kind of get into that, but now I know exactly what the kitchen is and how not to get in there and how to use it best and how to step out of it if I need to, because I still want to be up close to slam the ball into said person on the other side of the net, you know, and so I get to now have fun. Why? Because I have learn the rules, learn the right language instead of just trying to get out there and say, well, I'm not going to call it the kitchen, I'm going to call it something else.

Or it doesn't matter. Well, it does matter if you're playing. In fact, the best kind of games are ones where everybody just follows the rules.

Wouldn't the roads be much clearer if everybody just followed the rules? You knew I had to slip that one in there, didn't you? It means something to me, you know? Oh, man. Yes, it would be just a clean, smooth ride every time.

But there has to be that one person, right, who wants to do their own thing. And here's the thing. All the religions of the world, all of them try to name God, try to tell us who God is. None of them question that God is. All of them, however, have something to say about what or who God is.

And here's the big difference across the board. Nobody else has this but Christianity. And that is God is a holy trinity. He actually is a relationship. So, like, why do relationships mean so much to people all around the world?

Like, it's. Nobody goes around saying, hey, relationships really should mean something to you, man. Or marriage should really mean something. Nobody has to do that because we intuitively know these relationships matter. Why?

Because God himself is a relationship of Father, Son, and spirit. Why does everybody across the board, across religion, across society say, like, we need more love? Why? Why are all movies that mean something or stories or podcasts ultimately connected to the foundation of reality love? It's because reality himself is love.

So Jesus comes to unveil to us the divine life. And the divine life is Father, Son and Spirit, a holy communion of love and life and light. And he says, and by his work, we're able to enter into that life. And then Peter comes along and says this in his epistle. He says, we are to be divine partakers, or we are to share in the divine nature of God himself.

We get to share in his life. Why? Because Jesus is the one mediator between God and man. Because, again, he is both God and man.

And so we come to the end. Romans has for us a vision of our end, which is to be in Christ, justified by faith, at peace with God through Jesus Christ. This is Romans 5. We read sharing. Notice this.

Sharing the glory of God, because that's his nature, is to share. In other words, God alone is to be glorified, and yet the one who is glorified shares his glory with humanity. What a thought that that is. That is only possible by God's Holy Spirit. You know what he does right after that?

Right after going really high, like, we've been up, way up here this morning. Okay. Or you could look at it the other way and say, we've been real deep. Either one. High and deep.

Yes, we've stretched. We're at the contours of reality itself where our minds are breaking. All we can ultimately do is fall down and worship.

Just because I don't understand, again, my wife completely, doesn't mean I give up and say, oh, well, that's over. No, it's an invitation. And this morning, I want to invite you to know the living God, the one and only true God. You see, only Jesus Christ has revealed God to us perfectly. Why?

Because he is God and he has come in the flesh and established his church that has now hammered out this doctrine. You say, pastor, listen, the Trinity is not in the Bible anywhere. So I don't believe it. Well, maybe you don't have to call it Trinity, okay? But you have to say that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, which is what we mean by Trinity again.

Again you say, well, it's just trivial semantics. But is it? Jesus himself distinguishes the persons. I came from the Father. I'm going to the Father.

He sent me. And now I will send the Holy Spirit. Another helper, another being. Jesus is the other helper that is sent by the Father.

And Paul in Romans, as soon as we go real high and real deep, he then says this. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings. You see, as soon as we start thinking abstractly and contemplatively and just really as the highest thoughts any human has ever thought is about who God is, that's it. There's nothing deeper. Not physics, but rather metaphysics.

Then Paul drops us right back into reality, our reality. And that is we suffer. Why? Because our Lord suffered. And if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for us.

And we suffer bearing our cross. We all have sufferings, every single one of us. And we're to suffer in him and to his glory, actually glorifying God in our sufferings. And he says this knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character. You think virtue here, and character produces hope.

And hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

You see, here's the big practical takeaway which you've all been waiting for. I know. Finally, out of abstraction, back down into the practical. Is this. Through all of your changes?

Getting old, losing things, losing people. Through it all, what subsists in our life is not really us, but God.

He never changes. He's immutable. And that means his promises never change, which is good news for all of us. He's always faithful. Always faithful.

And he can put that kind of faithfulness in our hearts so that no matter what the ups or the downs, the blessings or the cursings in life, what remains is good fruit. As we abide in him and he in us. So within this doctrine of the Holy Trinity. And I get it, you're like, man, I don't know why we have to. Good thing is just once a year.

Listen, this is beautiful to me, you know? And I think the more you live into the right language, it's like playing pickleball. When I get out there and play, I just. I love it. Man hadn't played in forever, but I love it because I know the rules.

I know. I know how to play. And when it comes to God, we've got to get him right. His language that he gave us. He.

He gave it to us. Let's cherish it. Let's not be overloaded by it. Start wherever you are and begin to pray to the Father. Begin to pray to the Son.

Tonight, go and pray to the Holy Spirit. Like, start your prayer off, maybe you normally do. Jesus, start. Holy Spirit, come.

Begin to open the door through this doctrine to all of what God has for us. He is incomprehensible. But that means there's no top. There's no ceiling. We can never know enough.

We can't get ever enough of Him.

And that is a good thing. It's not just a doctrine, it's a doorway. He's not just some static God up in heaven, locked away. But he's the living God who has come down to save us. He's not impersonal, but three personal.

He's a community himself. Because here's the thing. This doctrine of the Holy Spirit is not just a doctrine. It's God himself. It's Father, Son and Spirit.

It's God who knows your name. It's God who speaks your language. It's God who dwells within us. It's God above us. It's God with us.

It's God in us. The invitation is open today to know the one and true and only living God. Would you go to him now as we respond? In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. May it be so.

Amen.

Total Duration 00:30:47