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THE HOLY TRINITY Sunday, June 15, 2025 Pastor Tom Steers Christ the Saviour Lutheran Church, Toronto Our Opening Hymn is: “Holy, Holy, Holy” Lutheran Service Book 507 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsuqrvJrT2Q Confession and Absolution Page 184 The Kyrie (Lord Have Mercy) Page 186 The Gloria in Excelsis Page 187 Our Collect Prayer: Almighty and everlasting God, You have given us grace to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity by the confession of the true faith and to worship the Unity in the power of the Divine Majesty. Keep us steadfast in this faith and defend us from all adversities; for You, O Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, live and reign, one God, now and forever. Amen. Our Bible Readings: Old Testament: Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31 Psalm 8 Second Reading: Acts 2:14a, 22-36 The Verse (Isaiah 6:3b) Alleluia. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory. Alleluia. Our Gospel Reading: John 8:48-59 The Athanasian Creed – Written against the Arians https://bookofconcord.org/ecumenical-creeds/athanasian-creed/ Our Hymn of the Day: We All Believe in One True God” Lutheran Service Book 953 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9VolOFsnPI Text: Martin Luther (1483-1546) 1 We all believe in one true God, Who created earth and heaven, The Father, who to us in love Has the right of children given. He in soul and body feeds us; All we need His hand provides us; Through all snares and perils leads us, Watching that no harm betide us. He cares for us by day and night; All things are governed by His might. 2 We all believe in Jesus Christ, His own Son, our Lord, possessing An equal Godhead, throne, and might, Source of every grace and blessing; Born of Mary, virgin mother, By the power of the Spirit, Word made flesh, our elder brother; That the lost might life inherit, Was crucified for all our sin And raised by God to life again. 3 We all confess the Holy Ghost, Who, in highest heaven dwelling With God the Father and the Son, Comforts us beyond all telling; Who the Church, His own creation, Keeps in unity of spirit. Here forgiveness and salvation Daily come through Jesus' merit. All flesh shall rise, and we shall be In bliss with God eternally. The Sermon – Today we celebrate one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith – the teaching of the Holy Trinity. It’s the one Sunday in the Church year when we have a festival day not about something that happened in the life of Christ, but about Christian doctrine. Yet it’s not dry, abstract ideas we focus on. What we celebrate and speak of this day is the very nature of God. And what we understand about God through His book, the Bible. This impacts us in a way nothing else can. Because our eternal salvation, and our relationship with God, depends on how we see Him. Many people like mysteries, but this mystery is one we can love. For it’s about a God that loves us, and is in relationship with us. It is about the three divine persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that make up our one God . . . that make up this Trinity in unity. Our Triune God is something that, as human beings, we can never completely understand in this life. To do that, we ourselves would have to be God. But He is the creator, and we the beloved creation. Fortunately, God doesn’t ask us to fully understand the Trinity. He only asks us to believe it. Jesus said, “Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.” Children know of our love not by complete understanding, but by child-like faith in their parents. God, our Father, desires the same from us. Our Triune God revealed in the Bible what we need to know, both for our salvation, and for how He desires us to live in relationship with other people. The Bible teaches that God is a ‘community’ of three persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now by human logic, if each person of the Trinity is God, then there are three gods, but that isn’t what the Bible says. It teaches us there is one. The original Hebrew of the first words of the Bible take it for granted that while there is only one God, there is also a ‘plural’ nature, a multiple personhood to God. Because the Hebrew verb in Genesis that’s translated into English as “created,” very clearly requires a singular noun. What does that mean – there was one Creator. But at the same time, the noun that is translated as “God” is a plural noun, like the word trees, or stars. Right from the beginning, the Bible tells us God is one. And yet at the same time, there is something about God that is more than one. In the second verse of Genesis, we hear that there is a second someone who’s called the Spirit of God, who hovers over the face of the waters. And it isn’t long after the Spirit comes onto the scene that the Bible introduces us to the “Word” by which God speaks, and says things such as, “Let there be light.” The Gospel of John begins in the same way as Genesis. It opens with the Apostle writing, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” So, before we finish the first day of creation, the Bible explains that there is one God who is also Creator, Spirit, and Word. And as God continues the creation process, He has this conversation with Himself -- it’s in Genesis 1:26a when God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” In this verse, God speaks to Himself using the plural pronouns of “us” and “our.” And as we read the Bible, we constantly encounter numbers associated with God: “one” and “three.” After a while, you might ask, “Well, which is it?” To this question the Bible answers, “Yes. It is both. There is one God and three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This teaching becomes clearer when the Son of God takes on human flesh, and Jesus begins His public ministry. At His Baptism, Christ is in the Jordan river, and the Spirit of God descends as a dove. God the Father speaks from the cloud, “This is My beloved Son ….” There we have it … Father, Son, and Holy Spirit revealing themselves in the same place, at the same time. Sadly, many do not believe Jesus was both true God and true man. We see this lack of faith in John’s Gospel account, and we see it today. Just as the Pharisees rejected Jesus when He told them He was one with the Father, there are many now who deny the Trinity. The Baptist and Pentecostal churches, for instance, do not believe that when Jesus died on the cross He was both true God and true man. But because we do accept the Bible as the inerrant word of God, we know that if Jesus was not both true God and Man on the cross, He could not have paid for the sins of the world. The Apostle Paul made clear in his writings that it was only God’s perfect Son who could make that sacrifice for the world’s sins, yours and mine. Because Jesus was God in human flesh, He was the sacrificial lamb without blemish. Paul wrote in 2nd Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake he made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” In Jesus. If Christ were not both God and man, His death could not atone for our sin, because only God was capable of the infinite sacrifice necessary for the sins of all humanity. Fortunately for us, Jesus was true God. And He suffered for testifying to that truth. In our Gospel passage, Jesus puts up with verbal abuse and even risks being stoned for speaking the truth God told Him to bear witness to. Martin Luther put it this way in one of his sermons: “What does Christ do here? He suffers His life to be covered with shame and He endures it, but He defends the teaching, for the teaching is not ours, but God’s. . . .” And so, it’s important to understand our Triune God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s important, because the Trinity is a team who work together to save us from our sin. And we can see that divine teamwork in the incarnation. John Chapter 3, verse 16, tells us God demonstrated His love for us by sending His only Son into the world so that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. The Bible also says the Angel Gabriel told Mary that she would be with child by the power of the Holy Spirit, and give birth to the Son of God in human flesh. An angel also spoke to Joseph in a dream and told him that Mary’s baby was of the Holy Spirit. So again, we see this ‘Divine Community’ of our Triune God together bringing about our salvation. In today's Gospel reading Jesus claimed to be God in a way that almost everyone around Him understood. Christ said, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am." Jesus was not using bad grammar. When Moses asked God to tell him His name in Exodus 3:14, God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" With the words, "I AM," Jesus is identifying Himself as the person who appeared to Moses from the burning bush. He is saying that although He has a human body that is less than fifty years old, His person is independent of the beginning of time . . . that’s He’s true God and true man. Christ is saying He is the one who is, was, and always will be. His enemies obviously understood His meaning, because they were ready to kill Him for it. One of the key elements of the teamwork of the Trinity that saves us occurs as Jesus is in the depths of His suffering on the cross. At that time Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” Here we learn in a way we can’t fully understand, that God the Father allowed the sin of the world to be poured out on God the Son, and forsook Him. But the amazing salvation Christ earned for us with His anguish would do us no good if He wasn’t God in human flesh, and we didn’t know about it. Somehow this great forgiveness and salvation Jesus earned on the cross had to be conveyed to us. Someone had to show us, and tells us about Jesus. And that’s the role of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit brings us God’s gifts. He works through God’s Word, that we hear and read, to create and sustain faith in us. He does this through the visible Word of Holy Baptism. He does this through the body and blood of our Christ we receive in the Lord’s Supper. Only the Holy Spirit of God turns Baptism and Communion into true Sacraments. Where there is love of God and one another, and His Word is preached correctly as both Law and Gospel, the Holy Spirit is there. Sadly, there are people who reject the work of the Holy Spirit. There are some who turn the Spirit away. They will not believe, not join the true body of Christ in this world – His Church. Tragically, they’ll never experience the eternal salvation our Triune God longs to give them. Yet they will not spend eternity separated from God because God doesn’t love them. They’ll be separated from God because they refuse His love and grace. Believers are those who have accepted the free gift of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. It’s a faith the Holy Spirit worked within them using God’s mean of grace: His Word and Sacraments. So why bother with all the doctrinal details about the Trinity? Why stand firm on all this theology about the Triune God, even though it can mean ridicule or even abuse in today’s world? It is because the doctrine isn’t ours. The teaching isn’t ours. It is God’s. He has entrusted it to you -- to believe, learn, and be saved by faith, and to share this faith with others. Fellow Christians, may our Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be with you this day and forever. Amen. The Service of the Sacrament – Preface – Page 194 The Sanctus (Holy, Holy Holy) – Page 195 The Lord’s Prayer – Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen. The Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) – Page 198 The Distribution – Page 199 The Nunc Dimittis (Song of Simeon) Page 199 The Post Communion Collect (Left-hand column) Page 201 The Benediction – The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace. Amen. Our Closing Hymn: “Triune God, Be Thou Our Stay” Lutheran Service Book 505 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_YWKH4cdGU