This Lord’s Day is like no other Lord’s Day in the church year. Now granted, in a certain sense, we can say this about each one of the Lord’s Days, insofar as they present to us different texts relating to the different themes of each Lord’s Day. No one is quite like any other one.
But they do share this one thing in common: they focus our attention on the great deeds of our God, the saving acts of God in history. Today, however, focuses our attention not on the great deeds of God, but on God’s very being.
We refer here to the affirmation of the church through the centuries that our God is one God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Put otherwise, the God we worship is Triune, God in three persons, Blessed Trinity.
Appropriately enough, then, the church has given to this first Lord’s Day after Pentecost the name Trinity Sunday.
And yet note that the implied invitation to contemplate God’s very being occurs today in the context of a call to action. We mean here the Great Commission found in our gospel lesson.
Jesus summons his disciples to a mountain. We have already seen that in the Bible mountains are the site of revelation of divine presence and authority. We mentioned that for the Jewish people God’s descent on Mount Sinai to give his people the Ten Commandments is the revelation. Now here in Galilee the Lord gives the definitive revelation of himself and his will on a mountain.
There he reveals himself as the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth. Bible students point out that the immediate background for Jesus’ self-revelation is in the Old Testament prophet Daniel (7:14):
On him was conferred rule, honor and kingship, and all peoples, nations and languages became his servants. His rule is an everlasting rule which will never pass away, and his kingship will never come to an end.
There, on the mountain, Jesus tells the disciples to go out and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that he has commanded them.
This language suggests about the Trinity that, far from a doctrine marginal to the life of the church, it is at its very heart. For the activities that Jesus instructs the disciples to carry out—discipling, baptizing, and teaching—are central to what the church does in the world.
Let us single out baptism. We repeat the words of Jesus in the Great Commission every time we perform a baptism. At the climactic moment of the baptismal rite, the minister stands over the child, dips his fingers into the baptismal font, and applies them three times to the child’s forehead, saying, “Mary Jane or John Jacob. I baptize you in the name of the Father, of the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
The name of God that we invoke over the child is no esoteric formula. Baptism is not a secret rite that initiates the child into a secret society, like that of the freemasons.
When we baptize a child in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we are actually making a public proclamation of the gospel. The doctrine of the Trinity is actually a summary of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This doctrine cannot be understood apart from the gospel. Nor can the gospel be understood apart from the doctrine.
Consider the plain witness of scripture. It makes clear to us that God’s love comes to us in a threefold way: God so loved the world that he gave is only Son for our salvation (Jn 3:16); Jesus Christ, God’s only Son our Lord, himself loved us and gave his life for us (Gal 2:20); and the gift of God’s love in Christ has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5).
This is what we affirm about the one that we baptize. We affirm that this one has been claimed by the love of God, which unites him or her with Christ in his death and resurrection, makes him or her alive to God, and sets him or her free to live according to the Spirit (Trinity: God’s Love Overflowing).
Most of us, if we were born in Presbyterian households, if our parents were active churchgoers, were baptized as infants (babies). We had the name of God invoked over us. Baptism is a once-and-for-all event, but it is never a one-off. We should never see it as a rite administered to us in the distant past that no longer has bearing on our lives in the present. Rather, we should see our baptism as an event that accompanies us throughout our lives. That is why we can and should remember our baptism.
Of course, that does not mean that we should remember the day of our baptisms, the feeling of water on our foreheads, or the words that the pastor spoke over us. That we cannot do even if we wanted, if we were baptized as babies. Rather, we should remember that we are baptized, that before all things, before I say that I am a son or a daughter, a husband or a wife, a father or a mother, or even an American, I say that I am baptized (Josh Anderson).
John Calvin put it in these words: “We must realize that at whatever time we are baptized, we are once and for all washed and purged for our whole life. Therefore, as often as we fall away, we ought to recall the memory of our baptism and fortify our mind with it, that we may always be sure and confident of the forgiveness of sins” (Institutes, IV.15.3).
Culture tells us that what we feel or experience most deeply is what is most true about us. It teaches us, from the time of early childhood, that we are under a mandate to create our own reality, a reality that conforms to what we feel or experience most deeply. Be authentic. Be true to yourself. This is culture’s first and greatest commandment.
But to be Christian means to live by faith and not by experience. Faith and feelings do not always coincide. Our faith does not always match our feelings. In fact, there may be extended periods in our lives when our experience even contradicts our faith.
Nevertheless, we must realize that what is most true about ourselves is not what we feel or experience, but what God’s word tells us about ourselves. Our identity is not one we create; it is one we receive. And we receive our identity in our baptism by the One who has created and claimed us as his own in Christ.
Presbyterian pastor Josh Anderson put it this way: Baptism tells me not only that God is good and loving in general, but that God is good to me, that God loves me, that I have been engrafted into Christ, that the blood of Christ cleanses me from all my sins, that I’ve been regenerated by his Spirit, that I have been adopted into the family of God, that I have been made a member of his people, to whom he has bound himself by an unbreakable covenant.
This is good news worth celebrating. And that leads us to another important observation about our baptism. It is the gateway into the worshipping community.
Author Dale Bruner writes that through baptism we are transferred to a new [community]—into the fellowship of those who worship God the Father through listening to the teaching of his Son as we are enabled by the [illuminating] power of the Holy Spirit.
We become members of the holy catholic church we confess in the Creed, members of God’s own family, which we represent and confirm each time we gather for worship.
How do we understand worship? It is appropriate today, when we come to the Lord’s Table, to mention that worship is a service not only of the word, but also of the sacrament. When we were seminarians, our professors prepared us to be ministers of word and sacrament, capable of leading services of word and sacrament.
This conception of worship finds support in Scripture. We have a snapshot of the earliest Christian worship gatherings in the Acts of the Apostles. There we read that the baptized devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer (Acts 2:41ff).
The Apostles’ teaching, fellowship, and prayer are self-explanatory. But let us single out for a moment the phrase “breaking of the bread.” You no doubt can guess if you don’t already know that this phrase refers to Communion. It is worth noting that Communion too reveals to us God as Trinity.
In this connection, Calvin offers to us a memorable image of Communion. He invites us to compare the Lord’s table to the family dinner table. What happens at the Lord’s table? It is nothing less than the gathering of a household, where the Father graciously receives worshippers not only as servants but as sons and daughters. God demonstrates his fatherly care for his offspring by nourishing them at a spiritual banquet, in which Christ’s own body and blood are the main course.
And the souls of the worshippers who are gathered are truly nourished by the eating of his flesh and the drinking of his blood, thanks to the Holy Spirit, who imparts to them what is signified by the bread and wine, despite the distance and separation between them and Christ. This is a maxim of Calvin: The Holy Spirit brings close to us what is distant from us in time and space. The Holy Spirit brings Christ to us here and now.
This is a lot to process, I admit. It is some deep theology. But even Calvin himself said about the Lord’s Supper: “I’d rather experience it than understand it.”
Finally, our worship is not only signed, but also sealed by the Triune God. Refer for a few moments to the Apostle Paul’s words in our epistle lesson.
These verses contain the concluding remarks to the Corinthians, to whom he wrote two rather lengthy letters. In fact, his correspondence with them is more extensive than with any of the other churches, as far as we know.
The church in Corinth was confused by doctrinal error, weakened by immorality, and torn by divisions. But Paul is never lacking in his hope for them. And so he encourages them, reassuring them of the presence of the God of love and peace. Paul implies that these are attributes of a God who is Triune. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.”
If these words sound familiar to you, there is a good reason. For we use them as a benediction at the conclusion of our worship. They are a blessing that comes to us from our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in three persons, Blessed Trinity.
Theologians are right when they say that the New Testament does not develop the concept of God as Trinity. But during Eastertide we saw that Jesus introduced it by referring to his relationship to his Father and in his promise to send the Spirit.
And today we hear this language again in the Great Commission and in Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians.
But the doctrine would not be fully developed until the fourth century. And here I will conclude with a little church history.
The doctrine of the Trinity received definitive formulation in the fourth century, first at the Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council, (or worldwide church council) in 325, and then at the Council of Constantinople in 381.
The first council was called to settle the controversies surrounding a popular preacher named Arius.
He taught that the Son is not God in the same way as the Father is God. In effect, he denied the Trinity.
At the Council of Nicaea, the church rejected the teaching of Arius, and made precise what it meant when it spoke of God as Trinity.
Later the church had to clarify its teaching on the Holy Spirit. In 381, at the Council of Constantinople, the second ecumenical council, the church reaffirmed the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and produced the final version of the Nicene Creed.
To mark this important event today on Trinity Sunday, we are going to recite the Nicene Creed, which we share with Christians in all times and in all places, in our Affirmation of Faith.