Today’s Trinity Sunday sermon focuses, of course, on the mysterious concept of God as Trinity, Three-in-One. Though the doctrine of Trinity is a core part of our confession of faith, it is ultimately a human attempt to comprehend a God who is beyond the limits of human comprehension.
Our worship services are practice for what we’re going to be doing for all eternity: Praising the God who creates, saves, and sustains us and all of creation. We gather to glorify God for who God is, even and perhaps especially for the aspects of God that are beyond our comprehension. Thanks be to God that we serve One who is greater than we can imagine, yet chooses to be know to us in love.
This week’s sermon focuses on Isaiah 6:1-8 with some reference to John 3:1-17. I found helpful Cory Driver’s commentary, Seeing God Rightly at Living Lutheran, as well as Dan Clenedin’s essay, Other Ways of Speech at Journey With Jesus.
Here’s the sermon podcast audio and the livestream from Christ the King. I also put together some TikTok clips from this sermon here and here.
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Grace to you and peace from our Triune God, who is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen
Last Sunday’s sermon started with a church word of the day.
Anyone remember our Pentecost church word of the day? (We need a Sesame Street theme song like they have for the letter and the number of the day. Someone write a “church word of the day” theme song for my four-year-old to sing.)
Anyone remember? Last week’s word was Paraclete, the word Jesus uses to describe the Holy Spirit. Paraclete means a helper, an advocate, one who is on our side.
Today, I have a church number of the day. Our Trinity Sunday number of the day is…three. Or one. We believe in one God, in three persons.
One God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 1+1+1=1. The number of the day is three in one.
And instead of trying to explain how that’s possible, instead of digging deeply into the doctrine of the trinity, I’ve decided this morning to go with a lighter, easier to understand topic: The meaning of life. We’re going to talk about why God created us, what we’re here for.
Does that question ever come up for you? Not the details of how creation happened—not the order, or the scientific details, but why God bothered with Creation in the first place?
It’s not because God was lonely, or because God was bored. We’re not here as entertainment for God. Instead, we believe God creates because God in God’s fundamental nature is loving.
1 John 4 tells us God is love. And love requires an object. It’s a transitive verb. (Apparently we’ve moved from math to grammar.) A transitive verb is an action word which requires an object to make sense.
For example, “We need.” It doesn’t make sense by itself, right? We need what? It needs an object. We need food; we need a car. Love is like that.
We are created to be the object of God’s love. John 3:16 – God so loved. What does God love? The world. Us. God is love, and we are the objects of God’s love. Your purpose in life is to be loved by God.
And when we understand the love God has for us, our response is to love God in return. Our response—what we are created to do—is to give thanks to God, to praise God, to worship.
The Westminister Catechism (PDF link)—not Luther’s Catechism, but a different catechism the Presbyterians have used for centuries, puts it like this: “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
We are going to spend eternity worshiping God, praising God, being loved by God and loving God in return. Your eternal purpose is to worship God. This very worship service is a rehearsal for how we are going to spend eternity. This is a foretaste of the feast to come, to use a churchy phrase.
My job as your pastor is to lead you in praising God and preparing for the rest of eternity. That happens through teaching, through sermons, through comforting and provoking, through providing opportunities to encounter God. And of course, we live out our praise and worship by loving and serving our neighbors. Jesus said the two most important commandments are to love God and love our neighbors.
But it starts with recognizing God is our Creator, our Redeemer, the only One worthy of our praise.
This morning I want to look at our reading from Isaiah 6 as an outline for worship, almost a roadmap to why we’re here.
Let’s start with the setting established in verse 1. Framing this particular time in history as the year in which King Uzziah died makes two points.
First, it sets God’s activity in a particular time and place, kind of like when Luke begins his Christmas story about the birth of Jesus during the reign of Caesar Augustus, while Quirinius was governor of Syria. Isaiah’s vision is happening the year King Uzziah died, which is roughly 750 BC. God is acting in history, in our world.
The second point is King Uzziah himself, who’s an interesting character. His story is in Second Chronicles 26, and he was a great and powerful king until he tried to take the place of God. He tried to take credit for his own successes. Second Chronicles 26:16 says, “When he had become strong he grew proud, to his destruction.” Uzziah put himself against God, and discovered God was a lot more powerful than he was.
So after setting it up with the death of a king who wanted to be immortal, Isaiah continues by describing his encounter with God, the only one who is truly eternal. And in this vision, Isaiah sees God’s glory.
God is the cosmic ruler on the throne, high and lofty, the one whose powerful, majestic voice thunders through the world. God’s presence fills the temple, and God is attended by cosmic beings, seraphim singing praise to the king of kings forever.
In our worship, we echo this language. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The book of Revelation describes our future as singing praise to God for eternity, “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea and all that is in them, singing, ‘To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!’”
We’re here today for choir practice! Some of our praising comes right out of the Bible, this exact language. Other words we say during worship come from other people, sometimes more modern, sometimes the poetic words of our ancestors in faith. We confess with the language of creeds spoken by God’s people for centuries. But it’s all about praising God.
And of course, what we do as church in worship is wider than just literally singing songs. We learn from reading Scripture, from sermons and Bible study why it is we should be praising God, why all this matters, why God is the One worthy of our praise.
And we put it into practice, not just in words and music, but in action, not just in service projects or by giving to particular causes, but ultimately by forming our entire lives into worship. Worship is the way we live. Worship is our reason for being.
When Isaiah sees the vastness of God, when he hears the praise of the seraphs, he is overcome with the reality of God’s holiness and his own sin. He sees God’s perfection, God’s righteousness, compares himself, and confesses, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips.”
A holy God, a righteous God, a perfect God cannot tolerate the presence of sin. Isaiah knows the wages of sin is death, separation from God. Again, we follow this pattern in worship, coming before God and admitting our sin, our selfishness, the things we have done and left undone that go against God.
And then we hear the promise of forgiveness. We receive absolution. For Isaiah, it’s a seraph touching his mouth with a coal, purifying him, forgiving him. His sin is blotted out. This is the gift given to us in Jesus Christ, the gift of forgiveness by grace. God remembers your sins no more.
And then Isaiah is sent out to do God’s work, to translate praise into action, to bear God’s word to the world. Sins forgiven, purified, at peace with God, he is sent out to go and love and serve the Lord.
There’s a hint in here, by the way, of God’s nature as Trinity as the Lord says, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” But the purpose of Trinity Sunday, the purpose of the whole doctrine of Trinity, is not to solve a mystery.
The purpose is to worship the God who is holy and mysterious, to worship the God who is so far beyond our understanding that the only way we could know this God would be if God chose to be known to us.
Which is exactly what God has done. God has entered into history in the person of Jesus Christ. God has entered into your life through the Holy Spirit.
And in this particular time, in this particular place, not in the year King Uzziah died, but today, Sunday, May 26, and whenever you’re watching or listening to this, God is here, choosing to be made known to you.
We have gathered here today to encounter God, to get a glimpse of God’s glory in preparation for eternity. God is here, as the body of Christ which is the church gathered together. God is here as we gather at the Lord’s table to receive Jesus in bread and wine. God is here as the Holy Spirit washes us clean in baptismal waters. God is enthroned on our worship as we sing and pray together.
We see the majesty of God enthroned not only in the incomprehensible vastness of the cosmos, in the high and the lofty shaking of the world, but also in the cross. We see the glory of God revealed in loving sacrifice, in the midst of ordinary life.
The holy and sacred has come to us. We see glimpses of God’s glory revealed in the beauty of a quiet meadow, under the vast canopy of stars, and in the crashing of thunder.
And yet this Triune God who is an eternal mystery welcomes each of us as individuals, as beloved children. God welcomes you when you show up like Nicodemus with questions in the dark of night, coming in secret.
When we grasp the cosmic glory of God, the ineffable glory of the potentate of time, when we try to even begin to wrap our heads around the concept of eternity, all we can do is say with Isaiah, “Woe is me. I am lost.”
As Psalm 139 says, “How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you.”
Trinity is the best doctrine the church has come up with to comprehend an incomprehensible God, who has chosen to be know. This eternal creator is a God of love who welcomes us by grace into the mystery of love.
We are invited to join the dance of Trinity, to receive the love which overflows from God’s very being. We-as mortal beings-are made to be the objects of God’s love for all eternity.
God calls you into eternal life to be loved and to love. And to this we say, Amen!