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Sermon for Holy Trinity Sunday – June 15, 2025
Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Of the fifty-two Sundays in the church year, not to mention all the various Christian festivals and commemorations that fall during the week, we have one day on the liturgical calendar which is devoted to a doctrine, a teaching of the church. That day is today as we celebrate Holy Trinity Sunday.
The Holy Trinity is important for several reasons. It is a complex theological formula confessed in the creeds which both proclaims and safeguards the divinity of Christ. It is a doctrine gleaned from scripture (particularly John’s gospel) which describes the mystery of God being three distinct persons while remaining one God. The Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is also the proper name for God, given to us by Jesus himself as the name in which we are to baptize.
All of this is important. Every Christian adult should have some basic knowledge of the doctrine of the Trinity, if for no other reason than to know when that language is being used by other religious groups in different and non-Christian ways – which it often is!
But as important as it is to know what the Trinity is, it is also important to know what the Trinity does. In fact, in scripture, more often than not, the Trinity is revealed through what this one God in three persons does.
For instance, all the way back in the first chapter of Genesis, there are hints of the Trinity which are revealed through what the Trinity does. As God created the first humans, God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” Do you hear the plural language? Christians have long interpreted this plural language as a reference to the Trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all there from the very beginning – as the New Testament claims over and over again. Here the Holy Trinity is revealed by what the Trinity did: creating a man and a woman in the image and likeness of God to live in a life-giving and life-bearing relationship.
Another fun place to look for the Trinity in the Old Testament is in Genesis 18, when Abraham and Sarah were visited by three mysterious strangers. God had promised this elderly couple that they would bear a son, and that their descendants would be as many as the stars, and that he would make of them a great nation. This promise was hard to believe. It seemed too good to be true. Later, three strangers visited them in their camp. One of them told them that in one year’s time, Sarah would bear this child. Some Bibles capitalize the word “He” for this visitor, even midsentence, using a grammatical tradition reserved for references to God, as a little clue that this was not some random visitor. Christian interpretation going back at least as far as St. Augustine has understood this visit from these three mysterious strangers as a visit from the Holy Trinity, who again is made known through what the Trinity did – namely, assuring God’s people of God’s promises.
This pattern continues in our gospel reading for today, only here the persons of the Trinity are specifically named as Jesus describes how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit work together to do certain things.
The context for what Jesus says about the Trinity’s work is important. Jesus is in the Upper Room with his disciples. He is preparing them for what is coming next. He is preparing them for his crucifixion, which is imminent. He is preparing them for the suffering they will experience as his disciples as they carry on his ministry in the future. Throughout this section of John’s gospel Jesus has been dropping hints about the challenges they would face, the difficulties they would encounter. He tells them that the future will test them in ways that can’t even begin to imagine. “I still have many things to say to you,” Jesus tells them, “But you cannot bear them now.” The burdens they would face as his followers would be heavy indeed – too heavy for them to bear all at once, too heavy for them to know about ahead of time.
But while Jesus doesn’t disclose all that his disciples would face in the months and years and decades and centuries to come, he does make them a promise. He promises that the Holy Trinity will be doing certain things.
Jesus promises them that the Spirit, sent by the Father and the Son, will guide them in their mission. He promises them that the Spirit of truth will lead them into all the truth.
Jesus promises them that this Spirit, sent by the Father and the Son, will declare to his disciples all that is to come. That is to say, the Spirit will continually point them to the future he has in store for them, a future beyond their struggles and difficulties, a future of resurrection and new life.
Jesus promises that the Spirit, sent by the Father and the Son, will take what belongs to him and declare it to them. The Spirit will impute to them Jesus’ righteousness, his holiness, his status before God. The Spirit will impart to them his power and his peace. The Spirit will hand over to them his undying love, his victory over sin and death, his intimate and eternal relationship with the Father.
This gospel reading is in the lectionary for today because it gives us a portrait of the Holy Trinity. It is perhaps a faint sketch in broad strokes, but all three of them are there! And this blessed Trinity is made known, Jesus says here, by what this Trinity does. This Trinity, Jesus says, will come to us with truth, with promises, with gifts – all of which will make the unbearable bearable for us.
In our reading from Romans for today, St Paul makes the bold claim that we boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, 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.
Boasting in our suffering is not the same thing as our modern habit of idolizing victimhood. Instead, it is the acknowledgement that when we face the unbearable, when we are in over our heads, when our strength gives out, it is then that conditions are ripe for the Holy Spirit to enter in and go to work. It is when we despair of ourselves that we find true hope in Christ. It is when we are empty and powerless that God the Father pours his love into our hearts. Here too, the Holy Trinity is revealed by what the Trinity does, namely transforming suffering into hope, a hope that does not disappoint.
These Biblical vignettes show us that the Holy Trinity is not some dry theological formula. The Holy Trinity describes the one God in three persons who is at work doing things. The Holy Trinity describes the one God in three persons who is doing things even now. The Holy Trinity describes the one God in three persons who is doing things for you.
The Holy Trinity didn’t just create Adam and Eve. The Trinity created you. As Luther invites us to confess in the Small Catechism, “I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that God has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them.”
The Holy Trinity didn’t just visit Abraham and Sarah. The Trinity visits you, sometimes in ways you don’t recognize or understand, but more frequently and recognizably through Word and Sacrament. The Trinity visits you through these mysterious means of grace to assure you of the promises God made to you when you were baptized in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
And Jesus didn’t just promise that the Holy Trinity would help the Twelve Apostles. The Trinity continues to be at work to help us too. The Trinity leads us into truth in an age of untruth. The Trinity speaks to us through God’s Word of the things that are to come, the future God has in store for us, a future beyond our struggles and difficulties, a future of resurrection and healing and new life. The Trinity takes what belongs to Jesus and declares it to us, giving us his victory over sin and death, announcing that we have been forgiven, giving us peace with God. The Trinity is among us to help us bear what is unbearable in our lives, transforming suffering into hope, a hope that does not disappoint us because God’s love is being poured into our hearts.
The Holy Trinity is a vitally important doctrine of the Christian church. There is much that is important to know about what the Trinity is. But we get there primarily through what scripture tells us the Trinity does. And as we gather in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, this blessed Trinity is still doing things, so that by faith we would be drawn into this relationship which is eternal and undivided, loving and life-giving, today and forever.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church