Trinity Sunday

John 3:1-15 - Trinity - June 3, 2012

Where The Spirit Blows

Today is Trinity Sunday.  The word Trinity is not found in the Bible.  It’s a word that was created by Christians in order to express what the Bible teaches about God.  The Bible teaches clearly that God is three distinct Persons in one divine Essence: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  That’s what Trinity means: tri + unity = Trinity.  The only true God is the Triune God.  All true Christians believe this.  Every true Church confesses this.  The Christian Church has learned to articulate her faith in the three ecumenical creeds – the Apostles, the Nicene, and the Athanasian – not by thinking really hard about God – not by sitting down and figuring out his mind – no, but by learning from Holy Scripture who God is and what God does, and by defending the doctrine they learned when controversy arose.  Our creeds are not extra words that we impose upon the word of God.  They are concise expressions of the holy Faith that God’s word teaches us. 

We are saved by faith.  St. Paul writes, “With the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”  The word creed simply means I believe.  When we confess what we believe, we are confessing two things: First, we confess the content of our faith – that is, who God is, what he has done, who we are, and how we are saved.  Second, we confess that this is what we ourselves personally believe as the body of Christ and as individual members of it.  The two always go together: the objective truth, and our subjective commitment to it. 

We are saved by faith because we are saved by God.  That is why it’s so important to know God – and to know how to talk about him.  That’s why the creed we just confessed together is so exclusive and uncompromising.  No other faith saves because no other god saves.  Our faith isn’t just a bucket of knowledge by which we impress our Maker and Judge.  No, our faith recounts and embraces the deeds by which God rescues us from sin, death, and the devil.  We hold onto our creeds and cherish them precisely because we cherish the words and works of Jesus.  Jesus gives us knowledge of God. 

Nicodemus desired knowledge.  Well, he went to the right person.   Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews.  And as such, he had lots of knowledge already.  The Pharisees were experts in the Old Testament, as well as experts in the code of outward behavior that they had extrapolated from it.  The Pharisees regarded the law as something to fulfill; and they thought they had.  They looked at Scripture as something to master; and they thought they had.  And then here came Jesus.  He taught God’s law for what it truly required, and so by revealing their sin, he made enemies of the self-righteous Pharisees.  They had already learned all that they were willing to learn from the prophets.  But Jesus opened Scripture as one who knew it better.  He showed himself to be among the prophets, and so exposed their ignorance.  No one could do the works that Jesus did unless God were with him.  There was something to learn from this man.  They didn’t like it.  But they had to admit it. 

Yes, Nicodemus went to the right person.  But he wanted to learn in the wrong way.  He approached Jesus in the same presumptuous way as he had approached the rest of the prophets.  He came under the cover of night, blinded by the darkness of his own self-righteousness.  He thought if he and Jesus could just sit down and hash things out one-on-one that he would in that way master his words too and acquire whatever wisdom Jesus might’ve had to offer. 

He paid Jesus a compliment.  “Your works impress us.”  But there’s no true praise in this.  Recognizing Jesus as more than an ordinary man is not the same as recognizing Jesus as your Savior from sin.  Nicodemus knew that Jesus must have come from God – like some sort of prophet.  But he could not figure out by his own observation that Jesus was of God, begotten of the Father from eternity.  To learn this, he needed more. 

So Jesus taught him.  And he taught him on God’s terms.  Nicodemus started the conversation; but Jesus chose the topic: “You must be born again.”  Nicodemus needed more than just a really good explanation in order to receive what Jesus offered.  He needed a new mind; he needed a new heart, a new life.  He needed to become a totally new person.   That’s what Jesus told him.  He needed to be born again.  Nicodemus had to forsake his ability to figure things out.  He had to despair of his obedience to the law that made him shine as righteous before men.  He needed to know who he was talking to.  Nicodemus needed to acknowledge himself as a sinner before God. 

This rebirth from above that Jesus requires is not just a hoop that we have to jump through.  It’s not just another item to strike off our ledger as we make our way to the kingdom of God.  But that’s how Nicodemus took it.  “How?” He asked.  “How can a man do this?”  … You can’t.  That’s the point.  Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.  Human reason cannot understand the mind of God.  You must be born again.  You must be born of God.  You must look and see what God does and quit trying to figure out the next thing you need to do. 

No less than Nicodemus did, we naturally look at the word of God as something to figure out intellectually.  We lean upon our own understanding all the time.  Now, perhaps this isn’t the case with us when it comes to the central tenants of the Christian faith.  Maybe we recite the Creed week after week and readily consent to all that it says.  [Baptism]  Perhaps the doctrine of Christ’s bodily presence in the Lord's Supper gives no occasion to doubt for those of us who are particularly strong in faith.  Maybe.  And maybe the fact that we can’t figure out the Trinity or understand the Two Natures of Christ doesn’t bother us too much.  We simply believe it, right?  That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? 

But the wiles of human reason don’t stop there.  Even a Pharisee can blindly assent to the mystery of the incarnation or the holy Three in One.  But there is one unfortunate habit that the flesh cannot suppress.  It’s what theologians call the opinion of the law.  It is the habit of regarding the righteousness that God demands from us as something that we are actually able to render – as something that we can produce and offer to God.   

The fallen reason of fallen man despises the mysteries of the Christian faith because it’s not able to figure them out.  Our flesh likes to be in control.  But there is nothing that our natural reason and fallen flesh despises more than the righteousness of faith that is freely reckoned to those who believe in Christ.  Nothing puts us more out of control than the full and free forgiveness of all our sins for Jesus’ sake.  It is in God’s hands!  Just as our mother’s labor was beyond our control, so our spiritual rebirth is God’s work alone.  But our flesh, that is, our old Adam wants to do something.  He wants to regard our confession of faith as some small contribution to our salvation.  He wants to count our piddly obedience as something to boast in.  And this is the most deadly way to lean upon our own understanding.  That’s why our flesh must be put to death.  That’s why the old Adam must be drowned by the water and the word of Holy Baptism. 

Jesus says that unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.  Our natural affections, our natural urges, even our most pious and generous thoughts do absolutely nothing to bring us to God.  They keep us away.  Our success in life, our wealth, our good looks, our moral victories and social charm all drive us deeper into the darkness of ourselves. 

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” 

In order to see and enter the kingdom of God, we need to know the power of our Baptism to wash our sin away.  But first, we need to know our sin.  We need to know what our fleshly births have proffered.  And so we look at what the law teaches us, and we see what the law condemns.  We see that the law is right.  We agree with its judgment.  But agreeing is not enough.  We find no power or willingness to be what God requires us to be.  But where the flesh is weak and stubborn, the Spirit is willing.  And the Spirit is willing.  He is bound by no one.  The Spirit is God.  He proceeds from Father and Son together and so blows where the Father and the Son want him to go, because the will of God is one. 

And where does he blow?  Where does he bring us to look but to where God condemned sin in the flesh once and for all as his own Son from eternity suffered for your sin and for mine?  The punishment and anger that we see lashed out on Jesus as he bears the stripes and torture of crucifixion was the anger of God against the very sin in which our flesh was conceived.  In the symbol of the crucifix (right here), we don’t just see an identification that we’re in a Lutheran Church.  No, we also see the true nature of sin.  We see what the Spirit wants us to remember.  We see what identifies Jesus as our Savior who gives us true life. 

Nicodemus knew Jesus was some sort of prophet, like, say, Moses who lifted up the bronze snake in the wilderness.  The people had complained.  They mocked God.  God sent poisonous snakes to bite them and kill them.  They asked Moses to intercede: “We have sinned,” they cried.   Moses pled their case and God told him to erect the very likeness of the snakes that were causing them to die.  But this snake brought life, because God said it would. 

We have sinned.  The poison of the serpent’s lie saturates our flesh and corrupts our reason and will.  It brings death. We need a new life.  We cry for mercy to our God who sees us in our misery.  And the Spirit of God who knows our every weakness, and who bears with our wayward will, intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.  But what words cannot express can most certainly be impressed upon our hearts – the image of Christ crucified for sinners. 

“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

The snake was lifted up.  There see the venom of the bite overcome.  That’s what Moses preached.  Christ was crucified for you.  There see the poison of sin purged.  That’s what the Spirit preaches.  Because Jesus tells him to.  Jesus, who knows you better than you know yourself, who knows your sin more intimately than your heart knows your blood took your sin upon himself, and welcomed the Father’s scorn and abandonment in order to reconcile you to himself.   He who knew no sin became sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.  He who was born in innocence in order to die as a sinner, burst forth from the womb of the earth on the third day in glorious life in order to give us new birth by the Holy Spirit through the water of Holy Baptism. 

Jesus is more than a prophet.  Nicodemus saw marvelous works and assumed that Jesus was a great man who came from God.  But we have seen more glorious works.  We have seen our sin borne for us on the cross.  We have seen the forgiveness brought to us from heaven as God serves us here.  We have seen our salvation prepared before our eyes and before the face of all people.  We have seen the works of God.  And so we have concluded rightly, as Jesus lays claim, that he is more than a prophet from God.  He is very God of very God who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit forever. 

We don’t think our way to God any more than we work our way to God.  Our creeds are not symbols of what we have figured out.  No, but like the cross of Jesus, they teach us what God has done, and so they serve as symbols to identify the Church that confesses Christ her Lord.  May we cherish what God gives us to confess, and seek to know God even as God knows us. 

Let us pray:

Triune God, be Thou our Stay,
Oh, let us perish never.
Cleanse us from our sins, we pray,
And grant us life forever.
Keep us from the Evil One;
Uphold our faith most holy,
Grant us to trust Thee solely
With humble hearts and lowly.
Let us put God's armor on:
With all true Christians running
Our heavenly race and shunning
The devil's wiles and cunning.
Amen, Amen, this be done,
O Lord, have mercy on us. 

In Jesus’ name, Amen.