One of my seminary teachers, I’ll call him Professor X, was truly and incorrigibly eccentric. Stories about him abounded, perhaps some of them apocryphal, some of them I know to be true. For example, Professor X demanded that we wear neckties in his class. Now, we all came to class in tee shirts, so we stuffed a necktie in our pockets and put them on when we got to his class. What a sight! Forty guys wearing tee shirts with ties wrapped around their necks. Professor X didn’t seem to mind. The letter of the law had been fulfilled.

Today in the church calendar is Trinity Sunday. So the emphasis is on the God who is one and yet who is three. Three “persons” or realities whom we call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One God, not three gods, and yet each of these “persons” is totally God. In the words of the King of Siam, “It’s a puzzlement.”

This was the subject of one of Professor X’s classes. Since he could not see more than six inches in front of him, he leaned over the desk, squinted, and said in his inimitable way, “Gentlemen, no one can understand the doctrine of the Trinity. I will now explain it to you.”

For many people, God (much less the Trinity) is quite unnecessary. They say, “After all, the old fogy never did anything but cramp our style and smash our dreams and allow suffering and pain and death, anyway. So let’s get rid of this God. We have long ago exchanged him for a 54-inch television screen or Suzie’s wedding plans or Dan’s education, and that’s the way we dismissed this God–we simply got a better bargain: something we could see and touch and taste and enjoy; which is something you can’t do with a bearded, balding old teaching about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We lead very busy lives. No time for this sort of nonsense. After all, it doesn’t put an extra dollar in the pocket or add a room to the house.”

But I take it we’re different. We come to church and we confess faith in this three-in-one God in what is called the creed. You may quibble about some of the wording; and it’s true, you can’t nail down God with a formula. Even to name God limits God. But all we have is language. And the creed is a way of speaking about God. But more than that–it’s a way of talking about God and having it come out as sheer gospel.

Listen to Luther as he writes about the creed in his Large Catechism: “In all three articles God himself has revealed and opened to us the most profound depths of his fatherly heart and his pure, unutterable love. For this very purpose he created us, so that he might redeem us and make us holy and, moreover, having granted and bestowed upon us everything in heaven and earth, he has also given us his Son and his Holy Spirit, through whom he brings us to himself. For. . . we could never come to recognize the Father’s favor and grace were it not for the Lord Christ, who is a mirror of the Father’s heart. Apart from him we see nothing but an angry and terrible judge. But neither could we know anything of Christ, had it not been revealed by the Holy Spirit.”

Elsewhere Luther says, “If you want to escape from despair and hatred of God, let speculation go. Begin with God from the bottom upwards, not from the top downwards. In other words, begin with Christ incarnate. . . Look at his death, his cross, his Passion. See him hanging on his mother’s breast and hanging on the cross. At all costs cling to the revealed God. Allow no one to take the child Jesus from you. Hold fast to Christ, and you will never be lost. God the Father longs for you. God the Son wishes to be your Savior, your Liberator. In this kind and lovely manner God has freed us from these terrible assaults and trials.”

The doctrine of the Trinity is a key teaching of the Christian Church. So we have come today and will in a few minutes confess our faith in Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And then we can go home and report that we are Christians because we believe in the Trinity. We have said the magic words. We are not like the heathen who believe in Vishnu or totems, or some “Grand Architect” of the universe. We believe in the Trinity!

Is it enough to mouth fancy phrases, to parrot complicated formulas?
I tell you, it doesn’t matter what you call God, as long as you do nothing about it. Call him or her anything you like–Allah or Supreme Being or First Cause or Ground of Being or Father, Son and Holy Spirit–but as long as that’s all you do–just think about God in the right way–it doesn’t matter in the least. I wouldn’t care if you called God red, white and blue or winken, blinken and nod. You see, it isn’t what God is in his nature, in his being, because we don’t know that. That’s the hidden God.

It isn’t what God is, it’s what God has revealed to us. It’s what God has done, is doing, and will do, and how we respond to it. Look, if you will, at this morning’s reading from the book of Proverbs. Remember the psalm we chanted. Note the second reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, where the Apostle refers to the Trinity as we live out our life of faith.

Finally, the four verses of the Gospel lesson are surrounded by five chapters of what is called the Upper Room Discourses of Jesus. It’s a farewell testament spoken by a leader before dying, reflecting the understanding of Jesus in the Christian community for which the Gospel of John was written. If you look closely at those chapters you will see that they are full of Trinity talk. “I and the Father are one.” “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” “I came from the Father and have come into the world..” “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name. . .” “I will be leaving you, but I will send the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth. And when he comes he will guide you into all truth.”

In, with, and under this trinity talk one word keeps coming up, front and center. The word is love. The Father loves, and so creates. The Son loves, and so frees us. The Spirit loves, and so guides us into all truth. “A new commandment I give to you,” says Jesus, “that you love one another.” The love that God has shown to us in Jesus Christ is the love we show to others. We are moved, we are urged, we are goaded, we are compelled to exercise that love to the world around us.

That world, as you well know, is in a helluva state. I mean that literally. It is experiencing wars, terror, natural disasters, man-induced disasters, and above all, fear–fear of the future. But God loves this broken world; he did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but that the world might be saved through him. It is our special privilege to be little Christs to the world, to love its people, to care for it, and to bring the lost, the lonely, the sick and the dying home to the Father’s house.

That’s what it means to confess the Holy Trinity.
Amen