Keep Us Stedfast

Good morning again, Encouragers.

For several weeks now we’ve been following our Lord through the highest and hardest days of His life. We knelt at the cross on Good Friday. We rose with Him at Easter. We watched Him carried up out of sight on Ascension Day. Last Sunday the fire fell, and the Church was filled with the Holy Ghost. And this morning, of all the mornings in the year, nothing new happens.

Trinity Sunday doesn’t add another event to the story. It steps back and names the One who has been at work in all of it. Behind the manger and the cross and the empty tomb and the rushing wind, behind every page we’ve turned since Advent, there has been one God: the Father who sent, the Son who came, the Holy Ghost who was poured out. Today the whole year comes round and rests in Him. We have followed the Son home to the Father, and it was the Spirit who carried us.

So this is the one Sunday in the year when our feast is not a thing God did, but the God who did it.

I’ll be honest with you. That tempts a preacher to stand up and try to explain the Trinity, as though my job this morning were to make three-in-one add up on a chalkboard. I’ve felt that pull more than once, and I’ve learned to distrust it. The Collect doesn’t ask for an explanation. Listen to what it actually asks: “Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity; We beseech thee that thou wouldest keep us stedfast in this faith.”

It asks to be kept. Not to be made clever. The grace to confess Him, and then the stedfastness to keep confessing Him on the days we’d rather drift. That is the whole prayer, and it is a prayer for people like us.

Notice where the Trinity is first met in Scripture. Not in a definition. In a cry. Isaiah went into the temple and saw the Lord, high and lifted up, and heard the angels calling to one another, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” Three times holy. Not once, which would have been plenty. The old fathers heard the first faint sound of the Trinity in that threefold cry, the one God confessed three times over. And the man who heard it did not reach for a pen. “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips.” That is what the holy God does to a sinner who actually sees Him. He undoes him.

Then grace moves. A live coal from the altar, carried by an angel, pressed against the prophet’s mouth: “Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.” Only after that does the Lord ask, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” For us. And the cleansed man answers, “Here am I; send me.” Undone, forgiven, sent. That order never changes.

Our Lord works the same thing out with Nicodemus, only by night and at a slower pace. Here is a learned man, a teacher of Israel, who comes with a careful compliment: “Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God.” Jesus lets the compliment go by and speaks instead to the man’s need. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And Nicodemus, who had spent his life reading, hears it flat and literal: “How can a man be born when he is old?” You can almost feel the patience in our Lord’s voice as He says it once more, plainly: “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”

Water and Spirit. That is baptism, and baptism is the whole Trinity at work on one small life: the Father willing it, the Son making it possible, the Spirit giving it. Nicodemus came supposing he might reason his way into the kingdom. Our Lord told him no one reasons his way in. You have to be born in, and that birth is not your own doing. It is grace, and it is what the Prayer Book means when it calls us sons of God by adoption. Lest we forget what it cost, our Lord adds the reason He came at all: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” The Father sends. The Son is lifted on the cross. The Spirit gives the new birth. One mercy, and three Persons in it.

Then there is John, exiled on his island, who looked up and saw what Isaiah saw. “After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven.” A door, standing open, where heaven used to be shut. And through it, the same song, sung now by the living creatures who never rest: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.”

Hold those three together for a moment, because here is where this morning catches up with us. The seraphim sang it to Isaiah in the temple. The living creatures sing it without ceasing before the throne. And in a little while, you and I, in a small church on a county road outside Bellville, are going to sing it too. We will stand and lift up our hearts and say, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts.”

That song was never ours to begin with. We didn’t write it. We borrowed it from Isaiah, who borrowed it from the angels, who have been singing it since before the foundation of the world and have not stopped yet. When we sing it, we are not starting something. We are joining something already going on, a choir far older and far larger than the handful of us in these pews. I’ll admit that steadies me on the Sundays when our number is small. The song does not wait on us to be enough. We only get to come in on it.

We will also say something this morning that we say no other Sunday in the year: the Athanasian Creed. “We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.” Those long sentences can sound like an examination paper, and I know some of you brace a little when you see them coming. They are not a test. They are a confession, made shoulder to shoulder with the whole Church, in every age and every language, that has ever called God by His right name.

And if anyone leaves here this morning still unable to make the doctrine sit neatly in his head, take Augustine with you. He was no slouch at thinking, and after a lifetime of it he said simply, “If you can comprehend it, it is not God.” The Trinity was never a riddle you had to solve before they’d let you near the altar. It is the name of the God who came down and found you first.

Which is why we come to this altar now, and not as strangers. The Proper Preface says it as plainly as it can be said: we worship one God “in Trinity of Persons and in Unity of Substance.” The Father has received us in the Son; the Son has lifted us up by the Spirit. We come with empty hands, sons by adoption and grace, to a table we did not earn and could never have set for ourselves. The bread will be broken. The cup will be poured. And the same God who undid Isaiah, met Nicodemus in the dark, and opened the door for John gives Himself to His people here, this morning, in this room.

So you needn’t carry the Trinity home as a doctrine you’re afraid you’ll forget by Tuesday. He is not a formula you’re keeping. He is the God who has kept you. He called you out before you knew His name. He washed you in water and the Spirit. And He has promised, in the words of the Collect, to hold you stedfast, long after this morning’s words have left you, all the way home.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.