Holy Trinity Sunday
- glcbmn
- Jun 1
- 9 min read
On a warm, sunny Sunday in June of 1995, I ambushed a pastor.
We had gotten to worship early, Trevor and I, at our beloved congregation of Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in St. Paul. I had been assigned this church as a beginning seminary student, and it proved to be a good fit for me. Trevor I were subsequently married at the church in 1994 and continued to worship there throughout our studies. This would be the church where we were ordained in 1998.
Anyway, the congregation had called a new pastor a few months previous to my story, and I considered him a little, uh, loosey-goosey in the theology department. This was only confirmed for me that fateful morning. It was Trinity Sunday and reading through the bulletin, I noted with delight that we were confessing the Athanasian Creed—my favorite! But as I looked over the words of the Creed printed in the bulletin, I realized parts were missing. Oh no! There’s been a mistake! I’d better go tell someone!
So ten minutes before worship was due to start, I went downstairs and alerted Pastor Erlandson that there was a mistake in the bulletin and parts of the Athanasian Creed got left out, and then helpfully suggested we could just read it from p. 54 in the hymnal—the one you have in your hands.
“Oh, that’s not a mistake,” he said. “I consulted Professor Carl Volz at the seminary, and he agreed with me that we shouldn’t have part of this creed recited. People might get the wrong idea about salvation.”
I stared at him and blurted, “You can’t just take parts of the creeds you don’t like and toss them out!” He, obviously needing to get upstairs and get ready said, “I rely on Dr. Volz’s assessment that parts of this creed are problematic. I’ll offer a class on it later for the congregation.”
Twenty-four-year-old dumb me stood my ground: “You and Carl Volz do not constitute an ecumenical council! Neither you nor he have any authority to alter the words of any Creed of the Church, at all, ever!”
Irritated, he replied, “Yes, well, it is time for worship. Let’s talk about this later.”
Fast forward 12 years, to June 3, 2007. Trinity Sunday, right here at Grace. I arrived around 8:20 and at 8:50 an usher—who has long since departed the congregation and this moratal life-- came up to my office, holding the bulletin and demanding to know what this word “catholic” was doing in this creed he had never heard of, and didn’t think was Lutheran.
“We are NOT Catholic,” he said.
“Of course we are not Roman Catholic,” said I. “That word ‘catholic’ just means ‘universal.’ You know, the whole church. Lutherans are a part of the whole Church on earth. Lutheran pastors promise in their ordination vows to uphold all three of the creeds, including this one.”
He would not be budged. I tried a couple more explanations and he got angrier, and I finally said, “Yes, well, it is time for worship. Let’s talk about this later.”
God has a huge sense of humor. And I wrote Pastor Erlandson a note of apology as soon as I got home that afternoon.
I am not the hero of this story, though I sure thought I was at the time. Only after I was ordained did I realize just how awful it is to ambush a fellow Christian leader—or anyone-- 10 minutes before the service. It disrupts everything, creates hard feelings, makes it difficult to listen to God, and damages relationships.
And while I was certainly correct that no pastor, seminary professor, or denomination has the authority to alter a creed that belongs to the whole catholic-meaning-universal Church, I hope I would find a different, more constructive way to say that now to a fellow brother in Christ.
And I also think I need to acknowledge Pastor Erlandson's and Dr. Volz's concerns that there are parts of the Athanasian Creed that are troubling and seem, well, un-Lutheran. The solution isn’t to take them out, however, but instead to try to discern why this Creed was first written, and why it was accepted by the Lutheran Reformers as a faithful explanation of Scripture. This is what I’m hoping to do today.
You’ve no doubt noticed that most of the festivals of the church year center on events—the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, and the coming of the Holy Spirit—or on people like St. Paul or James or Mary: people who are examples to us as Christians.
Today's celebration focuses more on a doctrine, a teaching of the church. We have a feast of rich hymns and Scripture readings today, some of the finest, all inviting us to consider how God reveals himself as Father, Son, and Spirit. In many ways, the Trinity is better sung about than preached about—more effectively praised than explained!
But because human beings communicate most consistently with words, sometimes words must be used. This is what the early church learned, as it tried to answer the question Jesus himself posed to the disciples: "Who do you say that I am?" The disciples were convinced that Jesus was God—but as good Jews, they also believed what Moses had taught: The Lord our God, the Lord is One.
So, how could the One God have become flesh in Jesus Christ? And what about this Holy Spirit of God that was poured out at Pentecost? How does that figure in? How do we find language to talk about it? How do we grasp it?
Of course in one sense, we can never really "grasp" God. God is a mystery to us, unfathomable, unknowable except as God reveals himself to us. Yet we need concepts, and we need words, because that is how we begin to understand. And as the Church tried to grope its way to some understanding, it came to focus on Jesus' last words to his disciples in Matthew 28: "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." That seemed to the early Church to be a key, a way of talking about God that helped make sense of it all.
And so the church developed creeds--statements of faith about God--and these creeds reflected this understanding of the One God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: One God who is the Holy Trinity. We see this in the oldest and most basic of our creeds—the Apostles' Creed--with its three articles, one each on Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That same structure is in the Nicene Creed, which came out of the ecumenical council at the city of Nicaea in 325—ecumenical refers to a united meeting of the churches at that time.
But that was not the end of the story. There continued to be debates and discussions about how to understand the Trinity, and how to talk about the Trinity. By the late 400s, it was clear that the Church needed to settle these questions and address some false teaching that had cropped up.
The Athanasian Creed was written in response to Arius and his followers, who said that said that Jesus was not actually divine,. It also addressed Nestorius and those teachers who tried to separate Jesus’ humanity and divinity. It was probably not written by St. Athanasius himself, but as he was a great champion against these false teachers, it was based on his interpretation of Scripture and bears his name.
It’s hard for us to believe now, but there were actually battles fought by armies over this subject! There were slogans, there were hymns, there were official Councils and meetings—and all because Christians were convinced that what we say about God, what we teach about God, what we believe about God, is very important—so important that the church needed to say, "Unless you believe this, you cannot be saved." It was not just a matter of opinion, but a matter of life and death.
Today we are often reluctant to be quite so sure of things. We live in an age when everything is seen as relative. You can believe this, or you can believe that, or you can believe nothing at all. Hey, no big deal. Let's all get along!
To the early church, though, it was a very big deal indeed, because what is finally at stake is what we believe about Jesus Christ and his saving work.
And so we have, in the Athanasian Creed, the Church's consensus on just how we understand Christ—what we mean when we say he is indeed God the Son, and also what we mean when we say he is both divine and human, both God and man.
This creed was not intended to be used regularly in the worship of the church; but in many churches, and especially in many Lutheran churches, it became the custom to recite this creed on this particular Sunday, this Festival of the Holy Trinity, as a way of reminding us what the universal Christian Church believes and teaches about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Having said all of this, let’s acknowledge that some of the wording is strange to us. I’ve already talked about how “catholic” with a small c means “universal” and that “the catholic faith” is just a different way of saying “the Christian truth.” That’s a good thing to guard, whole and inviolable!
I’ve also said that what we believe about Jesus is so important that the Church, including us Lutherans, have stated that one cannot be saved without believing these things firmly and faithfully. Why? Because this is the faith that saves, the only faith that saves. Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, who gives the Holy Spirit, is the only God who saves. To believe anything else is to believe in something that doesn’t save you. We have to be clear about this, because people’s salvation depends on it.
So far so good, I think, for most of you. But what about that last part dealing with the resurrection of the dead? That’s the chunk that was missing from the bulletin back in 1995. “At his coming all people shall rise bodily to give an account of their own deeds. Those who have done good will enter eternal life, those who have done evil will enter eternal fire.”
First of all, this is simply the Bible. John 5 says this: “The hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.” And Romans 14:12 says, “each of us will give an account of himself to God.” And 2 Corinthians 5:10 says, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.” And Revelation 20 says “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done.”
The Athanasian Creed here is just quoting the Bible. Where people get nervous is they think they have to believe the right things intellectually, and do enough good in order to “get into heaven” But remember what I have often told you: Christianity isn’t so much about what YOU do, it’s about what God does in and for you. If you are in Christ Jesus, these words should cause you no worry or fear. Because how do you believe, except by the power of the Holy Spirit? How do you do anything good, except by Jesus working in you?
It is trust in Christ that will save you, a faith given to you as a free gift in your baptism and nurtured every week here by Word and Sacrament. Let these closing words of the Athanasian Creed give you hope, not fear, because you belong to Jesus Christ. It’s not about intellectual agreement to a list of statements, or checking the boxes on good works. It is not up to you to believe or to do those good works, but it is the action of the Holy Spirit in you which does these things.
Remember the Small Catechism’s explanation of the 3rd article of the Apostles’ Creed: "I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me . . .enlightened me . . .sanctified and kept me in the true faith."
Human understanding will never bring us to the place of knowing everything there is to know about our awesome and mysterious God. But the Holy Spirit guides us, leads us, helps us grow in our understanding. And that happens, God willing, each day of our lives.
My favorite line of this, my favorite creed, comes right at the beginning: "Whoever wants to be saved should above all cling to the catholic faith," the universal faith, the Christian truth. This tells me that faith is not something to be understood or intellectually mastered. It is something to which we cling and hold onto for dear life. It is, as I so often say, "trust."
We will not be able to articulate or understand everything about God—but we are able to praise him, to sing "Early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee”; to proclaim with the Psalmist, "O Lord, our Lord, how exalted is your name in all the world!”; To stand in awe with Genesis as the Word of the Father, with the Spirit moving over the waters, speaks creation into being. We are able to join our voices, as faltering as they may be, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven to sing their unending hymn, "Holy, holy, holy Lord."
And in breathing these words of praise, we in fact open our hearts to the Holy Spirit. With the Spirit’s guidance, our task is not to understand, but to cling to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to whom be the glory forever and ever. “Mortals, angels, now and ever, praise the Holy Trinity!” Amen.