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Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father, from his precious Son, Jesus Christ, and from the Holy Spirit, the Son’s gift to his church. Amen.
The text for this morning comes from the second reading, Peter’s sermon in the book of Acts. You may be seated. Today we celebrate the revelation that God has given to his bride, the church, in that he is God’s Father and God’s Son and God Holy Spirit. The mystery revealed in Scripture that God is three persons in one. Not three gods, but one God.
In the Gospel reading, we’re introduced to the Trinity. You heard Jesus talk to Nicodemus about how a man must be born again. To be born again means to be baptized. It means to come to faith. Amen. It means to be born of the Spirit. And the name in which each and every one of you were baptized, whether as an infant or as an adult, you were baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Triune God. Jesus makes it very clear and defines it for Nicodemus and for you and me. You’ve seen it before your very eyes, even though you may not remember it in your own life.
A Lutheran Christian sermon. Holy, holy, holy. Because there are three persons in the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we sing that time and time again as we gather around this holy scene where the church on earth is joined with the church in heaven around the Holy Supper. And together with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify his glorious name, evermore praising him and saying, Holy, Holy, Holy.
But it is the second reading, Peter’s sermon, that really applies the doctrine of the Trinity to you and me. For in Peter’s sermon, he preaches and addresses a tendency within you and within me called idolatry. Yes, idolatry. Not just any run-of-the-mill type of idolatry, but the type of idolatry that rises up within believers in Jesus Christ. You see, the people that he was preaching unto on that day in Pentecost were Jews and Pharisees. They had distanced themselves from the bad people who had crucified Jesus and killed him. They did not claim to be a part of that group of people. They were different than that group of people. And that’s idolatry. For Jesus was crucified by you and me. And being crucified by you and me means that we are those very same people.
But that’s really not the type of idolatry with which you struggle and I struggle. You see, you have a standard and a form of thought in your mind as to what is a Christian? What does he look like? How does he talk? How does he dress? Where does he go? With what does he struggle? And we have in our mind a very narrow and myopic view of what that person is. Heaven help them if they ever get outside of that boundary. Because we know what it looks like in our mind’s eye, and we know what it doesn’t look like in our mind’s eye, and we do not know what to do with it when it’s in our midst.
And if we don’t know what to do with it when it’s in our midst, then we sure do not know what to do with it when we see it within ourselves, this idolatry. Now, we can confess that it ought not matter how people talk, look, act, with what they struggle, and so forth. We can confess that it doesn’t matter, but nevertheless, how do you and I handle it? When we see it, when we experience it, when we hear it come out of our mouths. That’s why I bring this up, that Peter’s sermon is very applicable.
We all confess with St. Paul, I do not understand my own actions for the very thing I want to do, I don’t do. And the very thing I don’t want to do, I end up doing. All of us will confess, yea and amen, pastor. Yea and amen, Lord. We believe and teach and confess this as true because we have a civil war going on within us. And that civil war that goes on within us is always struggling. We do not want it to be seen by everyone else, because if it’s seen by everyone else, Lord, have mercy upon us.
And we spend an inordinate amount of time and energy hemming our frayed edges and whitewashing all of our placards so that we cannot be seen other than inside this box. That’s idolatry. We need help. All of us do. We need your prayers. All of us do. We all have dirty laundry, but boy, do we try to wash it. And we wash it in that old Colorado River, which isn’t always so clean, as you know.
Because of that idolatry, do we make it harder or easier for each of us to confess the civil war that goes on within our bosom? Or is it too much to talk about the things that are wrong with us on the inside for fear that we may really drive the other person away because they don’t know how to deal with a Christian who’s a sinner? What a novel concept.
That’s idolatry, to think it other than. See, we’re really good in the church to say this: Dear world, you struggle with alcohol and drugs, don’t you? But we’re not too quick to say, We in the church struggle with alcohol and drugs too. We are very quick in the church to say, Dear world, has your family had problems and been wounded by infidelities? And we also need to say, We’ve got divorce in our family. I’ve been divorced. And so on and so forth.
That we can talk about the infidelities of fathers and mothers, of husbands and wives, of sisters and brothers. It’s in the church. We are very good at saying to the world, Dear world, have your children hurt each other with sexual improprieties? Yes. We better also say, Yeah, we’ve got a lot of sexual improprieties in the church too. We’re good at saying, Dear world, do you have a closet full of skeletons? We better say, Yeah, the church is full of closets full of skeletons, and we’re afraid.
We’re afraid for those skeletons to be seen. So afraid we actually fear it more than we fear God, and that is idolatry. The greatest witness that we can present to the world—and we’re all about outreach and witness—and the greatest witness and outreach that we can present to one another is not our stellar morality. It’s not our picture book marriages. It’s rather our weaknesses and our sins, because then we’re only pointing to the good man, the only good man who paid for our weaknesses and sins.
Too often, you and I have tried to convince the world, as Christians, look at how well we’re doing at being good. That’s idolatry. Rather, we should say, look at how good this man was, who is God in the flesh, who paid for me, and point there. This is not idolatry. This is godly.
That’s what Peter was preaching to the people there at Pentecost and preaching to you and me today. He said, this Jesus delivered up to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you really did crucify and kill. But this Jesus did God raise from the dead and loose the pangs of death because it was not possible for him to be held by death. And having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, this Jesus has poured out upon you that which you now see and hear.
Well, no, we’re not seeing and hearing, speaking in other known languages, but we are… We are seeing and hearing sins forgiven, and we’re seeing and hearing God speak His loving words of forgiveness to us who have made an idol of what it means to be a baptized child of God. To be a baptized child of God is to point to the one who makes us a baptized child of God and knows that being a baptized child of God, we struggle. We struggle.
And we have dark recesses in the corners of our hearts that we by God ought to never have anybody see except Him. Because when He sees it, He forgives it. When someone else sees it, we can’t hardly live with it, can we? But when He sees it, He forgives it. When Isaiah, having seen such a marvelous sight, cries out, here am I, send me, he’s wanting you, a broken man, a wounded woman, a broken man. That’s who he wants to send out to be a light in this dark world.
The one whose dark recesses God has seen and has forgiven. Because you and I point to the one who has forgiven us and shall never stop. For there’s true hope, true peace, true joy. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.