The Epistle Lesson                                                                  Romans 5:1-5

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Sermon Text

We are blessed as Christians to profess that Christ is our king, our God, and our ruler in every aspect of life. We are blessed as well to have a heavenly Father, somebody who watches after us in every aspect of life, to make sure that we as people bound by our limited human form still know the parental goodness of something that is greater than ourselves. Likewise though we are but physical bodies, we are allowed, through the visitation of God’s Spirit, to be blessed with a spiritual nature as well so our worldly nature. Slowly but surely, every aspect of ourselves is transformed from fleshly thoughts and fleshly nature to a spiritual nature binding together our physical form and our spiritual.

As Christians, we can proclaim this faith because we believe in the Holy Trinity. We profess that God is three persons and that those three persons somehow are one united being whom we call God. Though there are complicated formulas to explain this – things that talk about light, and the source of light, and the warmth of light; or else the roots of a tree, the tree itself, and its branches – the essential nature of the Trinity is that it is mysterious. We do not exactly know how God exists in three persons and yet is one God, but we know that it is true. We are blessed as God’s children to be in on this secret and to enjoy the benefits that come from it.

As I have already said in my introduction, we experience three unique ways in which God loves the creation. Lately, it has been put forward that God acts as the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all things, with each person of the Trinity somehow taking on one of these aspects. However, we are misguided if we think that each person of the Trinity only has one job. While it is true that the Spirit has unique work, as does the Father, as does the Son in God’s economy of grace, God only acts in the world as a united force. More than that, God cannot be limited in any way. God is free because God is freedom.

The Trinity then is not something by which we define God. We do not say God is three persons and therefore we know exactly how God works and in what exact ways God does this and to whom God is willing to serve. Instead, what we are given is the simple truth that God, in this singular multiplicity, loves us in every way possible. through every means possible, as the three persons of God’s singular self. Are we all thoroughly lost in the weeds? Are we ready for a bit more of a concrete discussion of what God’s work?

In the time before Christ came into the world, God’s people only knew of God as God the Father. While it is true that the Spirit was the one mediating discussions between God and God’s people, there was no talk of God as multiple persons, only as God being a single person. When we hear in the Shema, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God! The Lord is one!” That is not any sort of complicated statement about the Trinity, that is simply the view of Moses as he spoke  to his people. Even the one closest to God, Moses, the giver of the law, did not fully understand the triune nature of God.

It was only through the revelation of Christ’s incarnation that we understand that there are in fact three persons of God. Christ the eternal Word of God preexisted everything and through him all things were made, (we talked about this just a few weeks ago.) The Spirit of God speaking through and to the prophets was alongside God and God’s people through every moment of eternity. God the Father, a spiritual person somehow overseeing and yet coequal with these other two persons, all together are called “God.”

As we read our scripture today, we see a Trinitarian argument about what it means to be saved. Paul tells us that, because Christ came and lived and died and rose again, we are now no longer enemies of God, but at peace with God. All those sins that we had committed against God’s divine majesty every aggressive impulse we had against each other no longer has to be the thing that defines us. Now we are granted this new status under Christ we can become children of God and as children of God we are able to develop a new way of understanding life. The hardships that we face no longer have to be overwhelming because God who suffered alongside us has proven that we can somehow find in suffering a way to grow forward. We know that even those parts of suffering that are irredeemable at least have God’s solidarity alongside us through the person of Christ to comfort us in the midst of hardship.

Through this understanding of the world, we can develop virtue in a way that we would not be able to otherwise. Rather than being overwhelmed by a world that is broken we are instead able to accept the broken parts of it as a consequence of the world as it is and grow our own souls and our own communities to be closer into alignment with the world as it should be. This transformative approach to the trouble of the world allows us to see God doing something new even in the midst of a world that has been broken from the very beginning. When we acknowledge that the broken state of the world is a consequence of sin the trouble that we face in that world allows us to see why it is necessary to be more holy and to understand that holiness ultimately comes from helping others in the midst of this broken world.

The final thing that Paul speaks of in this part of the epistle is about how we are able to do all of this because we receive love through God’s spirit pouring that into us. It is hard to overstate how much of the work of the church comes down to love. It is a word that is cheapened in our own culture something that we use to describe any great affection for things as minimal as a certain kind of hot dog to as incredible as the love between family members friends and of course God for us. Scripture also struggles to capture this using different words in different contexts to give slightly different flavors to the kind of love that we experience. Ultimately love cannot be summarized in a singular word, but it must be experienced and the many different colors that it gives to the world around it.

Eager to understand the work of God whether we put it in trinitarian terms or just speak of God in terms of the singular and understand that there is something a bit more complex to it if we really sit down and think about it. If we are trying to understand how God works in the world we do so from the basis of a being that has loved since before anything existed. The father has always loved the son has always loved the spirit and so on and so forth in the infinite combination of their trinitarian relationship. When the creation was made God did so out of love and crowned that creation with the ultimate object of God’s affection human beings. To understand the work of God we must understand love.

This coming Saturday I will stand with a family as they join another family and we will proclaim the importance of love as something that does not envy or boast as something that is patient and kind that does not keep record of wrong of something that is infinite and that is expressed best and the simple sacrifice of oneself for another. Oftentimes love is seen as most profound in marriage or else and the love between a parent and a child the truth is though that the most profound love there is, is always between God and us. All other loves draw inspiration from God’s love for us, and all other loves are secondary to it. If you want to understand the work of the Trinity you must first understand love and there is no greater love than the love that God showed us in Christ presence upon this world dying for us while we were yet sinners and then the visitation of the spirit which is continually with us gifted to us to sanctify us and connect us to God and to one another. As is always the case it all comes back to love and today I ask you people of God to recover your first love to recommit yourself to God in every way that you can so that in all aspects of life you may see the benefits that come from knowing God the father the son and the Holy Spirit and that God’s continual love for you.