My teaching schedule allowed me to attend church at Trinity Lutheran in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

Trinity has grown significantly since I visited them nearly two years ago. The building, which has been under construction since 2001 and built by members of the congregation, is nearly complete and will be dedicated on July 1. After church I met with the pianist and three people who were involved in the construction. It was interesting to hear what they thought was good and some of the challenges they faced in getting agreement among themselves on the design as well as getting permits from the City of Rock Springs. The comment was made that when a church is designed, the Devil often sits in the front pew. At least they agreed on the color of the carpet. :) I told them that I was excited for them and that what they have is beautiful and will serve them well.

The congregation itself has also grown. When I visited last they only required half the basement to conduct worship; today the basement was full. Four hymns and an interlude were required for Holy Communion. The service was LSB Divine Service, Setting One, with a wonderful battery of hymnody for Trinity Sunday:

  • 507, “Holy, Holy, Holy”
  • 587, “I Know My Faith Is Founded”
  • Offertory: 781, “We Give Thee But Thine Own”
  • Distribution Hymns:
    • 623, “Lord Jesus Christ, We Humbly Pray”
    • 619, “Thy Body Given For Me, O Savior” (this completing in a way what I had heard at the home church on April 22)
    • 617, “O Lord, We Praise Thee”
    • 643, “Sent Forth by God’s Blessing”
  • 854, “Forth in Thy Name, O Lord, I Go”

Pastor Scott L. Shields preached the following transcribed sermon on Proverbs 8:22-31.

In the Name of Jesus, Amen.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, most of us like a good mystery, do we not? Few of us are not satisfied with an unsolved mystery. All mysteries, we believe, should be solved. Today is the festival of the Holy Trinity, and on this day we enter into the realm of mystery.

Today we celebrate and worship the Triune God, whose ways are beyond our human understanding, whose nature is above the grasp of our finite minds. God’s Word asks us, “Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty?” Too often, this is what we try to do. In our pride, we attempt the impossible. We rush to explain God on our own terms, to second guess him, to theologize about him, and to sketch his personality in an understandable way. Then we sit back in satisfaction, smugly thinking that we have captured the whole understanding of God like looking at a goldfish in a bowl.

But what foolish people we are. Confronted with the mysteries of the Triune God, we must reject the temptation to shape God in our own small image. Instead, let us return to the truth of God’s Word, so that we might faithfully confess the greatness and majesty, the inescapable mystery and the boundless love of our Triune God. In other words, let us let God tell us who he is.

Consider the illustration: one morning, St. Augustine, one of the great Bible scholars in history, was strolling along the beach. His mind was filled with theological questions trying to figure out the mystery of the doctrine of the Trinity. He struggled to understand the scriptures that he had read again and again. He couldn’t see the logic that would make all things fit together. So absentmindedly he stopped to watch a little child playing on the beach. The child had dug a small hole in the sand and was running with a seashell, dipping it into the waves of the sea and hurrying to pour that water into that hole. The child made trip after trip after trip. Augustine walked over and asked the child what he was doing. The child explained that he was trying to pour the sea into his hole in the sand. With sudden insight, Augustine realized that’s what he had been trying to do, foolishly trying to empty the immeasurable mystery of God into his small mind. Augustine later wrote one of his most famous writings and titled it not Explanations but rather Confessions. Why? Because when he discovered that the mysteries of God confront us, we cannot always explain them in rational human terms, but with childlike faith we can examine the revelation of God’s Word and rejoice in this simple confession: This is most certainly true.

Our Old Testament reading today from the Book of Proverbs takes us deep into mystery, into the ancient concept of wisdom, or chacmah in Hebrew. The writer of the Proverbs offers happy tribute to the events that took place before time began. He praises the creative power of God that inscribed the horizon, that put clouds in the sky, set boundaries to the sea, and staked out the foundations of the earth. These verses give us a beautiful picture of the personal and joyous relationship that existed between God and wisdom.

Wisdom, as the writer of the Proverbs says, was God’s daily delight. It was brought forth from everlast, before the mountains were in place. Before the oceans and earth existed, wisdom was there. Wisdom was the craftsman at God’s side, his architect who rejoiced in the whole world and delighted in mankind.

As we study these mysterious words that sing with such poetry, we can’t but wonder, what is wisdom? Taking our cue from some of our forefathers in the Christian faith, we can conclude with confidence that this wisdom is none other than Jesus Christ himself. Some believers in the past recognize in this personification of wisdom an anticipation and description of the divine logos, the word. The Word, that John mentions in his gospel — in other words, Jesus, long before he came in the flesh. St. Paul also confesses that Jesus is the wisdom of God in 1 Corinthians.

What a mystery this is. It is the mystery of the Bethlehem baby who fully participated in the creation of the universe. It is the mystery of the carpenter’s son from Nazareth whom we confess to be both God and light, very God of very God. It is the mystery of the two natures of our Lord, whom we believe to confess and to be God and true man, distinct natures united and undivided, an indivisible person who died, that we might never die; and who lived, that we might live forever.

We are not the first people to have questions regarding the profound mystery of the Holy Trinity. There once was a man of the early church by the name of Arius who tried to figure out the mystery of who Jesus is, and with tragic results. Arius was the leader of the church in Alexandria. As he tried to understand the mystery of Jesus and his relationship with the one God, he stumbled across the first verse of our Old Testament reading this morning, the Hebrew word, qanah. This word, Arius realized, could be translated in two ways, making a huge difference in the meaning: either that God had created wisdom or that simply God had possessed wisdom from the beginning. Arius came to the wrong conclusion, that Jesus is not the equal of God, but that he was created by God. Arius believed that Jesus had a beginning, which therefore made him inferior to God and a lower being.

Satisfied that he had solved the mystery of God and had identified the role of Jesus, Arius began teaching this false doctrine to others. He gathered many followers. He argued with opponents who insisted that Jesus was indeed the true God, co-eternal and coequal with the Father. The arguments were heated. People got upset. They got upset because Arius had gone against God’s Word and against the confession of the church. Arius was labeled a heretic and excommunicated along with all of his followers who continued in their error. It was the beginning of a great theological controversy that would last for half a century. This controversy has continued even to this very day, for Arius has followers of his teachings in the 21st Century: people who call themselves Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarians, and Latter-Day Saints. These groups deny that Jesus is true God. They knock on our doors, they sit at our kitchen tables and calmly eliminate Jesus from the Trinity.

So confronted with the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and with the Church divided into warring factions, as it was then and as it is now, what are we to do? We can follow in the footsteps of our forefathers, leaders in the true Christian church, who returned to the Word of God and searched for the truth. We should applaud the actions of these laypeople and pastors who stood up and spoke out against false teaching in the early Christian church by confessing the truth. They rejoiced that Jesus is true God, the visible likeness of the invisible God.

If we carefully search to find what God’s Word says about Jesus and his role in the mystery of the Holy Trinity, this is what we will find: first of all, the Word of God clearly calls Jesus a man. He was born in Bethlehem to a human mother. He had hands and feet, flesh and bones, and a soul. He exhibited all the traits and emotions of a human being. He was hungry. He was thirsty. He was tired. He slept. He wept. He suffered pain, and he died. In all respects Jesus was a human being like every human being who ever lived, except for one thing. Jesus never sinned. Only in this way was Jesus different from all other human beings.

If we stop here and see Jesus only as a human being, we make probably the greatest mistake of our lives. Although Jesus’s mother was human, his father was none other than God himself. Jesus was recognized as the Son of God by his followers, by John the Baptizer, by an angel, and by God the Father himself, speaking from heaven. Jesus is the one and only Son. He is unique and one of a kind. Old Testament prophecy pointed out that the child who would be born as messiah, the son who would come, was none other than the mighty God — Immanuel, which means, “God with us.”

So Jesus is true God, who has appeared to the world in human flesh. In him is all the fullness of the divine nature, and if we look closely at what God’s Word says, we will show that Jesus shows the characteristics of divinity, attributes that he alone possesses because he is God. For example the Word of God says that the child born in Bethlehem existed from eternity. Before the time of Abraham, he was. Before the universe was created, he existed, sharing glory with the Father. He was, is, and will be present with all believers everywhere, just as he himself promised. Also, God’s Word says that Jesus knows everything and has power over all things. He has supreme power over the spiritual world, over the church, over the forces of nature and the entire universe. He is superior to all created things because you see, he was involved in the creation of the universe. Without him nothing was made that has been made, and through him all things are preserved.

God’s Word says that Jesus not only has the power to perform miracles and heal diseases, but he also has the power to forgive sins. He shares with the Father the power and the privilege of raising the dead. Jesus himself said that he has the power to give eternal life. Can any mere human make these claims, as Jesus did? Has any human in history ever possessed any of these qualities? No. Such authority and power belongs to God and to him alone. The ancient mysteries of God’s church have not changed in our day and age. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

So each week as we gather here to worship, to pray, to praise and give thanks, we are not asked to explain the mystery of God’s nature, or to understand why he is merciful to sinners like us. We need only to confess the mystery that Jesus Christ is true God and true man. We confess the mystery that through the death of Jesus the debt for our sins has indeed been paid. We confess that by the resurrection of Jesus all who believe in him will live forever. We confess the mystery that although we are sinners, through the blood of Jesus we are also God’s holy people. We confess the mystery that in, with, and under the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper we receive the body and blood of Jesus. We confess that through the mystery of the washing with water and the Word we are the adopted children of God. We confess that through faith in Jesus’ death, there is a door to new life.

So on this Holy Trinity Sunday, let us rejoice that you’re not asked to understand the mysteries of God, but only to believe with a childlike faith that “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” We don’t need to pretend to be wise. We don’t need to claim to understand even one of God’s mysteries. We don’t need to, because you see, Christ is our wisdom. All thanks to him, and all glory be to our Triune God forever. Amen.