Romans 8:12-17 Holy Trinity Sunday Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke Sunday, May 26, 2024 “A Simple Message From a Complex God: We Are God’s Children” It’s so simple and yet so complex. I realize that it doesn’t seem like those two adjectives should go together, but sometimes they do. Isaiah received his call as a prophet. He stood before the throne of God and looked on a scene that filled him with awe and wonder. That’s a simple enough description, and it captures the main thrust of that passage we heard earlier, but that’s really just a summary. We could look at the details of the scene and the complexity of it and discuss for much longer the seraphim and their six wings and the tongs and the altar and a God who is not just holy but three times holy. It’s complex in a beautiful way. It’s so simple and yet so complex. God loves the world so much that he sent his Son. On one level we can hear that simple message and rejoice. It’s simple in a beautiful way. But it is also so complex. Why does he love us? How can God himself as a man stand in front of a secret follower at night and explain to him God’s plan? It is so profound that we dare not call it simple, and complex enough that it baffles even Nicodemus. It’s so simple and yet so complex. Our God is a triune God. The youngest among us can learn that the word means one-in-three and three-in-one, and they can recite the truth about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is that simple. But the truth is also so complex that on this Sunday devoted to the doctrine, we can read the entire long creed with a long name and still only scratch the surface when it comes to seeing what God is like. He is so complex that we cannot possibly fully grasp his nature, for as is fitting for God, he is like nothing else in our experience. And even though this day is devoted to the doctrine of the Trinity, the point is not only to learn what that word means or how it describes God. The point of this Sunday is to be edified by the truth about what God has done for us and to praise him in response. That’s exactly what Paul would have us do as he relates truth about God to us in our verses from Romans 8. There’s a simple message here. Paul himself sums it up by saying “we are God’s children.” But these verses are also profound and complex enough that they could take up many sermons. If we’re going to join in the Athanasian Creed today, we’ll only have time in our service for one sermon, so I would like you to focus with me on three key words as we look at this passage together. The first word should not surprise you at this point. The word is Trinity. But look closely and you won’t find that word anywhere in the reading. In fact, you won’t find it anywhere in the Bible. This is a word that the Church came up with and uses to describe what the Bible tells us about the nature of God. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Holy Spirit is God. There is only one God. We don’t mean that the Father Son and Spirit are all parts of God or different ways that God acts. We don’t mean that he just describes himself this way. God is this way. He is unlike anything we have ever seen or experienced. Trinity is a simple word to describe a God far too complex for us to wrap our minds around. And yet, you can see the Triune God in our verses. The Spirit leads us to love and good works. He leads us to a relationship with God. We can cry out to our Father, the Father, and we have a unity with Jesus Christ. We don’t learn about the Trinity for Trinity’s sake. We learn to see and stand in awe of the Trinity in action for us. Which brings us to another word. Our second word is adoption. Unlike Trinity, this word is something that we can connect to our experience. We see a legal process play out in the lives of people. A child becomes a member of a new family. Loving parents adopt him or her to raise as their own. I heard a pastor remark recently, and he is right, that parents don’t go around introducing their children saying, “This is Joey. He’s adopted.” That’s the sort of thing villains in the movies say. Loving parents don’t say that. They say, “This is my child.” And they give to children who are adopted all the love and care and help and status of children that were born into their family.
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