Preparing for Worship - May 26, 2024

The Sunday after Pentecost, May 26, is known in the church as Trinity Sunday. (It may be overshadowed for many in the area where I live by the Indianapolis 500 race and by Memorial weekend activities, but knowing who is our God, the One True Triune God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and worshiping Him, alone, is vitally important for us.)

The Old Testament lesson is from Isaiah 6:1-8. Isaiah is given a vision of the Lord Himself, high and lifted up, sitting on a throne, with His robe filling the temple. As the passage goes on, we don’t get a neat picture of the Trinity - just glimpses of what would be revealed more and more as the Scriptures go on. Angels called seraphim are praising the Lord, saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, for He fills not only the temple; He will fill the whole earth with His glory (as happened with the coming of Christ Jesus as Savior for all). This three-fold calling of the Lord as holy occurs in other places, too. See, for example, Psalm 99: “Holy is He!…  Holy is He!… The Lord our God is holy.“ This prepares for the teaching that in the Triune God, each Person of God is Holy. In contrast, Isaiah knows that he is in big trouble. He is a sinner, a man of unclean lips, living among fellow sinners. He could not be in the presence of God and live. One of the angelic seraphim immediately took a burning coal and touched the lips of Isaiah, saying, “Your guilt is taken away, and your sin is atoned for.” This is unique. Normally in the Old Testament, sins were atoned for and forgiven through animal sacrifices. This prepares the way for the forgiving work of Jesus, the Lamb of God, who would take away the sin of the world through His work of propitiation, His atoning sacrifice on the cross. (See passages like John 1:29, Romans 3:25, Hebrews 2:17, and 1 John 2:2.) Then, the Lord Himself finally speaks, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Notice that the Lord used the plural word, “us,” as He had done at creation, in Genesis 1:26 and 3:22. Though God is One ( Deuteronomy 6:4), He is also three (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), as the Scriptures go to to make clear. Isaiah, cleansed and forgiven, then volunteers to go and speak for the Lord as a prophet. God reveals through him many things about the coming Savior, Jesus, true God and true man, and the Holy Spirit. (See passages like Isaiah 9:6-7 and Isaiah 11:1-2 and 53:3-12.)

The Psalm is Psalm 29, another of the Psalms of David. This psalm is appointed for the baptism of Jesus and for Trinity Sunday,  as we think of the Spirit of God, hovering over the waters in Genesis 1:2, and descending as a dove upon Jesus at His baptism, and the voice of God the Father (Psalm 29:3) over the waters of the Jordan River, powerfully identifying Jesus as His beloved Son, in Matthew 3:16-17. It is the Triune God at work, the same God enthroned forever as King in Psalm 29:10 and Isaiah 6:1. Notice also how the Lord gives strength to His people and blesses them with peace in Psalm 29:11. The same gifts are also connected with what both Jesus and the Holy Spirit can give. (See, for example, John 14:24-27, Matthew 11:27-30, and Galatians 5:22.) As the psalm also calls upon all to give the glory and worship due to the Holy Lord and His Name (Psalm 29:1-2), we now baptize and teach and worship in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:18-20) and give glory to the Name of Jesus (Philippians 2:9-10) and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:31-32), as well as to the Father.

In both the Gospel and the Epistle this week, we also see the Triune God mightily at work, with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit spoken of. In the Gospel lesson, John 3:1-17, Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God and the need to be born again, or born from above, through the water and the Holy Spirit, a reference to the Spirit’s work in baptism. Jesus also speaks of the fact that He, the Son of God, descended from Heaven and became the Son of Man, to do His saving work and be lifted up on a cross, that the world might be saved through Him. Here is one of the simplest and clearest expressions of the Gospel, too, sometimes called the Gospel in a nutshell, that God the Father so loved the world that He sent His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. The ones condemned are simply those who do not believe. They are condemned already because of sin and their sinful nature unless they are brought to faith in Christ by the Holy Spirit.

The Epistle lesson lesson is Acts 2:14a, 22-36. This is Peter’s sermon on Pentecost. Through this Word of God, the Holy Spirit brings 3,000 people to faith in Christ Jesus and baptism. Peter focuses on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, showing that only Jesus could fulfill the prophecy from David, whose body is still in a grave. Jesus died on the cross but was raised from the dead and exalted back to heaven, at His ascension, to the right hand of God the Father, and then sent the promised Holy Spirit, through whom people could see and hear the Good News of Jesus, who is both Lord and Christ, the promised Savior. (See also the importance of the Holy Spirit in bringing people to faith in 1 Corinthians 12:3 and 2:12-14 and in my sermon from May 18 on “When the Spirit of Truth Comes.")