Sermon: Holy Trinity Sunday, John 16:12-15

June 15, 2025 
Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church
Pastor Jonathan Linman

Jesus’ disciples were all too human. More often than not, they did not understand their teacher, Jesus. They didn’t understand who he was. They didn’t understand where he came from. They didn’t understand the mission that God sent Jesus to fulfill.

That’s why Jesus said to the disciples what we heard in today’s gospel reading from John: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

Jesus said these words at the Last Supper. What happened next was Jesus’ arrest, his trial, his death, his resurrection, and his return to the Father in heaven. Time was running out. Jesus did not have time to teach his disciples everything. And they were not ready to understand his teaching anyway. 

What was true for Jesus’ disciples is true for us too. How many of us really understand God? How many of us understand God’s will for us? How many of us understand how God continues to work in the world? 

Moreover, the sinful, finite, mortal condition of humanity is that sometimes we don’t want to know the truth – the truth about ourselves, the truth about our nation, the truth about God. I am reminded of Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie, “A Few Good Men” when he yelled out in a climactic scene: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Fortunately, Jesus was a great deal more compassionate and patient than the Jack Nicholson character in the movie. Which is to say, the good news is that God in Christ helps us. Here’s what Jesus also said to his disciples: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” Well, the Holy Spirit has indeed come.

The coming of the Holy Spirit is what we celebrated last Sunday on Pentecost. Ever since that first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit has been at work in the church revealing to us divine truth. For two thousand years, the Holy Spirit has been helping believers in Christ understand the truth about God, the truth about Jesus, and the truth about the Holy Spirit. 

What we celebrate today on Trinity Sunday is the truth about one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is one of the truths that the Holy Spirit has revealed to the church. John’s gospel makes clear that the Father sent the Son and that the Spirit is sent as well upon the Son’s return to the Father. But the idea of one God and three distinct persons blows our minds.

How can one be three and three be one? The simple arithmetic literally doesn’t add up. It is truly a mystery. Yet, the Holy Spirit is still at work guiding us into holy truth. The Holy Spirit guides us into all truth when the Spirit speaks through God’s holy word of scripture. Today’s reading from Proverbs helps us understand how Jesus, the Son and the wisdom of God, was present with God at creation: 

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth…. I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” (Proverbs 8:22-23, 30-31) 

The Holy Spirit also guides us into all truth when we are baptized in the name of the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For in baptism, we are united with Christ and become members of his body, the church. And it’s in this community of the church that we deepen our understandings of God Sunday after Sunday, year after year. It may be a sermon or a bible study where we ask difficult questions of each other. Or it may be some experience of the holy in our lives together in community, but each incident is another occasion of the Spirit guiding us into all truth.

Furthermore, the Holy Spirit guides us into all truth when we come to this table for Holy Communion to receive the true body and blood of Christ. In the sacrament of the altar, we eat and drink of Christ’s true presence, Christ who is the way, the life and the truth of God. When we take Christ in through bread and wine, we receive divine wisdom in our very bodies, in our personal and communal experience. This is the work of the Spirit guiding us into knowledge of God’s truth through our direct sacramental experiences. It’s experiential knowing in the flesh. Not just an abstract head trip.

When it’s all said and done, in the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Word of the bible and through the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, we are given the gift of faith to receive in trust the truth of God as a family of Father, Son, and Spirit. We receive this truth in faith even if we cannot fully explain or understand the holy mysteries. 

And in faith as a gift of the Spirit working through the means of grace in the church, we come to experience the truth that the teaching about the Holy Trinity is not just a doctrine, but the truth of the experienced reality of God. 

We come to see the truth that the Godhead is a family. We come to experience the truth that God is all about relationships among the persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit. And we come to see that God is all about relationships among us in the church and relationships between the church and the world.

In the family of God, we come to see the truth that even amidst diversity of the persons of God and the diversity within the human family and in creation, we are ultimately all united as one in our Triune God. 

In the family of God, we come to see that it is God’s love that binds us together in our unified diversity. We are not all the same. But at the same time, we are united with each other. 

Here in the family of God, we come to see the truth about our triune God’s loving activity expressed by the apostle Paul in today’s second reading: “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…. Because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Romans 5:1-2, 5b) God, Christ, Spirit working divine love among us in the cosmos.

This truth about God as a Trinity of three persons and yet one God is a great gift to our broken, divided world where relationships among peoples and nations are strained to the breaking points, and where there is currently little sense of unity, and a much diminished view of any shared human reality. 

And the Spirit gives us the courage and boldness as needed to speak truth to power in our dangerous and frightening time in our nation with menacing clouds on the horizon, where even acts of charity are vilified by some Christian preachers who pontificate about “toxic empathy,” that it’s a sign of weakness to be kind to others. The Holy Spirit of our Trinitarian God, and our sacramental share in the life of the Trinity, the Father, Son and Spirit, guides us to say a bold “No” to such cruelty. 

Friends in Christ, on Trinity Sunday and always, we are called to bring the truth about our three-personed God and this God’s love to the world crying out for good news! We bring this truth in our loving words and deeds as we shamelessly offer empathy to others and seek the truth of God’s justice.

May the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father through the Son lead us to guide the whole world into the loving arms of God, whom we know as Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.