The Holy Trinity
Texts: John 16:12-15;
Prov:1-4, 22-31; Rom 5:1-5
YouTube: https://youtu.be/vG0triB1pI0
Sermon Take-Home Notes
THE TRINITY: GOD’S DANCE OF LOVE THAT IS SAVING US
FROM THE HUMAN DANCE WITH VIOLENCE (EVIL), PART 1
Let’s pretend that they give out awards for theology books. (They probably do so somewhere, but few people ever hear about it.) My nomination for the best first sentence in a theology book would be Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers. Here is that powerful first sentence:
One of the most pressing questions facing the world today is, How can we oppose evil without creating new evils and being made evil ourselves.1
Yesterday, in the middle of the night, for example, Vance Luther Boelter attempted to assassinate Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and then successfully assassinated the Speaker Emerita of the Minnesota House, Melissa Hortman and her husband. The manhunt, even now stretches on, but police were able to confiscate Boelter’s car, where they found a manifesto and a hit list with 70 names on it.2 We the public don’t know what’s in the manifesto yet, but we can bet it accuses the people on this hit list of being evil. In short, Vance Boelter no doubt thought he was opposing evil and in the process became a purveyor of new evils. By yesterday afternoon I heard news anchors and interviewees calling him evil.
Now the ball’s in our court. How do we oppose the evil of Vance Boelter’s brand of political violence, which is quickly proliferating all around us, without becoming evil ourselves? Let me state Walter Wink’s question for the historical ages again: How can we oppose evil without creating new evils and being made evil ourselves. That’s the ballgame, right? Ending our seeming human love-affair with political violence? The violence we justify in the name of stopping evil?
So let me make a bold, if not shocking, proposal: The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is the shape of God’s salvation from our history of violence. It took the three persons plotting together to work this salvation in history. The Trinity is meant to help us answer Walter Wink’s timeless question. For many millennia now, humanity has been trapped in a politics which ultimately puts its faith in violence. When we find others seeking to harm us, to perpetrate some violence against us, the only solution we’ve put our trust in is to name that as evil and then seek a more powerful violence to pose against it. And so our thinking goes: because we are opposing evil, the gods must be on our side. We are the good guys fighting the bad guys. Let’s face it: we are so mired in this thinking that Walter Wink’s question, for most of human history, hasn’t even made sense to us. Us become evil by opposing evil? That couldn’t be. Because, we have told ourselves over and over, the gods have deemed us to be the good guys to rid this world of evil. Let’s throw ourselves a big military parade to celebrate. Hasn’t this way of thinking been at the heart of human politics since even before history was recorded?
So why does Walter Wink’s question make any sense to us at all? Answer: Because the cross happened. The cross of the Crucified Messiah was an age-old scene that had happened millions of times before and millions of times since: Both the Jewish Council and Roman governor agreed that they’d found the culprit. Jesus of Nazareth was a blasphemer to the Jews and an insurrectionist to the Romans. He was evil. Stirring up evil in the land. Crucify him! That’s what must be done with evil people! And so, with that thinking, there would never be any question that they had made themselves evil that day by their opposition to evil. It wouldn’t have occurred to them, except for a small band of followers of this Jesus, who began to claim that God, the true God who created the universe, had raised this Jesus from the dead. Preposterous! How could God ever be on the side of someone we deem to be evil? But this is what those disciples of Jesus were claiming.
And that’s what makes Walter Wink’s question so poignant and urgent to ask: How can we oppose evil without creating new evils and being made evil ourselves? God’s answer is precisely that it takes the something like the Trinitarian God’s concerted plan to save us by entering into human history through the Messiah’s dying on the cross. And it’s something anticipated in the Hebrew Scriptures, too, if we may take a brief detour through the story of Joseph and his brothers. The ending of the first book of the Bible, Genesis. You will remember that Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him and sold him into slavery to Egypt, telling their father Jacob that Joseph had been killed by a wild animal. To make a long story short, after many years of ups and downs, Joseph ends up as Secretary of Agriculture to the Pharaoh in Egypt at a time of famine. Joseph, in his wisdom, has prepared Egypt for the famine, and his brothers find themselves traveling to Egypt to look for food. When they see their brother Joseph as Pharaoh’s right-hand man, they begin to tremble in their boots — or sandals, I guess. But Joseph puts them at ease with one of my favorite verses in the Bible, “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today” (Gen 50:19b-20). Joseph’s brothers had intended evil; God turned it into something good.
This is the meaning of the cross in a nutshell. And it took the Trinity of divine persons to pull it off. Humanity, thinking in its usual terms of purging evil, themselves did evil by crucifying God’s Messiah on the cross. God, in raising Jesus from the dead, has turned it to good. And the Good goes far beyond the defeat of death, which is no small thing. The Good represents a new way of being human which no longer puts its ultimate faith in sanctioned political violence to rid ourselves of evil. It’s like that Pogo cartoon: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”3 If we follow the trinitarian relationships — between the Parent-God who sent Jesus, and Jesus himself, and the Holy Spirit — we discover that we are invited into those relationships precisely so that we can find a new way to oppose evil without becoming evil ourselves. The Trinitarian relationships within the Godhead are a blueprint for answering Walter Wink’s question. In the cross of Jesus the Messiah; in the raising of the Crucified Messiah by God the Creator; in the divine love of the Spirit continually guiding us into this new truth; those who answer the invitation of entering the Trinity’s truth are becoming able to see a new way of opposing evil without becoming evil ourselves. Because that’s exactly what the Trinitarian God has already done in history through the events of cross and resurrection. God has taken our evil ways of opposing evil, with our own evil, by suffering that evil within the Trinitarian God’s self.
We can see this so compactly in our Second Reading for today (Romans 5:1-5). We boast in suffering? What does that mean? God is able to take suffering and turn it into an abundance of love poured out on us through the Holy Spirit.
John’s whole Gospel tells us the story of how God takes our violence upon the Godself and churns it out as forgiveness and healing grace. God sends Jesus to expose our politics of violence and offer us instead a politics of love by being lifted up on the cross for all people to see in every time and place — which is itself a long-time process that the Spirit of truth will carry out in the world but not of the world. Today’s Gospel is an example of how humanity is invited to see our salvation from our own politics of violence by virtue of those close Trinitarian relationships sketched there. It’s a bit head-spinning: The Son whom the Father sent is speaking to his disciples, preparing them for the long-haul. He knows that the glory of the truth about to be displayed on the cross will take a long-time to make sense to the rest of the world.
Obviously, in our own time, when so many people in our country continue to be lured into something called “Christian Nationalism” — that oxymoron, two words that don’t belong together, because Nationalism puts its faith in the power of violence and Christ is teaching us to have faith in the power of love — yes, we can see how the work of the Spirit of truth still has a long ways to go. We have seen the belief in a politics of violence through and through this week — like calling in large forces of the National Guard and the Marines to squash relatively small pockets of violence, like Israel and Iran beginning to folly attacks against each other, and finally ending with a true believer in violence like Vance Boelter trying to take matters into his own hands. Yes, we have a long way to go.
But in another respect, today’s Gospel invites us to see how the main battle has already been won. The compact naming of Trinitarian relations in today’s Gospel follows immediately after this (in your Sermon Notes):
[Jesus said to his disciples,] And when the Spirit of truth comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and justice and judgment: about sin, because they do not have faith in me [because they instead have faith in the power of violence]; about justice, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer [which is why the Spirit of truth will need to carry on the work of helping us to know true justice]; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned [in other words, the Jewish Council and the Roman governor will condemn themselves because they are about to condemn the Messiah sent from God, who was sent in order to live for us a politics of love instead of a politics of violence]. (John 16:8-11)
I’ve inserted some of the context from the whole of John’s Gospel in order make clear the process which is still ongoing since the victory of the cross and resurrection. Again, in human history! That we might change! Most people still put their faith in the traditional human politics of violence when they feel threatened. But because the cross and resurrection have happened in history, the Spirit of truth is still able to do its work. Especially when followers of Jesus — you and I — get on board and join the Trinitarian dance of love. In order to more fully understand this Trinitarian dance of love, we will continue the conversation next Sunday as we return to the Gospel of Luke with the amazing story of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac. But for today, after another long week of witnessing the consequences of the human faith in violence, let’s celebrate the Trinity’s dance of love. Let’s celebrate that you and I are invited into a politics of love, even in the face of humanity’s continuing dance with the politics of violence. How do we oppose evil without becoming evil ourselves? By joining the Trinity’s dance of love that is saving us from the vicious circle of seemingly unending violence. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, June 15, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/vG0triB1pI0
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress, 1992), page 3.
2. The initial reports were a list of 70 names. Subsequently, that number was trimmed to 45.
3. From a syndicated comic strip, “Pogo,” created by Walt Kelly for Earth Day 1971.
