In The Name
Matthew 28:16-20
When you think of
today as Father’s Day, probably the one thing that comes to mind, whether you
have your father here with you or you have to remember the times that you spent
with your father, is the word relationship.
You develop a relationship with your father that is unique in the
family. It’s different from the way that
you relate to your mother or your brothers and sisters. A relationship with your father is something
that you can cherish and learn from the rest of your life. For a young man, the relationship with your
father can serve as a model for you as you become a father. For a young woman, the relationship with your
father plays a role in the kind of person that you will look for in a
husband. This is assuming, of course,
that the relationship that you have is a positive one. We know that because of sin, all people have
to deal with their sinful nature inherited from their parents just as they
inherited it from their parents and so on down the line. We are all less than perfect, but in spite of
that, the relationships that are built in the family play an important part in
molding and shaping who we are and how we will react in our own families later
on in our lives.
In our Gospel
lesson for today, Jesus is talking to His disciples during that period of forty
days between His Resurrection and His Ascension into heaven. He is preparing them for what will be ahead
of them when He is gone. He had built a
relationship with them in the three years that He taught them through His words
and the signs and wonders that indicated to them that He was truly the Messiah,
the Son of God and Savior of the world.
They would need that because He was giving them a tremendous task. In the words of our text, they were to go and
make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit. It is
that statement about baptizing in the name of the Father and the Son and the
Holy Spirit that makes this an important text for this Trinity Sunday, a Sunday
in the Church Year when we emphasize the nature of the true God, the Triune
God, the Three in One. Jesus, Himself,
makes this statement and in so doing answers a question that has been confusing
people for generations. What is the
nature of the true God?
Human wisdom will
try to explain the nature of the Trinity and, by itself, human wisdom will get
it all wrong. That was happening in the
early church. It became necessary for
the leaders of the early church to come together and make a clear statement,
based on Scripture alone, about the true nature of God. It is clear that there is one God, yet in
describing this God, it also becomes clear from the Scriptures that there are
three persons in one God. Again, human
reason has a hard time understanding this and as a result, finds itself
straying from the truth that gets the relationship all wrong. It was then that the church leaders put
together a confession of faith that clarified the relationship between the
three persons of the Trinity and it became known as the Nicene Creed because it
was presented and adopted at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. About 150 years later, another document was
adopted that helped to clarify this relationship and it became known as the
Athanasian Creed, in honor of Athanasius, a Christian leader who was an
important spokesman for the truth when the Nicene Creed was written and
adopted.
The Athanasian
Creed has been an important document down through the history of the Christian
Church. It is included in the list of
writings that are known as the Lutheran Confessions contained in the Book of
Concord, the definitive collection of Lutheran teachings since the time right
after the Reformation. It isn’t used in
worship as much as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed because of its
length but it is still an important explanation of the relationship between the
three persons of the Trinity. It has two
parts, the first dealing with the nature of the Trinity and the second on the
nature of Christ. Both of these
doctrines were attacked by false teachers in the early years of the church and
it was essential that leaders faithful to the Scriptures came forward and
presented this document.
I would like you
to turn in your hymnal to page 319. We
are going to read this responsively today followed by a few comments. As we get started, sometimes people are
surprised by the use of the term “catholic faith.” This use of the word “catholic” comes from a
Greek word that means true or universal.
It is referring to the true church, those who believe in Jesus Christ
alone for the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God. At the time that it was written there was
only one Christian church and to distinguish the true faith from the false
teachers that were threatening the true church, the word catholic or universal
was used. To say these words does not
mean that we agree with the Roman Catholic Church and its teachings. We will first read up to verse 26.
As you can tell,
the emphasis in this section is on the nature of the Trinity. There are not three God’s but one God. Yet we do not abandon the idea that the
Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. You will also notice how some of the lines of
the Nicene Creed have been incorporated into the text of the Athanasian
Creed. We continue now by reading
responsively the rest of the Creed.
As in the first
section that we read, there are many similarities to the other Creeds that we
more commonly use. There is sometimes
some confusion about the last part of the Creed. In verse 39, at first glance it seems that
the judgment will be based on works rather than faith as we have always
taught. A close look and an
understanding of the grammar will show that there is no inconsistency with our
teaching. In speaking of the final
judgment, verse 39 says, “those who have done good will enter into eternal
life, and those who have done evil into eternal fire.” The key to understand this is the word
“good.” Good is an adjective. It describes a person, place or thing. In this case it is describing a good thing,
in other words, your faith. That is
consistent with all that Jesus and the New Testament writers said about
believing and being saved by faith alone.
“By grace you are saved through faith; it is a gift of God, not by works
so that no one can boast.” “God so loved
the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall
not perish but have eternal life.” You
all are familiar with those passages.
Faith produces good works but it is faith first of all.
It’s all about
relationships, even in God’s family. He
is our Father just as Jesus often said.
All we have comes from Him. The
greatest blessing is His only Son who came into the world to be our substitute
under the law and on the cross. It is
the Holy Spirit who brings us to faith through the wonderful Means of Grace,
the Word and the Sacraments. It is that
faith that is the good thing through which you will enter eternal life. To the Triune God be all praise and glory now
and for all eternity. Amen.
Rev. Gerald Matzke
Zion Lutheran Church
Painesville, OH 44077
Trinity Sunday 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment