Deo Gloria
Sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 7, 2020
Pastor Martin Bentz
Text: 2 Corinthians 13:11-14
Theme: God’s Blessing Be With You!
- The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
- The love of God
- And the fellowship of the Holy Spirit
How do you say “good-by”? What do you say, for instance, when a friend of yours leaves your home? Do you simply say “Good-by!”? And what does that mean anyway: “Hope you find a good buy,” sort of like saying, “Happy shopping!”? Actually good-by is a contraction. It’s short for “God be with you.”
Or do you say, “So long!” or “Farewell!” or “See ya’ later”? Do you use a foreign expression perhaps, something like “Aufwiedersehen!” or “Au revoir!” both of which mean: “Until we meet again.” I kind of like the Spanish expression “Adios!” myself. Literally it means “to God,” “I commend you to God.”
What about at the close of a letter, what do you say there? “All our love!”? “Lots of love!”? “Hugs and kisses!”? “Write soon!”? I suppose it depends whom you’re writing to.
What if you were writing to another group of Christians, a group of Christians living in another part of the world, say Africa, for instance, or Brazil or Taiwan? How would you close a letter like that? Here’s how the apostle Paul closed his second letter to the Christians in Corinth:
Finally, brothers, good-by. Aim for perfection, listen to my appeal, be of one mind, live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints send their greetings. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
A bit longer than most of our farewells, and yet anything but a bunch of meaningless verbiage. Paul’s words are packed with significance. First, he gives some final exhortations; then a promise; then an encouragement to greet one another in love. Next he extends greetings from other Christians. And finally, he gives a blessing. Now we could spend a lot of time looking at this entire farewell of Paul’s, but this morning we’re going to focus our attention on the blessing that Paul speaks. One might summarize that blessing in this way: “God’s blessing be with you!” But there’s a bit more to it than that, a whole lot more, as we’ll soon discover.
The first thing we want to note about Paul’s benediction is that it has three parts: 1.) “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,” 2.) “and the love of God,” 3.) “and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” We want to take special note of that today since today is Trinity Sunday. The word “trinity,” of course, is not found in the Bible. However, the teaching it describes certainly is. Trinity means “three in one”– “tri,” like when you get a triple in baseball means “three;” “une,” like when you’re down to one in Uno means “one”–“three in one”–triune or trinity. The word represents what the Bible teaches us about God: that he is one being, and yet three persons–not three Gods; and not one God, masquerading in three different forms, but one God made up of three distinct persons.
“Now wait a second! How can there be three different persons, yet only one God? That doesn’t make sense. Any first grader can tell you that 1+1+1 does not = 1.” And you’re right, it doesn’t make sense. To us it doesn’t make sense. But that’s when we have to remember who and what we are. We are only human. We are not God. Our mind and our understanding is limited. For you and me to grasp and comprehend who God is and what he is like is like a first grader trying to understand calculus. No matter how hard we try we can’t. It’s beyond our comprehension. Because of his great love for us and because God does want us to know him in a personal way, God has revealed himself to us in his Word; but that does not mean we’re going to be able to understand everything he tells us. This is one of those cases where in faith we simply need to accept what God tells us, whether it makes sense to us or not.
You see, the Bible is clear. It plainly teaches that there is only one God. In the book of Isaiah, for example, God says, “I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God”(44:6). And yet the Bible also tells us that God consists of more than one person. Already back in Genesis, ch. 1, in the account of creation, we find an indication of that. When it came time for God to create man, he said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness…”(v. 26). “Us” and “our” are plural, not singular. Naturally, that doesn’t tell us how many persons there are, but Jesus did. Remember what he said in our Gospel lesson this morning? “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit“(Mt 28:19). Paul refers to the same three persons in the verses of our text: God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit–three persons, yet one God.
In pronouncing God’s blessing to the Christians in Corinth, Paul starts with the Son. “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ…,” he says. Grace is another word for God’s love, his undeserved love, his unconditional love for people like you and me. If someone ever gave you something anonymously–a gift, for example, or a bouquet of flowers–for no apparent reason, with no explanation, no strings attached, nothing expected in return, that’s what grace is.
Over the years certain shows on TV have become rather well known for their random acts of kindness. They’ll find out about some needy family, about some poor widow, about two friends who haven’t seen each other in over 50 years, and they’ll do something nice for them. They buy them several months’ worth of groceries. They pay for a whole year’s worth of rent. They secretly arrange a surprise reunion for the long, lost friends. The people they do this for don’t deserve anything from them. They’re not friends of the hosts of the show, for example. And they certainly can’t return the favor. They simply do it as act of kindness. That’s the idea behind grace. God doesn’t love us because we deserve his love. God doesn’t love us because someday we’ll be able to pay him back. No, God loves us in spite of the fact that we don’t deserve his love. He loves us even though we can never, ever pay him back. That’s grace.
“May the grace–may the undeserved love of the Lord….” The word Lord reminds us that Jesus is our master, the one who bought us, who paid a tremendous price that we might belong to him. “May the grace of the Lord Jesus…” The name Jesus means “Savior,” the one who rescued us from our sins, and what we deserve because of our sins: death and hell. “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ….” The name Christ means “the anointed one,” the one who was anointed by God to serve as our Savior. “May the grace of our anointed Lord and Savior be with you.”
It is very fitting that grace should be attributed to Jesus Christ. As John says in his gospel, “The Law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”(1:17). Jesus is the grace-giver, the one who made available God’s undeserved love. He brought grace for sinners like you and me, people who fall far short of perfection; people who struggle for mediocrity, much less aim for perfection; people who often are not united in mind and purpose as God would have us be, but are divided just as the Christians in Corinth were, divided by jealousy and envy, divided by pride and selfishness and personal, petty gripes; people who often fail to live in peace with one another; people who obviously weren’t grateful to God before they came to know their Savior, and who sad to say sometimes still aren’t very grateful even now that they do know him. For people like that, for sinners like you and me Jesus gave his life, so that we might enjoy God’s blessings of forgiveness, life and salvation. We didn’t deserve that, but that’s what Jesus did for us. That’s grace.
Next Paul highlights the Father. “And the love of God,” he says. The Greek word used for love here is “agape.” What is agape-love? Agape-love is a self-sacrificing kind of love, a giving kind of love. It’s the kind of love that is willing to put others ahead of itself. It’s the kind of love that is willing to make sacrifices for others, even willing to give up its most precious possession if necessary. Would you be willing to give up your smartphone to pay for your friend’s speeding ticket? Would you be willing to give up your car or your motorcycle to help a friend pay off his doctor bill? Would you be willing to give up your house or your cabin on the lake for someone who lost their home in a fire? Would you be willing to give one of your kidneys to someone who was experiencing kidney failure due to heavy drinking? That’s what agape-love is like. That’s what God is like. God is love. And as John states in his first letter, “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son [the most precious thing to him in the whole universe]–he sent his one and only Son into the world, that we might live through him”(1 John 4:9). “May the love of God be with you.”
“And the fellowship of the Holy Spirit….” Fellowship means “sharing in” or “being united.” When we were still lost, before we came to believe in Jesus Christ as our Savior, we were separated from God. We were alienated from him. There was no sense of peace and harmony and closeness with God, because there wasn’t any. In a way we were like the Hmong refugees who came to this country from places like Cambodia and Thailand. We were outcasts, refugees with a pain-filled past and an uncertain future.
But not anymore. Through faith in Christ God has adopted us into his family. He has torn down the walls of separation. As Paul says in the book of Ephesians, “We are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household”(2:19). And it’s not like God intends to keep a safe distance from us until we get to heaven, lest we contaminate him in some way. No, God wants us to enjoy a close, personal relationship with him. So he comes and lives with us. He comes and lives in us, in the person of the Holy Spirit.
Usually it’s between the ages of 1 and 3 that children struggle with something called separation anxiety. When mom and dad are getting ready to leave, they throw a fit. They cry. They scream. They cling to their arms and legs. They block the door. They don’t want mom and dad to leave because they’re afraid they won’t come back.
As children of God, you and I don’t have to cry or scream or throw a fit because our Savior Jesus has left. For one thing, we know he will come back. That’s his promise. For another, he has not left us alone. We are no more separated from God than a fish is separated from the water in the lake. We are surrounded by his presence. You and I enjoy the fellowship of God’s Spirit 24 hours a day to comfort us and encourage us and guide us on our journey through this life. It’s one more way we are blessed by our triune God.
Perhaps now you understand why the benediction is one of the last parts of our liturgy. Before the service is over, before you leave worship and are forced to deal with another dose of reality, before you encounter another week of deadlines and quotas, another week of meetings and appointments, another week of unexpected problems and frustrations–before the service ends our gracious God reminds us one more time that even though we are leaving, we are by no means leaving alone. He and his blessing go with us. “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” Amen.