A Sermon on Romans 11:33-36 for Trinity Sunday. Delivered by Pastor Caleb Strutz.

We are in a period of transition. Of course, I’m the new pastor and this is my first Sunday. I’m still getting used to everything and learning the ropes, so I apologize if I’m doing something wrong, please let me know. But the transition to a new pastor is really only incidental to the transition that’s happening today in the Church year. We’re coming to the close of the festival half of the Church year, when we observe Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, these major historical events. Today, to wrap it up, is Trinity Sunday or the Feast of the Holy Trinity, and following is the long green season of the Sundays after Trinity, which focuses less on the events in the life of Christ and more on the teaching of Christ. So today we end the festival half with a celebration of our Triune God and begin the non-festival half by looking at the doctrine of the Trinity, who God is. And as we attempt to peer into the nature of God, we can only exclaim with Paul in our Epistle, “Oh, the depth of God!” We see that His judgments are unsearchable and His ways are past finding out.

This observance of Trinity Sunday is one of the later additions to our church year, only coming in in 1332. Part of the reason for this was that there was some pushback to this feast from the higher-ups in the church, because it’s so odd. All the other festivals remember historic events in the life of Christ (his birth at Christmas, his resurrection at Easter, and so on) or the lives of saints, like Peter and Paul. But this Sunday is about… God. Isn’t every Sunday about Him? Our focus isn’t on a person or an event, but really on who God is, the doctrine of the Trinity. That makes today a rather odd day, but certainly one that’s needed.

There’s been a lot of disagreement over the years about who God is. That’s basically the history behind all of our Creeds: the Apostles’ Creed was the baptismal Creed used in Rome, for those adults who were going to be baptized to show that they believed the right stuff. The Nicene Creed came out of the Council of Nicea, which had to fight against the heresy of Arianism, that Jesus was not fully God, but only partially or similar to God. The Athanasian Creed, the really long one that we only say on this Sunday, dives into these issues in depth and irons out who God is: three persons (Father, Son, and Spirit), but only one God.

And that controversy doesn’t end there, right? Our world is more confused than ever about who God is and who Jesus is. Most people believe in God of some sort or think that Jesus is a really great guy, but when it comes to anything beyond that, they’re left in the dark.

The reason why all of this is so difficult is because who God is is a mystery. We can’t possibly understand the Trinity—what it means that there are three Persons, but one God—that’s something that doesn’t compute in our human reasoning. We can’t know who God is in and of Himself, so we have to look to other places to know him. And that’s where it gets tricky.

Paul says that God’s judgments are unsearchable. To put it another way, we all ask questions of God that begin with “Why?” If you can’t know God directly, you can at least see Him by the way He interacts with your life, but that, too, only leaves people wondering.

These questions can be practical and immediate. “Why would God let me suffer this illness? Why would God put me in so much pain? Why would God…” you finish that question.

These questions can be more theological. “Why would God send someone to hell? Why would God let our church suffer decline? Why would God…” you fill in the blank.

Just as the doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery to our human reason, so, too, the way we see God work often leaves us with more questions than answers. God and His judgments are unsearchable. It’s not clear to us at all.

But just as God’s judgments, the decisions that He has made for our lives, are unsearchable, so too, as Paul says, are “His ways past finding out.” God’s ways, how He does things, doesn’t make any sense to us either.

Think of the plan of salvation. That’s what we, on Trinity Sunday, are uniquely situated to do, to look back on the great festivals of the church, to see how God has intervened not just in my life personally, but in the whole of history. Think of Christmas. When God the Father sent his Son to become a man and take on human flesh. No one would have thought of that. That concept doesn’t exist in any other religion in the world.

Think of Good Friday and Easter. That God the Son would suffer for our sins. That He would die to defeat death and rise again. That salvation has been won for you by Jesus. You ask someone why they think they’re going to heaven, they say, “Well, I try my hardest, I’m a decent person.” No! A free gift. By faith. You don’t have to do anything. This doesn’t make sense to us. Nothing else works like that. God’s ways are “past finding out.”

Think of Pentecost and how the Holy Spirit works in our lives. God uses a book! I’ve got hundreds of books. What makes this one so special? It doesn’t make sense, but it’s the Word of God through which the Spirit works. God uses water, the most abundant substance on earth. Water covers 70% of the earth’s surface, there’s nothing special about water. But when connected with his Word, it forgives sins. It makes us children of God. God uses bread and wine. Bread and wine exist in every culture on earth, across all of time, but when Christ’s Words are spoken over them, they’re His Body and His Blood. They give us forgiveness, unite us to Him and to one another.

God’s ways don’t make much sense to us either. It’s not how I would have told Him it should be done. Thanks be to God that we are not His “counselors,” that we have not given anything to Him, as Paul says, but that we are recipients of mysteries we cannot understand.

So what do we do with those “whys?” Well, we can’t understand the Trinity, and how God has intervened in the world to save us doesn’t make much sense either. So maybe we have to face the difficulties that we have in our lives, the big questions that we don’t have answers to, the same way that we face the doctrine of the Trinity, or salvation, or the Sacraments.

We don’t know how any of it works. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. We can’t grasp it with our reason. But that doesn’t mean that God is unreasonable. No, He is beyond our reason.

Do you think an ant can understand a human being? Of course not! So how can we expect to understand God? Of course, there’s a big difference there. It’s not just that God is so much bigger than us, although that can help explain part of it. But God loves us and cares for us, as small as we are. God bids us, at times, to let go of our reason and cling to His love. When we don’t have an answer, we can trust that He does all things well. He has shown how much He cares for you, He has shown how much He loves you, He knows what He’s doing.

On Trinity Sunday, we talk about God. In a certain sense, God is unknowable, beyond our reason. And at times, what He does seems unsearchable. But we can know who God is. He is revealed in Scripture and manifest in Christ. We can know what He has done to save us, even if that doesn’t make any sense either. And we can put our trust in Him because we know that He loves us. “Of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.”