When I first read the gospel reading for this morning, I was a bit confused. It felt like we had gone back in time a bit. We\u2019ve just completed the Easter season, with it\u2019s culmination in the Ascension of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and now we\u2019re back on the hilltop with the disciples, hearing Jesus\u2019 last words to them again. It feels like we\u2019ve slipped back two weeks. So why is this, what were the lectionary writers thinking? Well, today is Trinity Sunday, so I\u2019m guessing that the fact Jesus told his friends and followers to go baptising in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit probably has something to do with it.<\/p>\n
There isn\u2019t much to go on here though is there. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all referred to and Jesus makes it clear that it is important that new believers are introduced to all three persons of the Trinity, but it doesn\u2019t tell us much about them. For that we have to go to other places in the Bible. So that is what we are going to do this morning, we are going to have a tour of some of the places in the Bible where Father, Son, Holy Spirit all feature \u2013 so that we can see them at work.<\/p>\n
Before we dive into this, though, I want to point out that we are trying to communicate about one of the deepest mysteries of God with a tool \u2013 language that developed from one early human wanting to let another one know where the best berries are to be found. We know that this tool isn\u2019t up to the job \u2013 whatever we say about the Trinity will be inadequate \u2013 that\u2019s where wonder comes in \u2013 but it\u2019s all we have, so we have to make the best of it. <\/p>\n
So let\u2019s start at the beginning, in Genesis 1 and John 1.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void, and the darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters and God said\u2026..\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.\u201d<\/p>\n
As we bring these two foundational scriptures together we see that God \u2013 Father, Son, Holy Spirit are all, together, involved in the creation of all that is. One way of thinking about this that I find helpful is to see God the Father as the speaker of the Word of Creation, by the breath of the Spirit. Speaker, Word, Breath are intimately linked together \u2013 none of them make sense without the other \u2013 three elements of the same action that brought into being all that is. <\/p>\n
The next obvious place to go is to the baptism of Jesus. At the beginning of his active recorded ministry of teaching and healing, Jesus went out to the Jordan to where his cousin, John, was baptising. All four of the accounts of Jesus life record this event, and this is what Matthew wrote in his eye witness account:<\/p>\n
Matthew 3:16-17<\/p>\n
And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him and lo, a voice from heaven, saying, \u201cThis is be beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here, again, we see the three persons of the Trinity acting in concert and unity. The Son looks to the Father and receives the Holy Spirit. The Father affirms and sends the Son. The Holy Spirit comes from the Father to equip the Son. It is a wonderful image of love and mutuality. It was Jesus who took on himself human nature at the incarnation, but the mission was a joint one \u2013 all three persons of the Trinity were involved, intimately. We see this repeatedly as Jesus goes off to pray \u2013 to talk with his Father, and as he ministers to people in the power and insight that the Holy Spirit fills him with.<\/p>\n
Towards the end of his time on earth, on the night before he died, Jesus talked with his friends and followers, helping them to understand what would come next, what would happen after his death, resurrection, and ascension. In John\u2019s eye witness account of this conversation we read this:<\/p>\n
John 14:16-17<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him, you know him for he dwells with you, and will be in you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here we notice that the two persons of the Trinity, both Jesus and the Holy Spirit are \u201cCounselors\u201d In Greek this is the word \u201cparaclete\u201d, which means, one who comes alongside \u2013 an encourager, in a legal sense an advocate, a teacher. Both Jesus and the Holy Spirit have fulfilled this role at different times. Jesus was sent to be physically alongside those first disciples, and when he returned to heaven he asked the Father to send the Holy Spirit to be spiritually alongside every disciple, everyone who follows Jesus, to help them, more than that, to dwell with them, just as Jesus had dwelt with the first disciples. All the three persons of Trinity involved in the mission of God.<\/p>\n
As I\u2019ve already mentioned we celebrated the first outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost last week, and you may remember that one of the signs of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit was the sound of a great wind, of the breath of God, which takes us back to Genesis and the breath of God, the Holy Spirit, breathing new life into God\u2019s people. We might also recall that one of the first gifts of the Spirit was the gift of languages and courage for the disciples to proclaim the mighty works of God and to preach about Jesus. So we see the Holy Spirit pointing to the Father and to the Son, each glorifying the other.<\/p>\n
The work of all three persons of the Trinity continues to be seen in the life of the early church, referred to in the letters of the New Testament. For instance in Paul\u2019s second letter to the Christians who lived in Corinth, in 2 Corinthians 1:21-22, we read:<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has commissioned us; he has put his seal upon us and given us his Spirit as a guarantee.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here Paul happens to be talking about the ministry that he, Silas, and Timothy share, and the authority with which they teach, but the point is that in doing so he draws on a shared understanding and experience of the three persons of the Trinity and their active work in the lives of the early Christians. The theology of the Trinity was not a later addition to the Christian faith, it was a common, shared understanding from the very beginning.<\/p>\n
I was reminded in some reading I was doing this week of the Athanasian creed, which was probably written in the 5th or 6th century, largely to defend the doctrine of the Trinity. It appears in the Book of Common Prayer on p27 if you want to have a read through. In it we read that we must neither \u201cconfound the persons nor divide the substance.\u201d A little later in the translation used in the BCP we read that each is \u201cincomprehensible\u201d. More modern translations of this section describe them as \u201cinfinite\u201d. The point is not that we can\u2019t understand the Trinity at all, but that each person of the Trinity is each beyond our full human comprehension. Our minds just can\u2019t contain the fulness of who God is \u2013 not just the logistics of the Trinity, but the glory of each person of the Trinity.<\/p>\n
Whilst we can\u2019t get our heads round it all, that shouldn\u2019t stop us grasping what we can. There is a life of loving community at the very heart of who God is. Father, Son, Holy Spirit love each other, glorify each other, point to each other. We were created by the triune God to be a part of that loving community \u2013 to receive that love, to share that love, to love with that love. In our human fallenness we reject that invitation and refuse that love, and so are unable to fulfil our created vocation. To give us a way back Jesus was sent by the Father, filled by the Spirit, to redeem us, to restore us, to save us. We are rescued by the triune God, restored to that loving community. Now we live, in the time between times, sent to tell others and to baptise in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, waiting for the time when God\u2019s kingdom will be seen in all it\u2019s glory and we will experience in all its fulness the loving community of Father, Son, Holy Spirit for all eternity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I first read the gospel reading for this morning, I was a bit confused. It felt like we had gone back in time a bit. We\u2019ve just completed the Easter season, with it\u2019s culmination in the Ascension of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and now we\u2019re back on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[477],"tags":[152,1424],"class_list":["post-1201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eyton","tag-matthew-2818-20","tag-psalm-8"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1202,"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions\/1202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carterclan.me.uk\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}