Each night, as I put Bronte down to sleep, I take Bronte and cradle her in my arms and pray a blessing over her. It started out somewhat generic, but has become a blessing that rhymes and asks for the Holy Trinity to watch over her. It goes as follows:
May the Holy Trinity encircle you through the night. May your Heavenly Father enfold you in his arms. May Christ Jesus save you from all harms. May the Holy Spirit guide you through the night. That you may wake up fresh in the morning light.
This is an encircling prayer. It is a prayer or blessing designed to remind us of the Trinity and the fact that each part of the Trinity has a role in our lives. We often focus on just the Father or just the Son. Some churches focus on just the Spirit, but that is not a problem we often find in ourselves. And this prayer, this blessing is designed to remind us that we have a relationship with the whole Trinity.
God the Father is our father. Jesus reminds us that we are to call him our father and treat him as our father. And as I stand there, enfolding Bronte in my arms I imagine our heavenly Father doing the same for us.
Jesus, the Son of God, sometimes referred to as the Son of Man, was sent to save us. Usually we think in terms of Jesus saving us from our sins, and Jesus does this; but there are other things in this world and in our lives that we need to be saved from, and Jesus is able to save us from those as well.
The Holy Spirit is sometimes hard to grasp on to and to understand, but the Spirit is our comforter and our guide. The Spirit shows us the way and speaks to us when we need direction.
The Holy Trinity is active and real in our lives. God is not a distant god, God is a god of relationship, within the Godhead and with God’s people. And we are called to be a part of that relationship ourselves.
I. A Confusing Trinity
The church I grew up in until Junior High was Trinity Lutheran Church. I don’t remember many sermons preached there as I grew up, but I do remember the pastor commenting in one of his sermons that it was Trinity Sunday and he felt that because the church was Trinity Lutheran he should probably speak about the Trinity. I also remember him saying that this wasn’t always the easiest thing to do, as talking about the Trinity usually meant you were getting a little to theological in your sermon and not practical enough, and further that the concept of the Trinity is a hard one to wrap our minds around.
As I prepared for this morning’s sermon I realized that much of what my pastor growing up said was true. And yet, here I am preaching about the Trinity today. Hopefully I won’t get too theological at the expense of the practical, and hopefully what I have to share will make sense.
Today is Trinity Sunday. It is the day in the church year where we acknowledge that God is a god of relationship. God is so much a god of relationship that it is not enough that God have relationship with humans, God actually has relationship within the Godhead. The Father, the Son and the Spirit are interconnected, they are one, but at the same time they are three. This is a central part of our belief as Christians, and yet when you look at the Bible, it sometimes can be hard to see the Trinity laid out so very clearly. Don’t get me wrong, it’s in there, but it isn’t laid out as clearly as a textbook or a systematic theology would put it. We see monotheism pushed throughout the Old and New Testament, but there are hints that we see that the monotheism isn’t as clear cut as we’d like to believe. When we look at Genesis we see God hovering above the waters, above the chaos, and we know that this God is one. And yet when God creates humans he decides to create humans in “our own image”. Not “my own image” but “our own image”. And then in the Gospel of John we are told that God was not alone at the creation of the world after all. Rather, the Word was with him and the Word was the way that God went about creating the world. And we are let in on a little secret, that Word that was with God at the beginning of creation, that Word that the Old Testament referred to as Wisdom, comes down to us as Jesus, the Messiah. And we realize that though God is one, there is a complexity there that we just cannot understand.
And the Trinity is most explicitly shown in the Bible in the last line of 2 Corinthians, which we read this morning: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
II. Different Roles
This, like the blessing that I say to Bronte each and every night, is a Trinitarian blessing that acknowledges the fact that in the Trinity, God fulfills different roles. The Father loves us, the Son offers us grace and the Spirit brings us fellowship. Now we need to remember that God isn’t totally divided up. We don’t only receive love from the Father, and Jesus isn’t the only one offering grace, but at the same time, there are roles that each part of the Trinity fulfill.
When we usually think of the Father we think of him as the creator, the sustainer of this world. This is fair. This is how God the Father is originally introduced to us. And it is a part of his role that we ought to celebrate and rejoice in. But I fear that we often tend to think of the Father as distant, as set apart, as removed from our day to day lives. I believe we’ve had this conditioned into us in a number of ways. First, when we think of the creator of the universe, we think that God is probably a bit busy running the universe to deal with individual people and their individual problems. Or, perhaps it is that we have the watch-maker vision of the Father, a God who built the clock, set everything in motion, and then wound it up and let it run. But just because God created the world doesn’t mean that God is distant. Jesus shows this to us when he teaches us to pray, when he encourages us to call God “dad.” And Paul, in his Trinitarian blessing does not focus on the creative part of God the Father’s role, rather he focuses on his love. May the Love of God be with you, he says.
Jesus is our Savior. He is the one who offers us grace. He is the one who sacrificed himself for our sake. He lived out the love of the Father in the most powerful way. He died for our sins and offers us salvation. But it isn’t only salvation or grace that Jesus offers. We have other things mentioned throughout the Bible which he brings to us, like peace. That’s right, Jesus is the Prince of Peace and often Paul particularly offers the blessing asking for people to take the peace of Christ with them.
The Holy Spirit is the most confusing part of the Trinity. Not much is explicitly said about him, but we are told that he is our counselor, that he will stand up for us when we need someone to do so. We are told that he is our guide and our teacher, greater at leading us on the right path than our conscience could ever be. And we are told that the Spirit offers fruits and gifts to God’s people, so that we can live in union, in community, with each other and with God. The Spirit of God offers us fellowship with God and with each other, as we are made into the beings that God designed us to be.
III. Relationships
When we look at the Holy Trinity, when we look at what God is about being three and yet one, we realize that God is at his center a God of relationships. There is a reason that God decides that humans shouldn’t be alone, because, though God is one God, God is not alone either. God is a God of relationship and we see this in the way that the different parts of the Trinity work together. We see this in Jesus and his life on this earth as he talked about the Spirit of God being upon him and as he talked about God being his father.
In Genesis, God says that humans are going to be made in the image of God. Some people have taken this to mean that God has two eyes, two arms and a mouth. Many have realized that this is not what God meant when he said that humans would be in his image. Others have argued that being in God’s image means that we have a spiritual life, that we have a soul. And they would argue that this is what separates us from the rest of the world around us. And this has often been the Christian answer as to what it means to be in God’s image. But there is another possibility, as well. What if being in God’s image means that just like God we are beings of relationship as well. What if just like God we have a desire to create, to sustain, to offer grace to those around us, to live in fellowship. This is an amazing and powerful idea, because it means that we even have more reason to work out our relationships in Christ. It means that we have a divine imperative to work with each other, to come together, to find unity and strength in each other.
God has a special relationship going on within the Trinity, within the godhead. The Father and the Son and the Spirit are working together and loving together and sharing together. And then they invite us to be a part of that. They say that they want relationship with us, that they want to welcome us in, that we are allowed and able to join in with them in their work in this world. And so, how are we caring for the creation? How are we sharing God’s love with those around us? How are we offering the grace of Christ and the peace of Christ to those who have not experienced it? And how are we offering fellowship to each other? When we begin to do these things, then we find that we too are acting as we were made, in the image of God. And this is a wonderful place to be. Amen.
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