Let us pray: Come Holy Spirit come! Move in and through these words, reveal yourself to us in ways that show us the beauty and glory of God. In the name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, one God. Amen.
Today’s readings offer us several views of the Holy Trinity. That sometimes confusing, always mysterious, human attempt at defining the nature of the Creator of all that is! In the beginning, the great wind of God, in Hebrew, Ruah, moved over the waters and created life. God the Creator, the life-force hovering over the void, bringing everything into being. The animating, creating Spirit of God. All living things called into being through God’s word. And it was so. God saw everything that God had created and indeed it was very good. In the Creation story God’s proclamation of goodness is about you and me an everyone. In that goodness and out of that goodness, we were created. In God’s image. Indeed, we are very good, beloved creations of God! God the Creator, God the life-giver. Everything in creation bearing witness to the glory and goodness of God, creation itself the first testament to the nature of God.
In our Epistle the author of Second Corinthians offers a lovely blessing that points to the three aspects of God. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. The grace of Jesus: Jesus 100% God AND 100% human, offers us grace, freely given forgiveness. Jesus the divine human, knowing us fully well, showing God’s love in human form. Jesus points to, and together WITH the Creator, shows us how loved we are. Loved enough to give up everything, even divine nature and power, loved enough to offer his life to testify to our Creator’s loving desire for relationship. The blessing asks for the communion of the Holy Spirit to be with us. This coming together, co-unity, you and me and them, US, in blessed community with our good and loving God, the Creator, the Grace-giver, and the force that brings us all together.
And in today’s Gospel, Jesus sends the disciples out to invite everyone into community, to be baptized in the name of the Triune God: the Creator Parent, the divine human example of love, and the unifying Holy Spirit.
Last Sunday At our 11 o’clock service we had a baptism. Such a great celebration and reminder of how central the Trinity is to our understanding of God and what it means to follow Jesus
Pay attention to the prayers that come from the baptism service in the book of common prayer:
We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water.
Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation.
Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage
in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus
received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy
Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death
and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.
We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism. In it we are
buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his
resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.
Therefore in joyful obedience to your Son, we bring into his fellowship those who come to him in faith, baptizing them in
the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Notice what we believe in happening at baptism:
Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy
Spirit you have bestowed upon these your servants the
forgiveness of sin, and have raised them to the new life of
grace. Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give them
an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to
persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy
and wonder in all your works. Amen.
(B.C.P., 305-8)
As Jesus sent his disciples out with the instructions to baptize in the name of the trinity, we too are called to share the aspects of God shown forth in the Holy Trinity.
Through our baptism we receive adoption as God’s children, our Creator reaching out, claiming us, very good children of our good and loving God.
Through our baptism we join in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We receive forgiveness of our sins and the reminder that with the help of the Holy Spirit we are to follow in Jesus’ steps of love, inclusion, and grace, working to create justice, peace, and dignity for all.
At baptism we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit to sustain, comfort and lead us. Through our baptism, our physical bodies become temples for the Holy Spirit, that Spirit of God in us communing with the Creator and with the Son.
My siblings in the divine mystery of God that is the Blessed Trinity. Our Episcopal faith is rooted in the Holy Trinity, the tri-fold nature of God revealed in the Creator, in Jesus Christ, God incarnate, and in the wind, the flame, the dove, the Holy Spirit. And so I pray that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all this Trinity Sunday and forever.
Amen.
