Trinity Sunday

Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us
your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to
acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the
power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep
us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to
see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with
the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever
and ever. Amen.

Today is Trinity Sunday. We, together, with Christians all over the world acknowledge in our worship in a focused way that we worship the mysterious one God who exists in three unique and distinct persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Since the early church, preachers and theologians have noted that at the heart of the gospel is the movement of God in redemptive love towards the world he has made and that this movement is a movement of one God in three persons. Today we will consider why this is important. Why is a confession of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit crucial to our understanding of the Gospel?

The mystery of the trinity reveals to us a God who is who is who he is as he pours his love into the other. Before he poured his love into creation, love was given and received perfectly between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Daniel Migliore of Princeton Seminary puts it this way: “that God is the power of self-giving love.... this is the deepest meaning of God’s triune life-in-relationship. This is what decisively marks off the living God from the dead idols. They cannot give life because they cannot love. They cannot love because they cannot enter into communion with and freely suffer for another.... The coming of the Son of God and his sacrificial death on the cross are neither chance happenings nor emergency measures nor out-of-character actions on God’s part. The self-giving love of God is grounded in God’s eternal triune being.... God’s liberating and reconciling activity in the world is the free-outward expression of God’s own eternal life of self-giving love...... “

Let me put it to you this way: what Jesus does, how he lived, how he died, why he died, God’s resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the reasons for that - the entirety of God’s redemptive work in Christ is what the love that God shares perfectly within himself looks like when it goes to work on our behalf (this is what Migliore means when he talks about the quintessence of God’s self-giving love as the ability to freely suffer for another).

On Trinity Sunday the lectionary points us to the creation narrative, the psalmist’s reflection on it in Psalm 8, and Jesus’ great commission in Matthew, thus reminding us that the same love shared between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, before the foundation of the world, is the love that created, the love that makes a new humanity in Christ, and the love that renews the fallen creation. Moreover, and staggeringly, God has made us to share in this very same love. He has, in the thoughts of Psalm 8, made us to be queens and kings of creation as we receive and give God’s love on his behalf for the sake of the whole world. In the 8th Psalm, when the Psalmist ponders, who are we that God should take notice of us, he does respond by saying that we should sit around and feel good about ourselves because we have been made in God’s image. His answer is that human beings have an awesomeness because, as God’s image bearers, we have been given a job to do and work to share, with each other, and with God. As God’s apprentices, if you will, we are to do God’s work in this fallen world. Other preachers have said what I am about to say before - they must have all had toddlers when they were thinking in this direction - our three year old is really in the “wants to help” stage of life - oh may this continue into the teenage years! There is not an egg to be cracked, a dish to be washed, a floor to be cleaned that she does not want a part in. She beams with pleasure when she has been co-pilot of whatever project has been undertaken. May we respond to God with the same awe and joy as we ask him for an even greater desire to share in his work as the bearers of his image.

Questions for discussion:

1. If someone were to ask you to give them an example of what difference it makes to believe in the Trinitarian God what might you say to them? Does Migliore’s point about God’s ability to share love in his nature help you think about this?

2. Do you think much about the dignity you inherently possess simply because you are made in God’s image? Do you think of this enough when you think of other people?

3. Is there value in thinking about creation and redemption in that order? Does thinking about the fact that the God who created all people help you think about how to start a conversation with someone about Jesus in a different way than you might have otherwise? If so, how?