Eucharistic Readings for Trinity Sunday: Year C
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
“God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:5)
These words are the words we use every week at our Women’s Bible Study. So they really resonate with the ladies and with me. We open with Noon Day Prayers. We close the opening with a final prayer petitioning God, praying, “Heavenly Father, send your Holy Spirit into our hearts, to direct and rule us according to your will, to comfort us in all our afflictions, to defend us from all error, and to lead us into all truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord; Amen.” And then we go into our Bible Study.
God’s love is in us. Many biblical writings report this;from Jeremiah 31:31-34, to what we have in Romans 5:5 for today. God has already done this wonderful thing to bring us closer to God. We just have to rely on it and trust it. As the writings say, we have God’s love through the Holy Spirit. As we learned last week (Pentecost Sunday) the Holy Spirit of God has come among us. This Holy Spirit works through the gathered community, the Church. This is why we must come together, yes, as an organized religion. Jesus did not say go and do your own thing, but rather, he said, “follow me.”
We are a creedal people. My own personal creed is Trinitarian. While I still adhere to the tenets of our Nicene Creed, I needed to fashion words that more closely articulate my personal theology. And, here it is, “I Trust in the Creating Word through the Holy Spirit of the Incarnate Word, in whom we live and move and love and have our being, and to whom we must give an account.”
I try to be intentional about worshiping God in spirit and truth. This was foretold by Jesus when he said, “Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks;” (John 4:23). This remembrance of Trinity Sunday informs us that God meets us where we are. Some of us may need an All Powerful God to move the waters so that we can get to safety. I think this is the Presence of God that will bring the war in Ukraine to an end. We may need a companion God while on the road to Emmaus to break bread with us and stop gun violence. Or, we may need the Great Spirit of God to visit us in our dreams, or through the voice of another to guide us on our way (as revealed in our Gospel lesson for today), and move us away from divisiveness, all to have us do God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. In all of these cases we are “on the move” with One or another aspect of the Trinity.”
This concept is fully captured in our Collect for 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, forever and ever. Amen.
As we listen to what the Spirit is saying to us, let us live to love, to serve, and to teach, while pondering anew what the Almighty can do. John
onewhoponders 