Sunday of the Most Holy Trinity

Today is the first Sunday after Pentecost, the 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.

Collect for today, BCP

The following text is the sermon that will be preached today at the Old Catholic Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Saint John andSaint Willibrord in Amsterdam by Pradusz. The Old Catholic Church is in full communion with the Anglican Churches . The readings are Proverbs 8:22-31, Revelation 4:1-11, John 16:5-15.

Jesus goes away. He will send them the Comforter some day, the Spirit of Truth. They have to go on with this promise. They have to hold on to it as a counterweight to what awaits them when Jesus is gone. What did Jesus actually mean? The Gospels aren’t precise chronicles of what happened. They are stories written to preserve what really matters of what he said and did. But above all to look back at it and to reflect upon it. They are written as if from the end – the death of Jesus being the starting point. Only now something becomes clear when the disciples loose their footing, when everything was taken from them, when there is nothing they can hold on to, they start to understand what was said and what happened. What remains of one who experienced so much violence? What remains of a man you are when you experience that dreams, expectations, your hope are gone with him who was – and you can see it only now – the bearer of dreams, expectations and hope? Helplessness, despair, powerlessness and fear. Nonetheless, the disciples gather. They want to share with one another what they feel inside, pain and powerlessness, sorrow and fear and then they experience something – that death is not the end. That the Spirit that animated Jesus is still with them. He or She accompanies them beyond death. From this experience is born the faith in Jesus as the risen, the living one. The God of Israel hasn’t written the man Jesus off, but stood on his side as he always stands on the side of the suffering righteous. And therefore he is the one who is, who was and who will come, as he is referred to in the Revelation of John. He was and is the ally of the suffering, participating in their suffering, sorrow, helplessness and despair. He can be found where blows are dealt. We tend to avoid pain and sorrow, naturally. But it’s otherwise with God, apparently. The truth the Spirit is to convince us to is the truth about who God wants to be for us. That truths sound already in his own name. The name that was revealed for the first time before Moses: I will be who I will be, for you. You are not alone, there is always someone closer than you think. Someone who is the creative power in life, in your life, in my life. The power which in Jesus has become flesh, a human being. And which in the Holy Spirit brings to life over and over again, even (or above all) when you think that there is no chance to live, no hope, no escape.

Holy Trinity by Fr Robert Lentz

Today we celebrate the Trinity Sunday. Unlike the name of God, which sounded on the desert from the burning bush, the world Trinity doesn’t appear in the Bible. Jesus has never used this term for God, he has always called Him Abba , daddy. What Jesus did was to speak about the Spirit, as in today’s Gospel, and his disciples called him the Son of God. So the Bible speaks of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We do it making the sign of the cross before each prayer, during each Eucharist, in all the sacraments. And also in our confession of faith we will recite together in a moment. And perhaps all the trouble is right here, at least if you understand the creed as something you have to believe in and the faith itself is a duty to accept a certain number of impossible things every day, already before breakfast and your first cup of coffee. Yet believing has nothing to do with having to. What we are trying to do in the church is rather to express the experience of God’s closeness in words, the live giving, intimate, comforting closeness of the one that is always solidary with human beings. We could say, then, that God the Father is the one above everything and everyone. Yet this great, mysterious God has come close to us in Jesus, a man of flesh and blood, like we are, who following his calling became the unique Son of God, the personification of divine love, the ultimate love. And for God is love, he is also within us, in the depths of our being she is present as the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of Wisdom (the same Wisdom that speaks in the first lesson!), who confronts us, not like a stern pedagogue, but as a silent, vulnerable, unimposing voice, sounding from within us, with things we don’t like to be confronted with.

The dogma of the Holy Trinity wasn’t made to make us accept something impossible in order for us to be called Christians. It is an attempt to verbalize the experiences of Moses and of Jesus’ disciples, the experience of the encounter with God who says, I will be who I will be, for you, with you, in you. Always.

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