Trinity Sunday 15th June – Communion Service led by Revd. David Aplin
It’s a brave man who preaches on Trinity Sunday, and David warned us that it was the worst Sunday to preach on in the whole year. The previous Sunday had been Pentecost when the spirit had come to many. Some had believed, and some not. So the scholars of two millennia ago put Trinity Sunday in to make sure we remembered that our God was not a single person. We talked about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as persons and they had a degree of freedom in their actions, but they were all part of our God.
So it was a difficult concept but an important one. Although it said in the theory that all are equal, Jesus prayed to the Father. And for many years David had felt very uncomfortable about the thought that Jesus had had to die to satisfy the father. It just didn’t make any sense to him. But Jesus had not died to satisfy the Father but because we were unbelieving. Jesus died that we might believe, and Christianity continued to grow because the Son had come to us and because the Holy Spirit was working alive in our world today.
The three persons of the Trinity had appeared at the same moment that our universe emerged from nothing. Creation was wonderful and totally illogical, and that made it even more wonderful. There was one God who eternally existed as 3 distinct persons. The Father mainly did stuff in the Old Testament and bit less in the New Testament – except that Jesus prayed to him. The Son was to be Jesus when he came to this earth as a human being. Jesus had not been a God: he’d been vulnerable like us. He’d had no magical powers and never performed miracles because he could not. What Jesus had done was what we could do; he’d called upon the Holy Spirit to help him. The miracles had been performed through Jesus, working with the Holy Spirit. When we needed help, we could call to Jesus or to the Holy Spirit, but it would be the Holy Spirit that helped us in this world.
And Jesus had returned to heaven as the Son. As he disappeared in the clouds it was the Son returning to the Father. The doctrine of the Trinity didn’t mention Jesus Christ. But we, as Christians, thought of Emmanuel, God with us.
Jesus, born of Mary, had ministered to us, had been recognized as Christ, arrested, tortured, tried, and crucified. And on the 3rd day – resurrected – he’d shown himself to many before returning to the father as the Son. So we got muddled if we talked of Jesus being with us now. Jesus could not be with us: he’d only been the human period of the eternal existence of the Son. And it was the Son to whom we looked and prayed – even if we joyously sang about Jesus.
And all too often we thought that the Spirit had come down at Pentecost for the first time – totally, utterly, and completely wrong. The wonderful words that started the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God”, did not talk about the Spirit but there was much mention of the work of the Spirit in the Old Testament. The Spirit had been there when it had been announced that Jesus was to be born; the Spirit had descended into Jesus at His baptism and supported Him throughout his ministry. When Jesus prayed, it had been the Spirit that performed the miracles. And when we prayed, it was the Spirit that would help us.
Our hope did not put us to shame because God’s love had been poured into our hearts with the Holy Spirit that had been given to us. That hope both of salvation and that the Spirit would guide and support us in our lives.
We were all here because God’s love had been poured into our hearts. We knew that the Father awaited us in heaven; that the Son would always be taking our corner and defending us; and the Spirit would always be with us in our lives and deep within us. For this love of God was in us all.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 