St. Alban's Episcopal church
Our mission is to proclaim the love of God in Christ Jesus for all
The Episcopal Church in Stuttgart, Arkansas
A sermon for Trinity Sunday
June 12, 2022 The Rev. Mark Nabors, Vicar Today is Trinity Sunday, a feast in the Church when we celebrate that we serve a triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three persons but one being, one God. This is who God has told us he is. The Trinity is God’s self-revelation. We did not puzzle this out on our own; God revealed it. This is not our best guess at who God is; God revealed it. God has been revealed as Trinity: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God. That’s just who God is. Did you notice how each person of the Trinity is mentioned in our gospel lesson? Jesus, the Son, is speaking to his disciples. He says the Spirit will come to teach them all things. Jesus says that the Father has given everything into the Son’s hands. The Spirit will, in turn, give all of those things to the people of God. To us. So what, exactly, is Jesus promising that the Spirit will give to us? The Spirit gives us good things–the things that Jesus himself brought in his earthly ministry. The Spirit bestows grace, mercy, forgiveness, healing, hope, truth, peace, goodness, wisdom, blessing, beauty, power, courage, love, intimacy with God. Those are the good things we are promised–and the list doesn’t stop there! We need all of these good things now, don’t we? We need them, and our world needs them. There is a lot of pain around us and in our own lives. There is pain in our world. To face all of that alone is a fool’s errand. We just can’t do it by ourselves. We need help and power. We need grace and strength. We need faith and hope. We need the love of God. And all of that has been promised to us. Jesus tells us today that the Holy Spirit is pouring out those very things, even now, as gifts of God to the people of God. St. Paul knew something about pain and struggles in this life. He writes from personal experience today in our reading from Romans. He says, “we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” St. Paul is reminding us that we suffer in this world–as if we needed any reminder. We know pain and grief and sorrow. There’s no need to hide our eyes from it or try to ignore it. It’s there. But, St. Paul says, we are not left comfortless. God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Spirit, just as Jesus said, because we have been reconciled, reconnected to God through faith in Christ. Because God’s love, God’s very Spirit, has been poured out into our hearts, we can endure, holding fast to our hope. We hold fast to our hope. St. Paul says our hope does not disappoint us. One translator puts it this way: “Hope does not prove an embarrassment.” Hope in what? Hope in God. Hope in those good and needed things the Spirit is giving to us. Hope in God’s presence in our lives, even in the middle of our suffering. Hope that our suffering, our pain, the bad things in this world, do not win in the end. For we have been claimed by God. God’s love, God’s Spirit has been poured out into us. And because of that, we will be with God forever. And nothing can separate us from God’s love. That hope will not disappoint; you can count on it. The Trinity has a reputation for being difficult to understand, and sermons on Trinity Sunday are known for being difficult and heavy and intense. But here’s the long and short of the Trinity. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God. Three persons but one Being. And that God is with us. That God invites us into friendship, into relationship, into intimacy. That God fills our hearts and gives us strength to face whatever this world throws our way. That God will not abandon us. And we can put our hope, our ultimate hope, in that God. For that God is faithful. That God loves us, now and forever. Comments are closed.
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