Trinity

I like it when Trinity Sunday and Father’s Day coincide. It reminds me of what Gregory of Nazianzus said in his writings about the Trinity: the existence of God the Father is dependent on the existence of God the Son, because a Begetter could not exist without one who is Begotten. In the same way, a man is not a father without a child. Nice parallelism.

This Sunday we hear the Great Commission, the passage at the end of the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus tells the disciples to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…” – or as the stained glass window at our church puts it, “Go to therefore…” Matthew also has the only Trinitarian formula in the Gospels, “…baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Many scholars insist that this is the early church inserting words into Matthew’s text, but John Nolland doesn’t. Instead, he says, Matthew is neatly summarizing all that he has written. “Matthew’s story has been about the action of the Father through the Son and by means of the Holy Spirit. And that is what the baptized are joined to.”

In a sense, that’s what the whole Bible is about. We will also hear the [first] story of creation in Genesis, in which God as Creator moves as Spirit over the waters and speaks the Word/Son who causes all to come into being. For Christians, the Trinity is present right from the beginning of creation.

Father’s Day in Burlington is when the annual Snake Alley Art Fair is held. Because the church is so close to Snake Alley, parking is practically nonexistent after 8 a.m. So we will have an early service and then serve breakfast to whomever wanders in from the art fair. After taking in the artwork myself, I’ll return to the church to provide a spoken Eucharist for the kitchen help. It will be a low Sunday, as Trinity Sunday typically is. That’s unfortunate. A Trinity sermon on Father’s Day might be just the thing to help people comprehend what is one of Christianity’s most distinctive and least understood doctrines.

[Pentecost 1, Trinity Sunday: Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Matthew 28:16-20. The quote from Nolland’s book is on page 1269.]