Trinity Sunday
7th, June 2020
St. Barnabas. Live stream
Readings:- Isaiah 40:12-17,27-31 & 2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28-:16-20
Open our ears Lord that we may hear you speak, and our eyes that we may see you all around us.
“Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?”
The opening verse of the Isaiah reading gives us a good indication of how great the people of Isaiah’s day thought God was. He is vast, weighing mountains and hills, enclosing the dust of the earth in a measure. As it was then it is today, for sensible people, God is too vast, too magnificent, too amazing to describe with our humble, bumbling words and phrases. And yet we still try and do it because we want to know Him better and love Him better.
So we come to Trinity Sunday when we remember God in three persons. When we remember that could we just conjure up a phrase that slightly catches His wonderfulness it would be as nothing.
When God he is talking to Job (Chapter 39) asks him, “Have you entered the store houses of snow or have you seen the storehouses of hail?” Further on in the chapter God asks about where the frosts come from, and who brings the water in to the desert to make it bring forth grass?” These are just words that we humans use to try and describe our God, to capture His essence.
Then when Moses was confronted by the burning bush he asks, “Who am I speaking to” and God says “I AM WHO I AM. Tell my people that I AM sent you.”
It sends a shiver down my spine just reading that passage. Then I remember that God sent messenger after messenger, prophet after prophet to his people to teach them, to rescue them, to guide them. In the end the people were thankful, praised God but ultimately forgot and returned to sinful ways.
In the end God the almighty, the invulnerable, sent His Son to be vulnerable and become human. Jesus was born as a baby to lowly parents, not to a castle, not to wealth but to a working family. A carpenter and his wife were to bring up the Son of God. But not before fleeing for their lives and living as refugees in a foreign land.
As a human being Jesus learnt to love God and his commandments. As God’s Son he learnt obedience, which in the end led Him to the Cross of Calvary. But what Jesus had done throughout His life was to live it as God wanted Him to. He set an example for others to follow. His final commandment on earth was, “Go therefore and make disciple of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
Jesus died and went up into heaven so that the Father and Son could send out the Holy Spirit. It had been long promised, Joel 2:28, “Then afterwards I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” This is some 500 years before Jesus is born.
It is God’s Spirit that is pour onto the prophets and into the many leaders of men that rescued to Children of God. But God wanted a new age, an age when we would be His people and He would be our God. So for some 400 years before Christ was born there was no Spirit activity. Then John the Baptise is born, Jesus is born and the new age begins.
We can be filled with God’s Holy Spirit, we can do extraordinary things, be extraordinary people. We just need to trust in Our Lord Jesus Christ. Filled with the Spirit Peter and the other disciples spread out across the world to carry out their Lord’s last command.
So that is the Trinity. God the Father, all powerful, all loving, God the Son who came a lived among us, who knows what life can be like, but who lived as God wanted him to live and God the Holy Spirit with us always, inspiring, encouraging, helping, correcting and a connection us straight to the Father and the Son.
The greatest thing about this God who weighs mountains and gather all the dust of the earth in a measure He loves us you, me, your neighbours, family and friends and in fact everybody in the world. He wants us all to love Him and worship Him. He could make us do it but He does not, that is why He is so wonderful.
Listen to the words that Bernard uses when He blesses us, he does in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
May that blessing rest on each of us this Trinity Sunday. Amen
7th, June 2020
St. Barnabas. Live stream
Readings:- Isaiah 40:12-17,27-31 & 2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28-:16-20
Open our ears Lord that we may hear you speak, and our eyes that we may see you all around us.
“Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?”
The opening verse of the Isaiah reading gives us a good indication of how great the people of Isaiah’s day thought God was. He is vast, weighing mountains and hills, enclosing the dust of the earth in a measure. As it was then it is today, for sensible people, God is too vast, too magnificent, too amazing to describe with our humble, bumbling words and phrases. And yet we still try and do it because we want to know Him better and love Him better.
So we come to Trinity Sunday when we remember God in three persons. When we remember that could we just conjure up a phrase that slightly catches His wonderfulness it would be as nothing.
When God he is talking to Job (Chapter 39) asks him, “Have you entered the store houses of snow or have you seen the storehouses of hail?” Further on in the chapter God asks about where the frosts come from, and who brings the water in to the desert to make it bring forth grass?” These are just words that we humans use to try and describe our God, to capture His essence.
Then when Moses was confronted by the burning bush he asks, “Who am I speaking to” and God says “I AM WHO I AM. Tell my people that I AM sent you.”
It sends a shiver down my spine just reading that passage. Then I remember that God sent messenger after messenger, prophet after prophet to his people to teach them, to rescue them, to guide them. In the end the people were thankful, praised God but ultimately forgot and returned to sinful ways.
In the end God the almighty, the invulnerable, sent His Son to be vulnerable and become human. Jesus was born as a baby to lowly parents, not to a castle, not to wealth but to a working family. A carpenter and his wife were to bring up the Son of God. But not before fleeing for their lives and living as refugees in a foreign land.
As a human being Jesus learnt to love God and his commandments. As God’s Son he learnt obedience, which in the end led Him to the Cross of Calvary. But what Jesus had done throughout His life was to live it as God wanted Him to. He set an example for others to follow. His final commandment on earth was, “Go therefore and make disciple of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
Jesus died and went up into heaven so that the Father and Son could send out the Holy Spirit. It had been long promised, Joel 2:28, “Then afterwards I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” This is some 500 years before Jesus is born.
It is God’s Spirit that is pour onto the prophets and into the many leaders of men that rescued to Children of God. But God wanted a new age, an age when we would be His people and He would be our God. So for some 400 years before Christ was born there was no Spirit activity. Then John the Baptise is born, Jesus is born and the new age begins.
We can be filled with God’s Holy Spirit, we can do extraordinary things, be extraordinary people. We just need to trust in Our Lord Jesus Christ. Filled with the Spirit Peter and the other disciples spread out across the world to carry out their Lord’s last command.
So that is the Trinity. God the Father, all powerful, all loving, God the Son who came a lived among us, who knows what life can be like, but who lived as God wanted him to live and God the Holy Spirit with us always, inspiring, encouraging, helping, correcting and a connection us straight to the Father and the Son.
The greatest thing about this God who weighs mountains and gather all the dust of the earth in a measure He loves us you, me, your neighbours, family and friends and in fact everybody in the world. He wants us all to love Him and worship Him. He could make us do it but He does not, that is why He is so wonderful.
Listen to the words that Bernard uses when He blesses us, he does in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
May that blessing rest on each of us this Trinity Sunday. Amen