The Image of God

 Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

May 22, 2016

Trinity Sunday

          In my mind, and in my experience, late spring is associated with three particular events.  The first is graduation.  Graduations are joyful, hopeful occasions that celebrate past accomplishments and look toward future goals, with a big smile and a lump in the throat all at the same time.  Graduation is also a team effort.  Not too many of us make it to graduation entirely on our own.  Parents, teachers, friends, coaches, mentors and others all help us get there when the road is bumpy and the obstacles seem overwhelming.  Not many of us get to graduation without some mixture of success and failure. The truth is, the schools could just mail out our diplomas and they would be just as valid as when we receive them in a hot, over-crowded gym filled with our loved ones.  But we come together for graduations to mark our connection with the graduates and the team effort involved in getting to that day. 

          The second is the Relay for Life.  Perhaps some of you have participated in the Relay for Life in Hudson.  If not, the Relay is a major fundraiser for the American Cancer Society that occurs all over the country in the spring.  One of the ways people can participate is by purchasing luminarias, which are paper sacks filled with sand and a candle, in honor of or in memory of those who have fought cancer.  The Relay opens with a walk around the track by those who are living with cancer and their loved ones.  The track is lined with literally thousands of luminarias with the name of a beloved person written on each sack.  When I walk around that track during the opening ceremony, I look for the luminarias with the names of my own loved ones and the names of other people that I know.  On the one hand, my heart is filled with gratitude for the impact these people had on my life, and on the other hand, my heart is filled with deep sorrow that their lives were cut short by this disease.  The Relay for Life is about both life and death, as we celebrate courage and triumph and mourn loss.  Finding a cure for cancer will take the efforts of all of us, whether we have the skills of research, or compassion, or care giving, or can simply write a small check.

          The third event is Memorial Day.  Many, if not most communities around the country have a great Memorial Day parade, and I believe Hudson is no different.  Everyone comes together to watch the floats go by, or to see friends in the parade, or to hear the high school band.  But primarily we gather along the streets of this country and our community to give thanks for the lives of men and women who won for us the freedom we now enjoy.  Memorial Day is also a day of mixed feelings as, in the midst of our celebration, we are reminded of the cost of that freedom.  Memorial Day is about the cost of both war and peace. 

          In the midst of all these other late spring events, the Church celebrates Trinity Sunday.  Trinity Sunday always falls on the Sunday after Pentecost and is the one Sunday of the year when we celebrate a doctrine of the church rather than an event.   Usually we celebrate the birth of Jesus, or his baptism, or the events of Holy Week, or the resurrection.  Or we hear stories about the things Jesus did or stories he told.  But today we celebrate the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

          The Nicene Creed, which we say each week, is built around the Trinity.  We say “We believe in God, the Father almighty.”  “We believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord.”  And “We believe in the Holy Spirit.”  In the first chapter of Genesis, we are told that we are created in the image of God. “In the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.”  One of the interesting questions about the Trinity is “What does it mean that we are created in the image of the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?”  What does it mean to be made in the image of the Trinity?

          If our readings from Scripture this morning would explain the Trinity, that would be helpful.  But they do not, and that is because there are only a few places in Scripture that even mention all three parts of the Trinity in one breath, much less give us an explanation.  In addition to our readings this morning, at the end of Matthew’s gospel, in the great commission, Jesus sends the disciples out to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  The apostle Paul will often mention two of the three persons of the Trinity in the opening of his letters when he says something like “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”  So, with all due respect to both Jesus and Paul, they are not very helpful in trying to understand the Trinity.

          Taken together, however, today’s readings do shed some light on what the Church means when we say that the one God we worship is Father and Son and Holy Spirit, or Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.  In the reading from Proverbs, the Spirit is personified as Wisdom, the female voice of God that cries out to the people.  Wisdom reminds us that she was present when God created the mountains, the earth and the fields, the heavens and the foundation of the deep.  She rejoiced with God in his created world.  From the beginning, Wisdom was present with God and rejoiced in the creation of the human race.

          Paul tells us in the reading from Romans that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and that God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, giving us all three members of the Trinity. God has worked in human life not just as the Creator, but also as the one who has brought us peace through Jesus Christ and sustains us with the Holy Spirit.  And Jesus tells us in the Gospel reading reminds us of the way that God will speak to us through the Spirit of Truth.

          What we learn about the Trinity from these readings is that God has always been in relationship, even before there were human beings.  We have one God who is intentionally and intensely relational in nature. Today’s readings are just a sample of the many places in scripture that tell us that from the beginning, when the earth was a formless void and waters covered the deep, God has worked in human history as the creator, the redeemer, and the sustainer. 

          But what does the Trinity have to do with success and failure, life and death, war and peace?  The Trinity calls us to be the relational nature of God for each other.  We do not struggle with success and failure, matters of life and death or war and peace by ourselves.  Just as the Trinity is one God who is and has always been in relationship, we are called to mirror that by being one body, always in relationship.  God’s love has been poured into our collective hearts, as Paul writes, so that we never celebrate or struggle alone.  By our very nature, made in the image of God, we are always in relationship with God and each other.  Only together do we reflect the image of God to the world.  The Relay for Life, graduations, and national celebrations become parables of the Trinity.  Through those experiences, and others like them, we experience the mystery of being created in the image of God, who is always in relationship.

                                                                   Amen.