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Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

June 7, 2020

Trinity Sunday

          As a new grandmother with a just turned one-year old granddaughter and a just turned one-month old granddaughter, I confess to spending a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out who these small humans look like.  As the mother of their fathers, I am also interested to see who they act like, but that will come later.  For now, I study their hair and eye color, the shape of their faces, their little lips and noses…like I said, I spend a ridiculous amount of time looking to see whose image they carry.  Evelyn, the one-year old, has baby pictures that could easily be mistaken for our son Slocomb’s baby pictures.  Sometimes she looks like my mother and other times she looks like my grandmother.  I can hope she has my son’s huge heart, my mother’s great sense of hospitality, and my grandmother’s sense of humor and love of a good time.  Little Collins sometimes resembles her father as an infant but right now she is changing too quickly to tell.  We’ve looked through photo albums and baby books to find images of family members, but she’s just too young.  Mostly she just wants to eat and sleep, which means she definitely takes after my side of the family! 

          Looking for the ways family resemblances and traits are passed down from one generation to another gives us some insight into who we are as members of a family.  This morning, in the reading from Genesis, we hear that we humans are made in the image of God.  “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”  As God looks at God’s beloved children, made in God’s own image, whose image does God see?

          Today is Trinity Sunday, the one Sunday of the church year dedicated to a doctrine rather than an event.  In today’s gospel reading we hear from one of the few passages that mentions the three persons of the Trinity in one breath.  Jesus says to the disciples “Go therefore and make disciples 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.”  Today, the readings for Trinity Sunday call us to think about what it means that we humans are made in the image of one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer and to think about what image God actually sees when God gazes at us.

          First, as we are made in the image of God who is Father or Creator, we are called to be people who are creative, who see potential, who can work for order in the midst of chaos as God does in the creation story we heard this morning.  God’s people have always been called to be creative, especially in difficult times, whether they were finding their way through the wilderness to the Promised Land, or figuring out how to be a nation, or learning to be God’s people while in exile, or figuring out how to be the church during a pandemic.  We don’t always get that right and sometimes the image God sees back is quite distorted.  But we are called to be God’s creative presence in the world.

          Secondly, being made in the image of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit means that we bear the image of Jesus who came to redeem the world.  We promise to seek and serve Christ in all people at every baptism, but we also reflect the image of Christ to the world.  The world learns what redemption means by our words and actions.  Redeem means taking something that is broken and making it whole.  Can the world tell that by our words and actions?  There is clearly no lack of brokenness in need of healing.

          Lastly, we are made in the image of God the Holy Spirit, the Sustainer or Comforter.  The work of creativity and making the broken whole is challenging work, and we are in this work for the long haul for the image of God is not something that wears off.  Fortunately, we are not alone.  The Holy Spirit sustains us and holds us together as one human family made in God’s image.  When the work of living as one human family is hard, when the going gets tough and the temptation is to give up, the Holy Spirit sustains us to press on in the work of living as the image of God.

          Friday night, many of us gathered with a large group of people for an Interfaith Vigil for justice and peace.  We started at the Clock Tower, then moved to Christ Church, then First Congregational, then Temple Beth Sholom stopping each time for prayer and reflection.  The crowd grew as we walked the very few blocks and we ended on the Green, gathered in candlelight and silence.  The mood was somber as we were called to realize the deep and dark ways we are broken as a human family, and the changes and hard work ahead in order to create something new, to bring wholeness and healing where there is pain, division, and fear, and to sustain the momentum and passion we feel in this moment. We were gathered as Christians, Jews, and Muslims, people of no faith and other faiths.  We were gathered as the one human family, longing for a world in which the color of one’s skin does not make one exponentially more vulnerable to violence and death.  Trinity Sunday reminds us as Christians of our fundamental call to understand the human family as one, as God is one, and be people of creativity, radical and inclusive healing, and sustained by the Holy Spirit for the long haul.  When God looks at the human family God created in God’s own image, whose image does God see?

                                                                             Amen.