Opening Prayer:
Creator of all, we thank you for the opportunity to gather in study. Open our minds and hearts. By the power of the Holy Spirit, unite us in faith, hope, and love. Help us to be faithful to the gospel and to walk humbly with you. Grant us your peace as we grow in wisdom and understanding. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Matthew 28:16-20 Have you ever helped make disciples?
Jesus did not just send the church out to perform the ritual of baptism. The world will not be fixed by merely getting everyone wet. Saying the words “Father, Son, Holy Spirit” is not magic. The more difficult task is that of making disciples. Making disciples and immersion into the fullness of God go hand in hand. We cannot help ourselves or anyone else become apart of Christ without the work of the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is dependent upon what and who Jesus was and is. Christ keeps pointing to the Father. So therein lies the power. It is the Trinity, the fullness of God, to which we are attached as followers of the Way.
2 Corinthians 13:11-13 When have you felt this union in your own life?
These three sweet verses come at the end of 2 Corinthians’ many ups and downs. After the storm of tears, rebukes, recriminations, and self-justifications this letter represents, the last verse alone seems to have the power to set all things right. After three chapters of ugly wrangling, it is difficult to see how Paul can move so swiftly to this desiderata-type benediction. Trinity Sunday gives an opportunity for examination of the great mysteries of union between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; it also can point to the mysterious union that we as humans experience between each other, even in the hardest of circumstances.
Genesis 1:1-2:4a What does this passage say to you about your relationship with God?
There are some things that this passage and this Trinity Sunday have to say about God and us: First, the God of Scripture is just too big and mysterious to allow a single subject to drive a series of verbs (create, said, see), or to describe him simply as a single actor over creation. The spirit or wind of this God also takes action; the spirit “sweeps, hovers, and broods” over the stuff of this world in a way that hints at relationship—both inside and outside the Godhead this passage portrays.
Second, the real question here is not one of what preceded what, but of who brings order to all. Genesis 1 explicitly makes the claim that the ordering activity of God was present at the beginning of the story, as it is now and has been every step along the way. As the faithful Jew learned to trust God’s power to create order in the light that breaks the darkness every morning, so the faithful Christian has learned to trust that power through the light and life that breaks the darkness through the spirit of the risen Christ.