I grew up with two brothers. When my father was about to yell at one of us, he\u2019d preface it by standing straight, hands on his hips and asking loudly, \u201cWhat do you think you\u2019re doing?\u201d I hated that question, and I swore I\u2019d never do it. Yet when I became a stepfather, I still remember the first time I stood over one of the kids, hands on my hips, and loudly asked, \u201cWhat do you think you\u2019re doing?\u201d My father was inside me, and he\u2019d taken over. We all have these people from other relationships inside us. It\u2019s not just people we\u2019re close to, either. I grew up in New Jersey in the heyday of the New York Yankees, when Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were stars. Baseball was what boys did in New Jersey in those days, but I was really, really bad at it. When I see a ball coming at me, my first instinct is to get out of the way, not catch it. So I was kind of an outcast and to this day, when Jacquelyn and May want to go to a baseball game, something they love, they really prefer to leave me behind, because the voices of those boys telling me how awful I am are still there. Now just as we have these different persons inside us, God has persons inside, so we speak of a \u201cthree in one\u201d God. The name for this is the trinity; today is Trinity Sunday and I want to invite you to think about God with me and about how that all fits together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want to start with the Holy Spirit. This morning we read from proverbs about Wisdom raising her voice. Sometimes when we think of the Holy Spirit, we miss the whole scripture witness about the nature of the Spirit. I was chatting with someone last week, and they mentioned that when they think of the Holy Spirit, it\u2019s like Caspar the Ghost. That\u2019s easy to see: after all, many of us grew up with Caspar cartoons and Caspar is a friendly sort of ghost. Many of us are old enough to remember when liturgies and prayers often referred to the Spirit as the Holy Ghost. But the Biblical witness about the Spirit isn\u2019t a ghost, it\u2019s more like a wind. In fact, Hebrew uses the same word, \u2018ruach\u2019, for \u2018breath\u2019, \u2018wind\u2019 and Spirit. Greek is the same way: it uses the word \u2018pneuma\u2019, which gives us all kinds of words related to something wind or breath related. So the first thing to think about with the Holy Spirit is that it is invisibly animating. We don\u2019t see the wind, but we feel it, we don\u2019t see the wind, but we see its effect, we don\u2019t see the wind, but we know it\u2019s there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second thing we see the Spirit doing in Scripture is announcing. The Spirit comes in dreams sometimes, sometimes in visions. The Spirit acts as a messenger between God and our lives. Jesus mentions this in the piece we read from the Gospel of John. He says that he has more to say and that. \u201cWhen the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. [16:13 ]\u201d This is why the most important moment in prayer is not when we speak but when we listen for the Spirit to speak in our hearts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So animating, announcing and there\u2019s a third thing the Spirit does: appreciating. The reading from Proverbs has this wonderful image. It asks us to imagine God busily creating: the mountains are being shaped, the heavens established, beaches carved out and Spirit\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\u2026 I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race. [Proverbs 8:30f]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
I like to think of this as being like a parent, building a sand castle on the beach with a child who runs back and forth, brings buckets of water, maybe stumbles in the sand but delights in what\u2019s built, what\u2019s done together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So inside God is this person of the Holy Spirit, animating, announcing, appreciating. But there\u2019s another aspect of God we might call the architect. Traditionally, we\u2019ve talked about God the Father and that\u2019s a fine description except it\u2019s gendered and God is not particularly male in scripture. Sometimes male language is used, sometimes female. It\u2019s when we paint God in our image that gender slips in. This aspect of God reminds me of when I worked on a survey crew, laying out roads. In the suburbs of Detroit, there\u2019s a whole group of homes to this day that sit where they sit because someone I never saw laid out a blueprint and along with others I helped turn that blueprint into home lots for building houses. That\u2019s how I think of this part of God: an architected, creating the plan. I may not see the whole plan, I may only see a little part, but I trust that the plan is there, and my job is to follow it as closely as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That brings us to the son: Jesus Christ. The son functions in this trinity of divine by presenting it in a human form. Want to know what God looks like?\u2014look at Jesus. Want to know what God wants?\u2014listen to Jesus. Want an invitation to make your life in God?\u2014Jesus is all invitation. In Jesus, also, we see the pattern God intends for all of us: submission to God\u2019s will, God\u2019s intention. There\u2019s great joy in living with God, but there are painful passages, too. It\u2019s God who sends Jesus to the wilderness; sometimes that\u2019s where we find ourselves. And the cross is the ultimate example of submitting your life even to death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now for some, the Trinity is helpful; for some it\u2019s not. It wasn\u2019t for me, in fact, the Trinity is the reason I\u2019m not a Methodist. When I was 12 and in Confirmation, my family went to a Methodist church. The pastor taught the class and when he got to the Trinity, I said something like, \u201cThat makes no sense.\u201d He responded by telling me it was a mystery; I told him he just didn\u2019t understand it. Later, someone called my mother and explained it would be better if I didn\u2019t come back to confirmation. We moved not long after that and after a bit of searching found a Congregational church where they cared more about the gospel of God\u2019s love than the Trinity, and they were happy to have me. So if the Trinity isn\u2019t helpful to you, that\u2019s fine; leave it on the shelf, there are lots of other ways of thinking about God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But what\u2019s most helpful about the Trinity isn\u2019t the details, it\u2019s the relationships. What we should get from thinking about God as three in one is that God is all about relationships. God comes to us not as just one idea, one thought, one picture but as a loving, intimate community. Spirit, Son, Father. How we see God makes a difference; there are so many people who can\u2019t cross the threshold of a church because they only see an angry, glowering face. It\u2019s up to us to show them how God comes to us in many ways. The important part may not be the particulars of each one as much as that they are a divine community of love. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s in the scripture we read today, too. Remember the reading from Romans? It\u2019s part of a much longer section in Paul\u2019s letter to the new Christians in Rome. He doesn\u2019t know them yet, but he\u2019s heard about them. He knows they are struggling; Rome is a tough city and there are occasional persecutions of Christians. There are arguments between Christians also about what they have to do to be part of the Christian family. Paul cuts right to the heart: \u201cTherefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.\u201d We live in a difficult time as well, so that ought to speak to us. I don\u2019t know about you, but reading about all the conflicts all over the world and right here in our own country, I could use a little peace. I could use a lot of peace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So first: through this community of God, we are offered peace with God. More than that, out of the abundance of God\u2019s love, we\u2019re being filled. \u201cGod\u2019s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.\u201d, he says. Wow. What a wonderful image: our hearts like a glass, with God pouring love, not just a little, not just enough but a generous pour. Now I wanted to share something about the Trinity today because it\u2019s the day for it, but the most important point isn\u2019t just how we think about God; it\u2019s that God is trying to pour love into our hearts, today, tomorrow, every day. So much that it overflows; so much we can share it. Isn\u2019t that our hope as a church? That the love poured into us, into you, into me, into all of us together will overflow here and lift our whole community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ of Harrisburg, PA by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor \u00a92025 Trinity Sunday\/C \u2022 June 15, 2025 Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 and Psalm 8 * Romans 5:1-5 * John 16:12-15 I grew up with two brothers. When my father was about to yell at one of us, he\u2019d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[101,53,39,347,371,3,13,2,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-after-pentecost","category-afterpentecost-c","category-exegesis","category-john-scripture","category-luke","category-sermon","category-theology","category-worship","category-year-c"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1792,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791\/revisions\/1792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}