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Recently I have been on the road quite a bit, and when I drive, I like to keep up with the news on NPR. This week on one of my favorite programs, 1A, they spoke with the CEO of Dollar General. Since the Dollar General is so close to me in town, I thought this would be an interesting interview to listen to.
One of the topics they discussed was the CEO's faith. He talked about one of his deepest experiences with God. He was 11 years old, waiting to get picked up. For some reason that he did not go into, at that moment he realized the personal nature of Jesus' death. He felt, in that moment, that Jesus had died not just for everyone else, but for him specifically. He said it was in that moment that God's love for him became clearer.
Just to note, as we read in the Gospel today, Jesus died for the whole world. But it was out of love, and it was so that each and everyone of us might have a personal relationship with God again, as well as our relationship wit God as Christ's Body.
That's really what this story is about: Relationship. It's about how this CEO found his personal encounter with God, or rather how he came to be in relationship with God.
Now for every person in the body of Christ, there will be a different story about how we came to know God more fully. For me it was through Bishop Parsley laying his hands on me in Confirmation, as well as my call to ministry in England and Taizé, specifically at Winchester Cathedral. During Lent, we heard Kervin Jones' story of experiencing God through the love of our Diocese in building him a new home. Some might even have more mystical experiences like Isaiah in our Old Testament reading this morning. In fact, Episcopal martyr, Jonathan Myrick Daniels found this very passage in Isaiah called him to come down to Hayneville where he died during the Civil Rights Movement, saying young Ruby Sales.
We all have our own individual stories of our encounters with Christ Jesus, just as the church as a whole has her stories of Jesus. In fact, there's a word for how we as a church have experience God: Trinity. This is what we celebrate this morning.
You will note, though, that today we focus almost solely on The Holy Spirit as part of the Trinity. Many have said that this is because The Spirit is the least talked about of the Trinity. Just listen to our Creed later. The Spirit gets a grand total of, more or less, one sentence. On the other hand, The Father gets at least 2 sentences and The Son has a whole paragraph.
However, we just had a huge celebration of The Spirit last week. We spoke of the Spirit coming down at Pentecost in Acts. We even invoked the Spirit to come down to bless the water (we also do this, you will note, every Sunday in the Eucharist). And we sealed our newly Baptized with the Spirit in our service.
I should also note that this is ordination season. There have been two in our Diocese these past two weekends. I, in fact, celebrated the second anniversary of my ordination as a deacon almost 2 weeks ago.That service is also about calling on the Spirit to be present in the life and ministry of the newly ordained.
The Spirit is about transformation, as we can see through these services and as both Paul and Jesus tell us this morning. The Spirit transforms our lives into something new so that we can now be fully in relationship with God.
The Spirit, as we have heard these past weeks, was sent for us. In the Gospel according to John, we even see Jesus breathing His Spirit on the disciples. In last week's Gospel, we even heard Jesus speaking of the Spirit as an Advocate or Helper that could only come after Jesus was gone.
Jesus, The Son, is our first link back to God The Father. He came down to be in relationship with us and to teach us how to live with God and each other. Incidentally, this is a reminder of why Christian Formation is so important.
The Spirit is that next link. No longer is God present as a fellow human being for us to know and love externally, but now God resides in us. God's relationship with us is so deep, He resides with us and remains in our lives. That is why we mark our newly baptized members and seal them with The Holy Spirit.
We have this line tracing us back to God. And yet, the Trinity is not three separate beings, but One God in three persons. It is not something new that resides in us with The Holy Spirit, but Christ Jesus Himself, The Son, The Father incarnate in human form.
God presents Himself as three-in-one because He's trying to tell us something. It could be something about our nature. After all, we do speak of ourselves as body, mind, and spirit, and yet these three things are one in us.
More likely, God is trying to say something about relationship. After all, the Trinity is the tool God uses to be in relationship with us. And just as God is three persons joined together as One Being, we too are called to be one with each other.
We all go through life with different experiences that lead us closer to God. The Trinity is the way in which the church has seen her relationship being formed with God. We in turn are called to use the Trinity to help us, as we say in the Two Great Commandments, to be drawn closer to God in love as well as with our neighbor.