A Concord Minute: Crossing the Trinitarian bridge

This Sunday, my parish - Concordia, Sikeston - is recognizing and celebrating the Holy Trinity. This First Sunday after Pentecost closes out the first half of the church year that begins annually with Advent right after Thanksgiving.

The first half of the church year focuses on Christ’s first coming, birth, life and ministry, death, resurrection, ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Holy Trinity Sunday summarizes all that God self-discloses to His creation for you in His Son, Jesus Christ. After Holy Trinity Sunday comes the “green season” of the Spirit’s work in Christ’s church for the sake of bringing the world to the Gospel.

Holy Trinity Sunday is the bridge between the two halves of the church year. Holy Trinity Sunday or the First Sunday after Pentecost allows the church to grapple with the awesome, incomprehensible reality of the Trinity. The only way the creation knows God the Father is through His disclosure in Christ by the power of His Holy Spirit. Three in one. One God, three persons. The Father speaks through His Son by His Spirit. Thanks be to God.

Though, the Trinity is thoroughly puzzling and equally frustrating to understand. Are there two “dudes” up in heaven at the moment, one the Father and the other the Son? One with white hair and the other brown hair? No. There are not two human beings up in heaven but the one Jesus Christ. How is Jesus known and present on the earth? By His Holy Spirit! How does the Spirit disclose Christ for you? Through His church in the Word and Sacraments! How then does the Father reveal who He is for you? By His Spirit in Christ.

Following? Or lost? The church continues to grasp the Trinity by faith in Christ until His returns. When the Lord returns, our faith will fall away and sight will be restored. Until then, we walk by faith and not by sight in the Trinity.

There is much within the Trinity that is hidden from us. How frustrating! Yet, if we sinful humans knew the “nuts and bolts” of the Divine, we’d die from Trinitarian overload. Sinful creatures cannot fully grasp how God chooses to work on our behalf. We don’t want to know; we don’t need to know either. All we need to know is how the Trinity has disclosed God’s love for you in Christ Jesus.

At the halfway point of the church year, the church will cross that Trinitarian bridge. For us at Concordia, our summer and fall will be focused on the Spirit’s formation in our lives now that Christ is ascended.

Words like “discipleship” and “formation” and “stewardship” come to mind. For us Christians in the season of the Trinity, we continue to be shaped and formed by the Spirit into a closer image of Christ.

Thanks be to God the Trinity has made itself known in Christ!

The Rev. Matthew Berry is pastor of Concordia Lutheran Church in Sikeston, Missouri. Based in Sikeston’s Historic North End, Concordia is a member congregation of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS), a theologically conservative, biblically sound, Christ-centered church.