St Philip & St James Church

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The beauty and wonder of the Holy Trinity

oday we celebrate the wonderful beauty of the Holy Trinity.

 

Let us take as our starting point the verse that frames our psalm this morning.  Psalm 8 begins and ends with these words:

 

O Lord, our Sovereign,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!

 

So our starting point is to praise God whose majesty we see in all creation.

 

Many of us have renewed our relationship with creation in these last weeks, and through our relationship with creation we have also renewed our relationship with the creator God who is our Lord and Sovereign.

 

Cut off from each other but allowed to spend time in our gardens or allowed one hour of daily exercise outside our homes we have come to appreciate the beauty of creation we see right on our doorstep more intensely.

 

Many of us I am sure have found ourselves identifying with the cry of the Psalmist; ‘how majestic is your name in all the earth!’ as we have enjoyed this lovely spring that we have had.

 

We’ve had such gorgeous weather.  Although we are grateful now for the rain that keeps the plants alive.

 

The psalm turns on verses 4 to 6

 

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
    mortals that you care for them?

You have made them little lower than the angels

and crown them with glory and honour.

 

Because what the doctrine of the Holy Trinity expresses is that we do not believe only in a powerful creator God but in a powerful creator God who loves us; loves humanity; is always mindful of us.

 

We see this love in Jesus Christ who is God the Son; God in human form; the word of God made flesh. 

 

We see this love in his very incarnation, in his preparedness to be our Immanuel, God with us. 

 

We see this love in the healing he brought us and in the Kingdom of justice and peace which he proclaimed to us and for us.

 

We see this love in the sacrifice he made for us on the cross and the victory over sin and death which he won for us.

 

Jesus is the bulwark, founded out love for us to silence the enemy and the avenger, spoken from the mouths of babes and infants.

 

So when we contemplate nature and see the beauty of creation, we may also remember God’s love for us which we see in God the Son.

 

But that’s not the end of it.

 

Because God has, in the words of the psalm, made human beings only a little lower than God.  He has crowned us with glory and honour and given us dominion over everything which he has created, putting all things under our feet.

 

In other words, we have been made co-creators with God. 

 

We have dominion over sheep and oxen, wild animals, fish and birds.  We have been entrusted with the fate of creation.

 

Can we really be co-creators with God?  Can we really be part of the divine control of the earth?  Yes we can.  We can do this because the Holy Spirit of God rests upon us. 

 

Jesus claimed for himself the power devolved by the creator God as described in the Psalm.  He told the disciples, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.’  And what does he do with his earthly authority?  He delegates it further to the disciples and commissions them to go and make disciples of all the nations and instruct them to follow the commandments that they have been instructed in; to love God and to love one another.

 

And we are able to carry out this task because we have the Holy Spirit of God resting upon us.

 

God the Father, whose power we see in creation, shows that he loves us through God the Son and shows that he trusts us by sending God the Holy Spirit among us so that we may do his work in the world.

 

How does this feel?

 

Well, it feels good to be loved.  It feels wonderful to be loved by so powerful a God.  And it feels quite good to be trusted with God’s work in the world, to be trusted with the Holy Spirit.

 

But there then comes the moment when we feel the burden of that responsibility, and especially we may question from time to time the ability of humanity to care for the whole of creation that has been entrusted to it.

 

But if we can open our hearts to the Spirit and remember the promise that Jesus made, ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age,’ then we will remember that we were promised that the burden would be easy, the yoke would be light, and the Spirit would be with us.

 

The message that has been entrusted to us to share with the nations of the world is above all a message of hope, of optimism, as much a belief in humanity as it is a belief in God.

 

O Lord, our Sovereign,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!

 

Page last updated: Saturday 6th June 2020 4:34 PM
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