The Holy Trinity - June 15, 2025

good Morning. It is so wonderful to see you all and I welcome you and wish you a happy father's day. You fathers out there and anybody who has a father, please don't forget to wish your father a happy father's day. And if your father has already gone to be with our father in heaven, I hope that you remembered to bring a picture. Uh we have asked everyone to bring a picture of their father to share with one another. And I saw several of you did because I've

already had a chance to talk to you about that. And if you did bring a picture with you, please plan to stay for fellowship after our worship service so that you can share your picture with everyone. I would also like to see do we have anyone here who has served in the army? Anyone? I know a few folks I talked to this morning certainly we congratulate you on the Army's uh 250th birthday, a rather momentous occasion. So uh I know that that was just yesterday and I hope that you had a wonderful day celebrating that event as

well. I would like to begin by thanking Jan Grio who is serving as our liturgist this morning. Thank you so much, Jan, for doing so. Um, also I hope that you took a look at the back of your bulletin as it lists the many activities going on in the church and I hope that you will plan to attend uh several of those if not all of them. We would love to have you there with us as well. Now, have we anyone in the congregation who has celebrated 50 years of marriage? We do have several people. Well, we also

have someone in our congregation who is celebrating today 68 years of marriage. And I would like for the Norfords to please stand so that we can congratulate you. That is a wonderful [Music] congratulations. We are so excited for you. What a wonderful celebration for the two of Did anyone beat 68? I don't want to be remiss and any anyone up here. It just I will not repeat what Diane just said. She said it just feels longer. We'll talk after. Okay. So, anyway, we are blessed to be able to be here together to share with one

another just the blessing that God has given to us all that we woke up today that we have been given the gift of a new day. And not only that, that we get to spend it together. So if you will please rise and let us share the peace of Christ with one another, will you please? Peace be with you and also with you. Peace be with you. Mention the friendship. Good morning. As the pastor said, I am Jan Grieco, and I'd like to remind you to use the friendship pad in your pew. She had forgotten to say that.

We'll continue our service with the call to worship responsibly. Holy, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. Glory to God. church all the We all glory to the glory of our praise. My praise We There is Heat. Heat. away. Hallelujah. This is the glorious Heat. Heat. Please be seated. Please listen as we have a call to confession. Jesus calls us to enter the joy of discipleship, the joy of following in his way. But sin clings closely and we struggle to respond fully to Christ's invitation.

Let us seek God's forgiveness so that we may know more deeply the joy God intends. Now in unison, please the prayer of confession. Blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yours is a perfect relationship, one God in three persons, mutual and whole. We confess that our relationships are not that way. We have been too selfish. We have failed to love in the manner of Jesus. We have let sin drive us away from one another and from you. We long for wholenesses, peace, but our sin pulls us in other directions.

Forgive us and restore us. Pull us to you with mercy and grace. Pull us to you. Amen. My friends, God who made us all loves us with a neverending love. And because of God's love, the Lord paid for our sin. So my friends, it is our joy this day to proclaim that in Jesus Christ we are forgiven. Thanks be to God. And all God's people say, "Thanks be to God. [Music] Glor to the Son and to the Holy Ghost as it is now and shall be world without Please be seated. [Music] Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful words.

Beautiful words. Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful words. Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful words. Beautiful, beautiful words, wonderful words, wonderful, wonderful words of life. Sing them over to me. Wonderful words. Let me know what beautyful words [Music] wonderful wonderful words wonderful Wonderful. Beautiful words. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful words of life to life and beauty. Teach me faith and duty. Offer pardon and peace to all. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful words. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful words of life. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful words. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful words. Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful word of God, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful word of God. One of the blessings of our being able to gather together is that we can together once again go to our Lord and Savior and share our deepest concerns, our hopes. And certainly anyone who has been watching the news lately, we have a whole list of things that I'm sure we want to bring before the Lord.

Um, evil has raised its ugly head over and over again in this world. And so certainly we want to come before the Lord and ask for peace. We ask that the Lord will be with families who have been who have lost loved ones. We certainly heard about the horrific events when the Minnesota lawmakers, two of which were killed and two who were seriously wounded and seem as though they will recover. But the kind of hate that rears its head is not a partisan issue. And we know that God is not happy and is

with them. And we pray that God will give their families peace and knowledge that the Lord is there. We pray for all of the families of those who were lost in the Air India crash recently. The last I saw 240. It may have risen from that. It just seems like every time we go to our news there is a story of a loss and we know that that means families are grieving. So we have been invited we have been asked by our Lord Jesus to pray to pray not only for ourselves but also for these people that we don't even know. It

is a holy moment. So I invite you now to please join me in the prayers of the people of God. Let us pray. Lord God, we do thank you for inviting us into your presence. Even though we know you know every thought that passes through our minds, we know that your Holy Spirit searches all hearts and prays for us. But dear God, we are horrified by the stories that we have seen on our television news stations. We know that wars continue to be waged around this world. And we pray for the people who have been affected by the

bombs that are falling in the night. Families who have lost loved ones, men, women, and children who are starving. Oh dear God, we pray that you will send your peace, your help to these places all over this world. We pray that whatever we may do to share your love that we will be moved to action. And dear Lord, we do pray. We pray for peace. We pray for not only the cessation of warfare but peace. That peace of contentment that everyone might know that you are with them that you will guide us through

this life. May we always always reach out to you and share our deepest thoughts, our deepest concerns, our hopes. Lord, we do pray for those who are experiencing loneliness. We pray for those who are experiencing loss. Whether the loss is from a change in life, a change in employment, the loss of a loved one. Dear God, we pray all of these things knowing that you love us and will never ever leave us. For we pray it in Jesus' name. The one who taught us all how to pray by saying, "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed

be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. We are certainly blessed by God every single day. We have been given our time, our talents as well as our treasure so that we might participate in building what God is doing here through this church, through our denomination

and serving people all over this world. So at this time I would like to invite our ushers to come forward for the collection of our tithes and our offerings. [Music] Praise God. Blessings. Praise him for Praise God. Praise the son of the holy ghost. Will you please join me in a prayer of dedication? Lord God, we thank you for the hope that we have in you. We know that you are a Lord of renewal and we pray Lord that you will take these our gifts, our tithes, and our offerings and that they might be a part of that renewal process.

that you will bring that renewal about here at this church through our denomination and in the church in service to you around this world. We thank you for including us in your plan, dear God. And we pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen. Please be seated. Our scripture this morning is taken from the Gospel according to Matthew. So I will be reading from Matthew 28 verses 16 to 20. And you're welcome to follow along in the Pew Bible if you would like. The the Bible Pew Bible pages are listed in your bulletin.

I ask that you listen now as I read aloud. Matthew 28:16-20. Then the 11 disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and in earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. and teach them to obey everything that I commanded you. And surely I am with you always,

even to the end of the age. This ends our reading of God's holy word. May God add to our understanding and our application of its truth in each of our lives. Will you join me in a prayer of preparation, please? Lord, we do thank you for our ability to read this particular section of scripture that we call the great commission. Once again, we hear these words and we pray Lord that the power, the meaning will not only be heard but will become an influence in our action in our daily lives. We thank you for this. And now, Lord, I

do pray that the words of my mouth and that the meditations of each of our hearts and our minds will be open and accessible to your Holy Spirit working through us. For we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, there was a little girl who went to vacation Bible school and they asked all of the children to take out a piece of paper and to draw something meaningful to them. And so they were all coloring and the teacher walked around and observed all of the different papers that the children were coloring on. And

one little girl was just going to town with the crayons and changing colors and changing to this color and just coloring, coloring, coloring. And the leader came over to her and she said, "Well, you're working very hard here. What are you drawing?" And she said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And she said, "Well," she said, "You know, nobody really knows what God looks like." and she said, "They will when I'm finished." For some reason, God has given us the desire to try to understand what God looks like, who God is, how God

behaves. What is what is it to know truly truly to know God? This is something that people have talked about for eons as they say for ages trying to understand who God is. From that there have been created man-made doctrines that fall short every time of who God is and our relationship with God. Therefore, we have a number of religions out there trying to figure this out. This is one of those questions in the 33 years that I have served as a pastor that has been asked of me multiple times. And that is

if we talk about God as the Holy Trinity, the three in one. Can you explain that to me? I understand. Understanding the Trinity, the Holy Trinity. For many, they will say we are a trinitarian church or denomination. meaning that we recognize who God is by the understanding of the trinity. The holy meaning none like it. Holy trinity. Well, how can you know God? back in 350 something CE common era a theologian a writer a preacher a rhetorician a bishop of hippo St. Augustine or Augustine you can say it either way depending on

your tradition one day St. Augustine was at his wit's end just trying to figure out how to explain what the Trinity really is. And as he was searching many of the philosophies of his day, he went out for a walk along the beach. And as he was walking along, he saw a little boy digging a hole in the sand. and he would run over and scoop with a a bucket of sorts or a cup some of the ocean water, come back and dump it into the hole. And of course, the water would just disappear. So the little boy ran back to

the ocean again and got another cup of water and ran back and dumped it in and it disappeared again. So St. Augustine turned to him and he said, "What what are you trying to do here?" And the little boy said, "I'm trying to figure out how to get that ocean into my hole to fill it up." And St. Augustine thought at that moment, that's the answer to understanding fully the Holy Trinity. It's impossible. It's impossible for us to understand something of God thinking that somehow we are going to be able to classify it, to codify it, to

put it into our words and our limited understanding of what the Holy Trinity is all about. Well, today in our church, in our denomination and in Christian churches all over the world, this is called Trinity Sunday, Holy Trinity Sunday. It is the Sunday after Pentecost. When we take a look at who is this God that we claim to worship, who is this holy God? Holy meaning nothing like it in the world. Who is God this Holy Trinity Sunday? Who do you pray to? It's all affected by your understanding of this question of

who is this trinitarian God? Can we pray to Jesus as well as to the father God? Can we pray to the Holy Spirit? It's an interesting, it seems like a fundamental question, but that's a question that I even heard debated when I was in seminary. When you pray, who do you pray to? Do you pray to Jesus? There are those who believe that it is Jesus and me because they had made this commitment to Jesus. There are others who say, "No, you only pray to God because Jesus leads us to God and Jesus always referred to God the

Father in heaven." And then there are those that say, "But it is the Holy Spirit that who has filled me in my life." And that is who I talk to when I pray. Who do you pray to? Well, in a way, we pray to all three because we are talking about the Holy Trinity. Three in one. God is one and God is all three. God is here and God is everywhere. God is spirit. And this very same God, our scriptures share with us, took on human flesh and became a man. In our in our understanding, according to our Westminster confession, which the

Presbyterian Church heeds because of its wisdom and its theology, we say that there are three persons in this godhead. That leads some people to think that we worship three different gods, but it is not so because we claim that it is one God that we know and relate to in three different persons. The doctrine of the trinity. Now, when I was young in high school even, I was thrilled that I had a social studies teacher who was a tent maker, meaning that he taught social studies during the week, but he also was a

pastor of a church. And so, knowing that he was a holy man, I asked him, I said, "Can you explain to me the doctrine of the trinity?" And he said, well, he said, "Think of it this way. It's like H2O. Do you know what H2O is? Yes. Yes, I know what H2O is. I said, well, H2O can appear as water, it can be ice, or it can be steam, but it is all H2O. Later on I found out that there were other illustrations for explaining trinity in that if you take a an egg, you look at the egg and you see that there are three parts. One egg has a

shell, it has an egg yolk and it has an egg white, but it is all one egg. There was a man who collapsed suddenly on a busy city sidewalk and it turned out that there was a priest nearby who ran over to him and the man was ha having a heart attack and the priest looked at him and said, "Sir, sir, are you baptized?" And he kind of shook his head, "Yes." And he said, "Were you baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit?" And the man said, "I didn't know this was going to be a riddle."

The problem with the doctrine of the Trinity is that there really is no one place in the Bible to look to find out what it is. You see, if you go looking for trinity in your Bible, you're not going to find that word anywhere. So, how do we come up with this doctrine in our belief that God is one in three persons? Well, quite honestly, the Trinity is an explicit teaching throughout the Bible. And the scripture that we read even this morning names all three persons as to when we baptize. We baptize in the name of the

father and the son and the holy spirit. All three active and equal in the godhead as one. In Genesis, even Genesis 1:26, it says, "Let us make humankind in our image." We have all of these references throughout scripture that God is bigger than just one person, that God is multiple, the three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But how do they work together? How do you know God, the one God? Well, first of all, it begins with the Holy Spirit because it is the Holy Spirit who grabbed you, who

moved you, who made you know that you needed God in your life. It is that Holy Spirit that is active in our lives even now and after you give your life to Jesus. The Holy Spirit, we are told, comes to live within us, to empower us, and to help to transform us into the likeness of Jesus. So, the church becomes sort of this three-legged stool. You know what they say about a three-legged stool? You cut off one of the legs and what happens when you sit down? You're going to fall. It is important that all three legs be

intact for the stool to support the foundation of what we are talking about in our faith. Certainly again in any illustration as is imperfect but it helps to exemplify the the problems in the church. There are some people who cling to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is everything in their tradition and that infilling and the the power of the Holy Spirit is everything to them. And they definitely pray that the Holy Spirit will be with them every day. But they're leaving out the role of Jesus. They're leaving out

that Jesus and the Holy Spirit always pointed to God. And I've already mentioned those who only pray to Jesus, who say it's just Jesus and me. I gave my life to Jesus and Jesus is the one who is my savior. Jesus is everything in my life. But Jesus said, "I am less than the father who is greater than me." But then there are those traditions that only emphasize God the heavenly father. And these particular traditions usually tend to be more traditional in the United States only talking about God the

father. That male imagery that God is somehow the big man up there. But the problem with this imagery is that that is leaving out the fullness of the Godhead as is known through Jesus who was a servant leader who said that we should lift up the downtrodden that we are to serve one another and that we are to serve God by our service to one another. And it is also leaving out the power of the Holy Spirit, the advocate that we were sent by Jesus when he left this earth. So you see, we have a problem if we choose to only adopt one

of the three of the Godhead. It distorts who God is in our life and in the life of the church. So this particular Trinity Sunday, what are we to grab from this? When people came to Jesus, he pointed them to God. He also said, "I leave with you the Holy Spirit." And he breathed on them, and they were given the power to do the work of the great commission. this last chapter of Matthew when Jesus says, "Go, you shall go. Don't just go to church, but go out into the world. Go out into the communities around you and

teach to others by your life what I have taught to you. go and then baptize in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. The way we think about the trinity really is our picture of God. Think about it. That little girl scribbling like crazy. Perhaps in your soul, in your mind, you too have been scribbling like crazy trying to figure out who God is. What does God look like? And how does God reveal God's self in your life, how you think about the Trinity really is your picture of who God is.

Without the Trinity, we end up worshiping a one-dimensional God. We end up worshiping an idol of our own creation because God then becomes what we want God to be. So that God will be at our beckoned call. We do not then worship the triune God, the God that is beyond our understanding. There was a little boy who went to vacation Bible school. See the importance of vacation Bible school in our lives. Even when we're very young, we learn about God and God's activity in our life. But this little boy came home

and said to his mom, you know, mom, I learned that God is everywhere. And she said, yes, that's right. And she said, well, is God in our refrigerator? So even when we close the door and the lights go out, is God still there? And his mom said, "Yes." And he said, 'Well, I'm going to close this cabinet. Is God inside that cabinet? And mom said, "Yes." And he went over to the sugar bowl and he opened it and he said, "Is God in the sugar bowl?" And she said, "God is everywhere." So he put the lid on the

sugar bowl and he goes, "Ha, I got you." how we try so often to think that somehow we can get God, that we can limit God with our limited minds, that somehow we can control God. You know, St. Augustine got it right. We don't understand God completely and we never ever will understand God because God is God. God's ways and understanding are not our ways and understanding. And we can't trap him in the sugar bowl. We can't make God do what we want God to do. So, how does one plus one plus one equal the trinity that we read in our

holy bible? I think Desmond Tutu who was a bishop of South Africa, an Anglican Archbishop in fact, who won a Nobel Peace Prize, who also wrote a book called Hope and Suffering. And in his book, I think he has the answer for us all to remember on this Trinity Sunday. It turns out that in his book, A Country priest was confront confronted by an eminent atheist who had all kinds of proof as to why God does not exist. He said, "I do not believe in God." And the priest looked at him and retorted, "Oh, it doesn't matter

because God believes in you. how you think and define the Holy Trinity. Whichever illustration, example is good for you. How you think about God as three in one, the Godhead. In the end, the only thing that matters is that God believes in you. God believes in us. God believes in this church. God believes in the church universal. And God will bring about God's will in our lives. And thanks be to God. Will you pray with me? Lord, we do thank you for being with us, helping us to try to struggle to understand your mysteries,

trying to understand just who you are in this life. We thank you, Lord, for the many ways that you reach out to us and to all of your people. And we pray Lord that we will not got get so hung up on doctrine that we miss the fact that you are in our life, that you believe in us, that you love us, and that you have a purpose for all of us in your kingdom. We thank you for this and pray all of this in Christ's name. Amen. For our final hymn, please turn to page 297 in Christ's Called to Baptize. Hymn 297.

Christ to praise. And after all people, the circle of the way of living. We share in our praying for Christ. King us with Heat. Heat. What a fun exercise this has been sharing with you, trying to understand the God that we worship. But most of all, know that God loves you. As Jesus said in our scripture, God will be with us even to the end of the age. When we leave this place, God goes with us. And may we all go in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit this day and forever more. Amen.