Psalm 8:1–9 • Genesis 1:1–2:4a • Matthew 28:16–20 • 2 Corinthians 13:11–13

The theme for this Sunday is the grace, love, and communion of the Trinity are with us all. The psalmist praises and glorifies God’s majestic name. God’s name is manifest in his creation and mirrored in the humans he has made. The Genesis reading rehearses the biblical account of creation. It shows how the Triune God created all things. It shows God making humans in the very image and likeness of the divine communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus commissions his followers in the Gospel passage. He commands them to go and make disciples of all the nations. He calls them to baptize his followers in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In his letter to the Corinthians the apostle Paul encourages the Church. He praises the peace, love, oneness, like-mindedness, and maturity of the Body of Christ. This Body is to be a true reflection of the divine fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Reminder: This introductory paragraph is intended to show how the four RCL selections for this week are connected and to assist the preacher prepare the sermon. It is not intended to be included in the sermon.

How to use this sermon resource.

The Grace, Love, and Communion of
the Trinity Are With Us All

2 Corinthians 13:11-13 NRSVUE

[Read or ask someone to read the passage.]

Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Be restored; listen to my appeal; agree with one another; live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 NRSVUE

Are you a fan of home improvement TV shows? Not everyone is a fan of reality TV. Yet many people enjoy watching old homes and buildings be restored and renovated. Entire channels are devoted to showing how something old, worn out, and broken down can be transformed into something beautiful and useful again. Floors are repaired, walls are rebuilt, and what once seemed ready for the landfill becomes a home again. It is amazing to see the transformation that can occur when a building is restored and renewed.

To “flip” a home, the owner has to invest a lot of time, money, and labor in the building within a short period of time to make it suitable for resale. Hidden flaws must be uncovered and corrected. The finished quality depends upon the builder. A house does not fix itself. The restoration depends on the one who takes responsibility for it.

Not everyone considers old buildings worth restoring, though. It’s common to see old, abandoned houses and buildings slowly decay and collapse into the ground. [Personalize this description for your location.] In the end, these buildings have to be torn down and removed so the land can be used for something else.

The good news for us today is that when God’s very good creation needed to be restored, God did not dispose of it. God is the master builder who takes responsibility for what he created. God did not allow his creation to fall back into the nothingness from which he formed it.

God did not walk away from the world he lovingly made. Instead, God invested all he has and all he is in restoring and renewing it. God sent his Son to ensure all would be remade as he always intended. He sees each of his adopted children as his masterpiece, a wonderful new creation. God has been working and will work to restore, renovate, and recreate his creation until the work is complete.

God is with us, and this is our hope on Trinity Sunday:
The grace, love, and communion of the Trinity are with us all.

As we said, this Sunday is Holy Trinity. Why do Christians have an entire Sunday to celebrate the Trinity? The understanding of the Trinity is so crucial to rightly knowing who God is. It’s crucial to understand ourselves and the logic of the universe. Christians believe God is one God who exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — three Persons, one living God.

In Genesis, we read how God, the Word, and the Spirit created all things. The Father creates through his Word — who is the Son — and the Spirit brings life and order. From the beginning, Father, Son, and Spirit are working together. Human beings were made in the likeness and image of this triune God. Triune means consisting of three and reminds us that God is not a solitary, selfish god. God is a relational family of love. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit are united in love.

And God made us in his image. “In his image” means that humans were created to be like God in important ways — able to love, create, think, make choices, and live in relationships. It doesn’t mean we physically look like God; it means we reflect God’s character and relational nature. We were made to reflect the Father’s love, the Son’s grace, and the Spirit’s communion.

In Genesis, we also read that God’s creation was good. But it didn’t stay that way. We chose to turn away from God and we brought brokenness into the world.

You see it. The world needs a renovation.

We can look around us today and see so many problems in the world that we live in. We see damage to our ecosystems. We see wreckage in human lives, families, and nations. We see hurt, lonely, and addicted people everywhere. We see wars, corruption, injustice, and division. And we ask how humans can ever look anything like a good, loving God. How can the world ever look like God’s world, his kingdom or way of life where everything flourishes?

Perhaps you’ve worn yourself to exhaustion and been plagued with guilt that you cannot do more to change the suffering in the world. Perhaps the problems of the world seem so huge that you try to hide, ignoring it and numbing with pleasure. Or perhaps you feel so overwhelmed and helpless that you become paralyzed with despair. What do we do?

The answer is that we cannot save the world. We cannot save others or ourselves. The answer is that God has acted to save.

The restoration that matters most — our reconciliation with God — has already been accomplished. Reconciliation simply means to restore a relationship. God restored the relationship between himself and humanity — a relationship that was broken by sin. Through Jesus, God healed what was fractured and brought us back into right relationship with him.

And it was accomplished through the incarnate Son of God. “Incarnate” means “in flesh.” It means in the Incarnation, God became flesh in the Person of Jesus. Jesus is fully God and fully human. He is the one true human who perfectly reflects the triune God.

Jesus lived the faithful human life we have not lived. He bore our sorrow. He carried our sin. On the cross he took into himself everything twisted and broken in us. He acted in our place and for our sake. When he rose from the grave, he began the new creation.

Jesus has done for us what we could never do for ourselves.

And because of that finished work, we can say with confidence:
The grace, love, and communion of the Trinity are with us all.

Our Bible passage today is the end of a letter from Paul. Paul was a traveling preacher-teacher called an apostle. He started new churches and devoted his life to spreading the good news of who Jesus is. When he was absent from a church that he was working with, he would write them letters with encouragement, guidance, and sometimes corrections. This particular letter is to Jesus’ followers in a place called Corinth. And it’s a difficult letter. They were struggling. There had been conflict and misunderstanding. These people, the Corinthians, were frail and imperfect, just like us.

In this letter, Paul says that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being” (2 Corinthians 5:17 NRSVUE). And it helps to say what “in Christ” means. It means belonging to Jesus and sharing in his life. The Corinthian Christians were working out what it means to live out who they were in Christ.

But these final words contain a real sense of hope. Let’s read our New Testament passage again:

Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Be restored; listen to my appeal; agree with one another; live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 NRSVUE

We’re going to begin with the last sentence because it gives us a framework for everything else.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The love of God.
The communion of the Holy Spirit.
Beautifully illustrating the Trinity.

Jesus’ grace. Grace means gift. Jesus Christ freely gave his life for us, granting us forgiveness in the gift of grace.

Father God’s love. God’s love demonstrates his unwavering commitment to his children. The Father loves you — he so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son.

The Spirit’s communion. Communion means shared life, belonging, union. The Spirit brings you into living fellowship, right relationship with the Father and the Son.

The Trinity has always been working together to save us and to free us. The Trinity has restored creation.

This is the truth that grounds the rest of the passage. So, now let’s hear verse 11 again.

Be restored; listen to my appeal; agree with one another; live in peace. 2 Corinthians 13:11 NRSVUE

“Be restored” or “be made complete” is not a demand that they fix or renovate themselves by sheer willpower. It is an invitation to receive what God has already given. Neither is Paul encouraging them to ignore their flaws or problems. They can face their struggles in the light of what God had already done for them in Jesus Christ. They can have hope as they wrestle with life and its challenges.

That same hope and invitation is for us. We rest in God the Father’s love. Jesus has reconciled us and restored us through grace. The Holy Spirit has been given to us to bring us into communion with God. We’re called, as the Corinthians were, to receive and live out what is true because of Jesus.

Paul goes on to say, “agree with one another.” This is not an easy task for us humans. How can we ever agree with one another when we are all so different? When we look at the God who made us in his image, we see unity in diversity. We see three unique, equal Persons in one Being. Their unity is not forced; it is the harmony of love.

And our unity flows from the harmony and oneness of Father, Son, and Spirit. This unity does not come from making everyone the same. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live in perfect communion. And the Spirit shares that communion with us. So, our unity is not about sameness, but about belonging to God and therefore belonging to one another. The Holy Spirit unites us to Christ and unites us to one another.

It is Christ in us by the Spirit who gives the unity we need so we can be like-minded. This does not mean we never disagree or that we all think the same. It means the Spirit forms a deeper bond than our differences.

Paul urges them to live in peace. Peace, in Scripture, means wholeness — life set right. Jesus has already made peace through the cross.

When Paul calls the Corinthians to unity and peace, he is not asking them to create a miracle by effort alone. He is calling them to live from a miracle already given in Christ. Jesus did not simply give us an example; he gave himself. He absorbed our hostility, selfishness, violence, and everything that stands against peace. He put it to death in his own body.

And when he rose from the grave, he began the new creation. The restoration that matters most — reconciling humanity to God — has been accomplished in him. When Jesus said, “It is finished,” he announced the completion of the work we could never complete.

Unity and peace are not wishful thinking. Unity and peace are not projects of human effort. It is a declaration grounded in Jesus’ finished work. They are gifts flowing from the life of the Triune God. And again, we hear the heart of the gospel:
The grace, love, and communion of the Trinity are with us all.

Humans are now, in Christ, restored to their dignity as image-bearers of God. Humans are also restored, in Christ, to their role as stewards of God’s creation. When Paul calls the believers in Corinth to “be restored,” he is reminding them to be who they already are in Christ. We are new creations.

The Spirit empowers us, giving us the ability and strength to live our new life. The Spirit sustains us, carries us, nourishing this new life.

And as we celebrated lasty week on Pentecost, the Father has through Jesus sent us the Spirit. Pentecost is the day Christians remember the Spirit being poured out on the Church. Today, as long ago in Corinth, our oneness, love, and peace are a manifestation of the presence of God in Christ by the Holy Spirit.

We are, by the Spirit, growing up into Christ. We are in process. We will be made whole in fullness when Jesus returns in glory. For now, our real life is “hidden with Christ in God,” which means God’s work in us is real even when we cannot fully see it yet.

God’s heart is that each person come to know and believe the truth about who they are in Christ. God wants his children to see and experience this kingdom reality and to live it out. The Holy Spirit empowers us join God’s mission and to witness to others the love of the Father.

What are some ways in which you can notice and join God’s restoring work today? Where might the Father be loving, the Son be extending grace, and the Spirit be bringing communion — perhaps even in places you did not expect?

Mission is God’s work before it is ours. God is restoring and redeeming his world. We are invited to share in what he is already doing.

We can join Jesus’ mission because the grace, love, and communion of the Trinity are with us all.

The renewal, the renovation of creation is not yet fully complete. We still see cracks and dirty, peeling paint. But the foundation is secure. It has been secured in Christ. We have the assurance that what God has begun in us, he will finish. We can trust the master builder.

Until the day when all things are made new, we live in hope. And we join, with joy and humility, in what he is already doing.

God began something long ago and has been working all this time to bring it to fruition. God has done a marvelous recreation in Jesus, and he is completing it even today by his Holy Spirit.

Father, Son, and Spirit each act with distinct love, yet always together as one God. For today on Trinity Sunday, for tomorrow, for this broken and beloved world, this is our good news.

So, hear it again, one last time as promise and proclamation:
The grace, love, and communion of the Trinity are with us all.

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Small Group Discussion Questions