Trinity Sunday

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, a celebration of the three-person nature of God. The lessons are not chosen to tell a story, but to show the different personalities of the triune godhead. Our first lesson from Isaiah contains the magnificent depiction of the Creator as a great king whose robe flows out to the very corners, filling the temple completely.

The same image of greatness is echoed in the psalm with the mighty voice of the Lord “flashing forth like flame…thundering over the waters...[and] breaking the cedars of Lebanon.”

But there is another important image we should not miss in the passage from Isaiah, the burning coal. On seeing the holiness of the Lord, Isaiah is made aware of his own impurity, of his being unworthy of even being in the presence of the Almighty. But God himself provides Isaiah with a way out of this predicament. He sends a seraph with a burning coal to touch to the prophet’s lips and cleans away all his sins, thus making Isaiah free to be in relationship with the Lord and to serve him.

This is a preview of what the second person of the Trinity does for all of us on the cross at Calvary. Our sins are cleansed from us by God’s action, not by anything we do or deserve, but by a unilateral act of God in trinity. The Father condemns us by his own holiness, the Son redeems us by his sacrifice, and the Spirit leads us into relationship.

— Charles Fehrenbach