Exhortation, June 20

According to the traditional church calendar, we are several Sundays into Trinity season. Trinity season begins with Trinity Sunday, which is the first Sunday after Pentecost, and Trinity season stretches through the summer and into the autumn, until the beginning of Advent. It is the longest of the seasons of the church calendar, comprising twenty-some Sundays.

Trinity season is sometimes seen as an oddity in the church calendar. The other festivals celebrate the events of redemptive history: Advent and Christmas memorialize the incarnation; Lent and Holy Week focus attention on the sufferings and death of Jesus; Easter celebrates Jesus?Eresurrection; Ascension gives thanks for the exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of the Father, and Pentecost the coming of the Spirit to the church. But Trinity season does not have any specific event in view. It is the longest season in the calendar, and it is devoted to a doctrine.

The Christians who established the calendar that is used throughout much of the church, however, were wise in establishing the season of Trinity. Though it is not a memorial of historical events, Trinity season points us to the significance of the historical events celebrated in the rest of the church year. Trinity season shows us that the historical events are not only about our salvation. The historical events celebrated in the rest of the year are the revelation of the character of God. We move from the incarnation, when the Father sends the Son, to Pentecost, when the Father and Son send the Spirit. Those events secured our redemption, but Trinity shows us that the nature of God is unfolded in the historical events of Advent, Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost.

Why is Trinity season so long? No doubt, those who formulated the church calendar believed that we needed a lot of time to meditate on the Trinity. But the point is not so much to help us formulate our doctrine of the Trinity more precisely. The point instead is to give us time, nearly half of the Sundays of the year, to consider how the Trinity is intertwined with all life, doctrine, and practice.

For instance, today?s sermon from Blake Purcell will focus on issues surrounding missions, and these issues are fundamentally about the Trinity. The Trinity reveals Himself in mission, which derives from the Latin word for ?send.?E The ?missions?Eor sendings of the Son and Spirit in history reveal the inner life of God, where the Son is begotten from the Father eternally and the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and Son. As Augustine put it, the missions in history reveal the processions in the eternal life of God.

The Church?s mission, in turn, reflects, is empowered by, and participates in the missions of the Son and Spirit. Jesus made it clear that the church?s mission is modeled on His own: ?As the Father has sent me,?EHe said, ?so send I you.?E The church?s obedience to the mission from the Son reveals the Son?s obedience to the mission given by the Father. The church?s mission is, further, empowered by the Spirit, who has been sent from the Father and Son. The church can fulfill her mission only by the power of the Spirit.

But even more than that, the mission of the church participates in the mission of the Spirit. The Spirit has been poured out on all flesh, in order to renew the creation. The prophets of the Old Testament promised that the Spirit would be poured out to transform the wilderness of Israel into a garden, and as the church carries out her ministries of Word and Sacrament, she is accomplishing precisely that. The church works out her own and the world?s salvation as God works in her to will and to do according to His good pleasure. The mission of the church occurs when the church is caught up in the mission of the Spirit, which reveals the eternal procession of the Spirit from the Father and Son.