A God Who Desires Relationship
This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan for the Feast of the Holy Trinity on May 31, 2026.
Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. Amen.
O Lord, our Lord, how exalted is your name in all the world. Out of the mouths of infants and children, your majesty is praised above the heavens... When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, what is man that you should be mindful of him, the son of man, that you should seek him out.
Today we are gathered on the Feast of the Holy Trinity. It is the one major feast of the church year where we are celebrating not a person or an event, but a teaching of the church. You might say this is going to be dry and boring. I once thought that too. It is kind of a running joke among pastors that because you do not want to mess something up on Holy Trinity Sunday and say something incorrect, the temptation is always to let the intern or the vicar preach that day, or the associate pastor, because then you don't have to worry about getting it right. That has happened to me on multiple occasions when I was invited to preach because the pastors in my life had taken vacation!
I am here with you today to tell you that the Feast of the Holy Trinity is not dry. It is not boring. It actually is enormously important! The Holy Trinity tells us something important about who God is, which is so important that it will inform how we treat one another, how we worship God, and how we react and respond to God.
Jesus gives us a command in Matthew 28: Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Holy Trinity — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — and teaching them to obey everything that Jesus has commanded us. And I am with you always to the end of the age.
For us to be bold witnesses of Jesus Christ, it is necessary for us to trust that the God who created the universe, who created all things, and who sent his Son Jesus Christ to die for us and rise, is in fact the Lord of all things. If he is not, then we are like sheep among wolves going out into a world that is uncaring and unloving. But if he is in fact the Lord, then we have nothing to worry about at all.
The Trinity Present at Creation
Consider for a moment that the Holy Trinity was present at the moment of creation. In the reading from Genesis 1 that was read for you today, you have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit present just in the first couple of verses of Genesis. God begins to create, and then he says, “Let there be light.” By his fiat he says there shall be light, and by his word there is light. He declares it to be good.
- This is the gift of creation because it shows us that the Father is there at the moment of creation, creating.
- Jesus is present there, the Son of God, the Word of God, present in the speech act of God which creates all things. All things are created, as Paul says in Colossians, in him, and through him, and for him.
We can boldly confess that the world exists by the word and action of God.
This vast universe with its billions of galaxies, each one having billions of stars, and each one having planets, asteroids, and comets and all the beautiful things that we see in pictures from places like the Hubble Space Telescope—this beautiful creation and vast creation, so vast that we could never reach the end of it.
(Literally, we could never reach the end of it! If we set off in a spaceship at the speed of light, trying to get as far as we possibly could, we would never reach the end because the universe we now know is expanding, and over that much space and time it would expand out of our reach.)
This vast universe was created by the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit broods over the formless void of chaos as God begins to create. This Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—this one God who is the maker of all things visible and invisible—created the universe and also created you.
A God of Love Who Desires Relationship
This universe is created by a God who is, in his very essence, a God of love. There is a bond of love and connection between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, so that none is above the other, and we worship all as God and Lord. That is who God is in his very being.
Why would God create this vast universe and then deign to create tiny little people like you and me on a planet circling a no-name star on the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way galaxy, one galaxy among hundreds of millions? Why would God take that time to do that? Because he wanted people who would share his image. He wanted to create people with whom he can have a relationship.
This is, in an important sense, who God is in his very essence: a God, not just a monad existing by himself without relation to anyone or anything, but a God who in his very being is connected by bonds of love and relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who then creates you so that he also can be in relationship with you.
How Shall We Live?
This is the gift of a day like the Feast of the Trinity—a day when we can remember that God, the transcendent God, the God who created the heavens and the earth, who set all of the stars in their courses and created hundreds of billions of galaxies, is in himself a god of relationship who cares about each one of us individually. He looks at you and says you are so valuable to him in this vast universe that he will send his own Son to take on human flesh, to teach us how to live before him, to die and to rise.
This is the gift of the Holy Spirit’s teaching to us as we enter the long green season next week after Pentecost. How shall we live in response to the goodness of God which he has shown us in this beautiful act of creation, this beautiful act of redemption?
- We shall live holy lives.
- We shall praise God with our words and our actions.
- We shall show the world that God is real, that his love is for us, and that his love fills us and comes through us so that all may know that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father.
May you trust this word and may you follow our Lord Jesus Christ. And may the peace of God which surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and minds strong in Christ Jesus our Lord to life everlasting. Amen.
