In my office, I have this bookmark hanging up [show to congregation]. You may even recognize it. Last spring, Fred Greene’s family created and gave out bookmarks at his memorial service at the church. There are two sides to the bookmark. The back is a poem by Mary Oliver called “In Blackwater Woods.” The front is a picture of Fred with his name, the day he was born, the day he died, a message from his family, and a quote from the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. The quote reads, “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” I have this bookmark next to my mirror in my office. I don’t pass it every time I’m in my office, but I pass it often enough to have memorized the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s words: “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” Fred was such a beautiful embodiment of kindness. The photo on his bookmark even embodies his compassionate, loving, and attentive presence–it’s somewhat amazing and surprising that a 2D, flat image could convey so much personality and so much warmth. 

“And surely I am with you always til the end of the age.” That’s how the Gospel of Matthew ends his account of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. And what we call today - Trinity Sunday - is a kind of culmination of a liturgical cycle of the church that I want to trace out for you for a moment cause it frames the year differently from our secular calendar. So it all began on Nov 30, 2025 at the start of Advent when we began preparing for what was to come, for who was to come which was God in the form of a baby which we celebrated with the feast of Christmas and then there were the 12 days of Christmas which culminated in Epiphany this revealing more fully of who Jesus was which cam I might add by way of foreigners from a strange land, the Magi, and through the weeks of epiphany we had scriptures that continued to reveal at deeper and deeper levels who this babe, this son, this person Jesus really was, i.e. the Holy One of God, the Christ and at just about the moment when we’ve come alongside Jesus as the Great teacher and healer, he’s transfigured and glorified on the mountaintop and then boom Lent arrived, February 18, 2026, on Ash Wednesday and suddenly there’s talk about ashes and death and the stripping away of all that glory as the scriptures moved us toward his impending suffering and death. He is scapegoated by the religious leaders and the civic authorities and the people go along as we witness his murder and his death on Good Friday followed thankfully gloriously by his resurrection on Easter, April 5th this year. Then our scriptures take us through the 40 days of his resurrection appearances before his Ascension and 10 days later Pentecost which we celebrated last Sunday when the Holy Spirit comes down and infuses the people and births the church, that’s where the body went. And it is from that narrative we receive the notion of God as one yes but also 3 somehow, that God is Father Above and God is Son among us and God is also manifest as Spirit within us and around us which brings us to today, Trinity Sunday. That’s the essential story, that’s what it’s all about. 

The 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, otherwise known as Rumi, wrote words that speak beautifully for what happened on Pentecost to the disciples of Jesus.  He wrote:  “There is some kiss we want with our whole lives:  the touch of spirit on the body.”  This kiss of the spirit is what the disciples received that day and it transformed them from a frightened huddling band of misfits into a community of God, inspired by Christ, to share His Spirit of life and healing and love.  It has been said that Christ did not come to make bad people good but he came to make dead people alive. We in the church often frame the Christian faith as though it was essentially about moral progress, about becoming better people through moral improvement. But Christ was much more about spiritual transformation, about bringing deadened people to life, awakening the numb and sleep walking, helping them to feel again, love again, see clearly by tethering them back into God, from whom they had become lost.  

The Apostle Paul who wrote and passed on the first words written by the followers of Jesus, when it was still a Jewish sect, was not one of the 12 Jewish disciples of Jesus who accompanied Jesus through his earthly life but rather he was a devout conservative Jew who believed Jesus and his followers were a danger to the tradition and needed to be stamped out, especially as the Jesus followers seemed undeterred by his execution.  Paul oversaw the stoning of Stephen, the first martyr of the faith, holding the jackets of the people who threw the stones. Paul was on his way to find, capture and persecute more followers of Jesus when he had a profound religious experience that knocked him to the ground, blinded him, and he heard a voice say - “Paul, Paul, why do you persecute me?” Paul asked who it was - “I am Jesus the one you are persecuting. Get up off the ground, go into the city, and you will be told what to do.” So Paul goes into the city to the very people he was looking for in the first place but blinded and vulnerable. The disciples of Jesus who received him were not a little stunned because they knew exactly who this dangerous man was, but they received him nonetheless, prayed over him to give him his sight back and Paul became one of them… and not just one of them, but in fact the most vocal, the most influential of all the followers of Jesus