This Sunday is Father’s Day, so all the men at church on Sunday will be given a bar of chocolate to celebrate. The Bible puts huge significance on the role of fathers in bringing up their children in the fear of the Lord, teaching them the truth, disciplining them when needed and training them for life. We’ll hear something of that role in our reading from Proverbs today and we’ll pray for dads in the service.
But today is also Trinity Sunday, the one Sunday in the year when the Church around the world specifically remembers and celebrates the Trinitarian nature of God. Actually, that’s something we need to remember and celebrate every day, not just one Sunday a year. Our God is a loving union of 3 persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Our knowledge of God from the scriptures and our experience of God in our daily lives is Trinitarian too.
So we come to the Father, through faith in the Son who died for us, and through the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Through that faith, Jesus’ Father becomes our father, Jesus himself becomes our brother, and the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in us. And all that is possible because God, the glorious Trinity, loved the world so much, that the Father sent his Son to live amongst us in the power of the Holy Spirit, so that all those who believe in him may not die but have eternal life: Eternal life with God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
God is not solitary, lonely, unapproachable or distant. He is 3 persons united in love. But in his love, he has reached out to us and brought us in to his family, the family from which every family on earth derives its name; the family which shows us what it means to be a true father and an obedient child. So on this Father’s Day, as we remember and celebrate our human fathers, let’s also rejoice in our Heavenly Father, and the joy of being adopted into his triune family.