So, we’ve been marking time by acknowledging the redeeming birth, life, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ our Savior, and the gift of the Holy Spirit who, living in the believer, continues the work of Christ across space and time on down through the generations. What do we do now?

Sometimes when I get to this point of the church year calendar, I feel a little let down. All the fuss has cooled a bit, and now we have months and months of ‘ordinary time.’ Yawn. Right? So wrong!

For the Christian living in Easter light, there really is no such thing as ordinary time. There are only times when we are oriented towards God, living worshipfully in His ways and according to His word, or there is lack of life, wasted time, and indeed even nothingness when we turn our backs on Him.

How appropriate for us to kick off ‘ordinary time’ with Trinity Sunday, then, because this Sunday roots all our lives in knowing God as Trinity. The person of Christ has been known and tasted in our midst, and now we remember from last week that Christ has given us His Spirit to continue leading us into all truth, leading us towards God. Pentecost, then, leads directly on to acknowledging the person of the Trinity: the Father who initiates all things, especially our salvation, the Son who came as one of us to inaugurate that work, and the Spirit, who keeps leading us back to our Savior and thence to His Father.

As early theologian St. Basil the Great says, “as the Father is made visible in the Son, so also the Son is recognized in the Spirit…If we say that worship offered in the Son (the Truth) is worship offered in the Father’s Image, we can say the same about worship offered in the Spirit since the Spirit in Himself reveals the divinity of the Lord. The Holy Spirit cannot be divided from the Father and the Son in worship. If you remain outside the Spirit, you cannot worship at all, and if you are in Him you cannot separate Him from God.” (St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, 26 § 64.)

Trinity Sunday roots all our time (both the liturgical following of Christ’s life as well as ordinary time), in the person of God, from whom come all good gifts, and to whom we are meant to walk. And this God is the One to whom we now have access through our Great High Priest and our Advocate. In fact, the early Church often described Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit as the two hands of the Father, lovingly reaching out to the world to bring us to Himself. Christ shows us the Father, and now we have the Spirit showing us Christ, keeping us connected to the Father—displaying the Trinity.

We get to know the Triune God! What an amazing and humbling thought! What if the joy of that knowledge were to so mark us, so form us that we allow God’s life to spill out all over the place in our lives, homes, relationships?

May we adore Him rightly this Sunday, then, for right worship orders right living. May we taste the joys of membership in the Father’s House as we worship, contemplate, think on His things, and eat of Him. And may we get to work this summer, allowing our ordinary times to be marked by receiving the Trinity, being drawn up into God’s life, and bringing along everything else in our path.

Story by Kirsten Guidero