Life in Threes

This summer has been billed the summer of 3's. Spider-Man 3. Shrek 3. Pirates of the Caribbean 3. Rush Hour 3. Ocean's 11 3. Wait, I mean Ocean's 13. I've seen the first three movies on the list and have discovered what many other movie goers have this summer: pulling off the third of the series is often the hardest. So far, I've been disappointed with all three movies with the exception of Pirates and that might have just been because I had low expectations in the first place.

This week I also find myself facing a different type of three, the third person of the trinity, the Holy Spirit. Today is Pentecost, the day we celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit on the disciples and the beginning of the Christian church. It also happens to be Memorial Day weekend which means significantly less people in church and thus, the perfect day for the intern to preach. I took it all in stride and figured preaching on Pentecost was a good thing. Nobody really talks about the Holy Spirit and that should give me plenty to talk about. But, as I started writing the sermon this week, I realized that the reason people didn't preach on it often, was because it wasn't exactly easy to preach on.

Those of us in the church will often talk about the Holy Spirit in an offhand way. We pray for it to show up in worship on Sunday. If we're trying to make a decision we tell people to listen to the Spirit or do whatever the Spirit moves you to do. We talk about it as a feeling. But, when it actually comes to making the Holy Spirit into more of a concrete being, well, it's a challenge to say the least.

I did my best with the sermon. I struggled a bit and ironically, prayed for the Holy Spirit to work through my writing of it and give me the words I needed. And the funny thing with how writing sermons works is sometimes we just end up writing them to ourselves. In my case, my last part of the sermon was about how we needed to trust that the Holy Spirit is always there, working through our lives just like it worked through the apostles on that day on Pentecost. Whether we could feel it or not, we needed to trust that the Holy Spirit was working through our lives. For me, it was trusting that even though I wasn't feeling the best about this sermon, that the Holy Spirit could and would use it anyway.

So this morning I tackled the big three. The third person the the trinity. Three Sunday services. And it definitely wasn't as bad as the three "3" movies I saw this summer. :) The Holy Spirit did its job and it did it well.