The Jubilee events meant that St Luke's made the choice to shuffle the church year back a week. You'll be glad to hear that it only affects a couple of weeks so Christmas hasn't disappeared into 2023!
What this has meant is that, in Tittensor, the Christian festival of Trinity coincides with Father's Day this Sunday 19th June. Trinity has been around for many hundreds of years whereas Father's Day is an invention from the USA in the early 20th century, but the two can be viewed together.
Most of us will have some male role models in our lives. Some will have been a wonderfully positive influence, others not so. Some will have been there for us, others not, sometimes from choice but also sometimes from tragic circumstance. In most cases, men will have simply tried to do their best, succeeding or failing along the way, and sometimes both.
As the old saying goes, you can choose your friends but you can't choose your relatives, so experiences will vary greatly and, certainly as children, we will not have had much choice at all.
The concept of the Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit forming one God, is a difficult one. It took the Christian Church hundreds of years and some fierce battles to sort its way through to the idea and is still debated. For different parts of the Church, it is possible to see a different emphasis, with the Holy Spirit seen as driving all one's actions and thoughts at all times by one section, whereas others might see that long reflection on Jesus's words offers guidance on how to exercise free will. Another part of the Church might see the instruction of the Father as being the most important and will turn to the words uttered by God in scripture as absolute rules to be obeyed.
A Christian might find themselves at different times taking up any one or more of these positions. There are times when 'what should I do' seems to have no answers and it is understandable to turn to the Bible, which after all contains the lives and decisions made by thousands of people, many struggling with similar questions. There are also times when a Christian might ask, 'what does Jesus say about this?' That too is understandable: here is the man and God without sin, who has tried to teach us how to live up to our potential as sons of God, made in his image. Then there are times when even those lessons, written in the Bible, don't seem to be helping. At those moments, opening your heart and mind up and praying for the Holy Spirit to enter you, to guide you and to give you a sense of the right thing to do, can be the way forward in life.
Perhaps all we can do is to remember that we do see God as a Trinity. None of the aspects that we think of as the Father, Son or Holy Spirit has the upper hand or is of greater or lesser importance. Opening up to God is a matter of opening up to all these influences; that's tough and requires reflection. There is no straightforward book of instructions that says, 'if this, then do that'. There is no voice in your head giving you robotic instructions that you can follow as an automaton. Jesus did not cover every subject in detail in his teachings. Therefore we must be prudent; we should read our Bible to put ourselves in the right frame of mind but maybe not for a written instruction from three or four thousand years ago; we should read and think of the person of Jesus but try to think what we should do to live up to his hopes, whilst realising that he knows we are not perfect; we should open ourselves up in quiet, uninterrupted moments when we hope that Holy Spirit can piece us together better than we could manage alone. We should pray for guidance and, like those Dads mentioned above, try to do our best. Amen.