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This month we celebrate two great feasts of the Christian Year. Sunday 11th is the Feast of Pentecost, and then a week later Trinity Sunday. Both in very different ways set us challenges. The former poses us with challenges as to how we are to live the Christian life. While the latter presents us with a challenge of a more intellectual nature.

There is a lovely little hymn that goes like this:

Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Break me, melt me, mould me, fill me.
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.

This accepts that we have already received the Spirit through our Baptism and Confirmation, but that each and everyone of us needs renewal. We need to be continually revived by the Spirit if we are to show forth in our lives the love of God and the teachings of His Son. As we celebrate once again the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples that first Pentecost, and marvel at the transformation that that event had upon their lives, let us think about what it is that the Spirit brought to them and brings to us. St Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, lists the fruits of the Spirit: 'Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self-control.' And therein lay the challenges with which allowing the Spirit into our lives presents us. The question we have to ask ourselves is 'How are the fruits of the Spirit shown in us today?'

We are told that the disciples upon receiving the Spirit began to do what Jesus had commanded them - to go out into the world and preach the Gospel. Suddenly after hiding away they went out into what they knew to be a hostile world to proclaim that Jesus was the Son of God, the promised Messiah. Yet, the quality which is missing from Paul's list and which we might think they most needed is courage. But, of course courage they did have. So, from where did it come? Their courage grew out of the fruits that Paul lists. Being full of those fruits they no longer knew fear. Being full of love for God and their fellow beings, in the joy of knowing that God loved them, they were able to show forth in their lives kindness, goodness, patience and above all peace towards those whom they formerly feared. It was because they allowed the Spirit into their lives that they were able to surrender themselves to the will of God. And that of course is the ultimate challenge of Pentecost.

What then of the Trinity? The Trinity is a problem for many Christians. Large numbers, I guess, avoid thinking about it at all; while others get very worried about not understanding something which is at the very centre of our faith. The various elements of the teaching are not difficult. We find it easy to think of the God who is the creator (the Father), and of God coming to live amongst as a man (the Son); and of the God we experience in our everyday lives (the Spirit). Also we can cope with the idea of there being only one God. Our problem comes when we try to put these ideas together. So why do we try to put them together?

Towards the end of St Matthew's gospel there is the command to go and teach all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The Trinity mystery - that it is beyond our knowledge without revelation. We believe God has given us a glimpse into his inner being, described as 'one God existing in three persons and one substance'. How this can be we really don't need to ponder upon to deeply, and we certainly don't need to let ourselves get tangled up in a web of intellectual and theological debates about it. What we need to do is to be still and absorb God - creator, saviour and guide - all knowing and all loving.

Trinity Sunday then is no real challenge at all, and certainly need not be the difficult problem we imagine. The very real and difficult challenge is that posed by Pentecost. Trinity Sunday is a time for quiet reflection when we rest in God's presence. Pentecost is a call to action.

Fr Graham