St Ursula's Church
Berne, Switzerland
A Church of the Anglican Communion, welcoming all who seek the Lord Jesus Christ
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| St Ursula's Church A Church of the Anglican Communion, welcoming all who seek the Lord Jesus Christ | ||||||||
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Grace, mercy and peace from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you
and also with you.
1 Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
early in the morning our song shall rise to thee;
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessèd Trinity!
2 Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee,
casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
cherubim and seraphim falling down before thee,
which wert and art and evermore shalt be.
3 Holy, holy, holy! though the darkness hide thee,
though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
only thou art holy, there is none beside thee
perfect in power, in love and purity.
4 Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
all thy works shall praise thy name in earth and sky and sea;
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessèd Trinity!
Reginald Heber
Almighty God,
to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known,
and from whom no secrets are hidden:
cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
that we may perfectly love you,
and worthily magnify your holy name;
through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
This is the day,
this is the day that the Lord has made,
that the Lord has made.
We will rejoice,
we will rejoice and be glad in it,
and be glad in it
This is the day that the Lord has made.
We will rejoice and be glad in it.
This is the day,
this is the day that the Lord has made.
God the Father forgives us in Christ and heals us by the Holy Spirit.
Let us therefore put away all anger and bitterness,
all slander and malice,
and confess our sins to God our redeemer.
Almighty God, our heavenly Father,
we have sinned against you and against our neighbour
in thought and word and deed,
through negligence, through weakness,
through our own deliberate fault.
We are truly sorry and repent of all our sins.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, who died for us,
forgive us all that is past and grant
that we may serve you in newness of life
to the glory of your name. Amen.
Almighty God, who forgives all who truly repent,
have mercy upon you, pardon and deliver you from all your sins,
confirm and strengthen you in all goodness,
and keep you in life eternal;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Glory to God in the highest,
and peace to his people on earth.
Lord God, heavenly King,
almighty God and Father,
we worship you, we give you thanks,
we praise you for your glory.
Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father,
Lord God, Lamb of God,
you take away the sin of the world:
have mercy on us;
you are seated at the right hand of the Father:
receive our prayer.
For you alone are the Holy One,
you alone are the Lord,
you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ,
with the Holy Spirit,
in the glory of God the Father. Amen.
Almighty and everlasting God,
you have given us your servants grace,
by the confession of a true faith,
to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity
and in the power of the divine majesty to worship the Unity:
keep us steadfast in this faith,
that we may evermore be defended from all adversities;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A reading from the prophet Isaiah.
12 Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? 13 Who has directed the spirit of the Lord, or as his counsellor has instructed him? 14 Whom did he consult for his enlightenment, and who taught him the path of justice? Who taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding? 15 Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust. 16 Lebanon would not provide fuel enough, nor are its animals enough for a burnt-offering. 17 All the nations are as nothing before him; they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness. 27 Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, 'My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God'? 28 Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. 29 He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. 30 Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; 31 but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
A reading from the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians.
11 Brothers and sisters, put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. 12 Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. 13 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.
1 Thou, whose almighty word
chaos and darkness heard,
and took their flight;
hear us, we humbly pray,
and where the Gospel-day
sheds not its glorious ray,
let there be light.
2 Thou, who didst come to bring
on thy redeeming wing
healing and sight,
health to the sick in mind,
sight to the inly blind,
O now to all mankind
let there be light.
3 Spirit of truth and love,
life-giving, holy Dove,
speed forth thy flight;
move on the water's face,
bearing the lamp of grace,
and in earth's darkest place
let there be light.
4 Holy and blessèd Three,
glorious Trinity,
Wisdom, Love, Might;
boundless as ocean's tide
rolling in fullest pride,
through the earth far and wide
let there be light.
J Marriot
Hear the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Matthew
Glory to you, O Lord
16 The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.'
This is the Gospel of the Lord
Praise to you, O Christ
Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in One God. The prayer most often recited by Jews begins: 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One'. The Creed proclaimed by Christians begins: 'We believe in One God'. And Muslims constantly repeat: 'There is no god but God'.
But Christians also say something else about God. The Christian faith teaches that God is Three-in-One, a Tri-Unity or Trinity. The Creed begins 'We believe in One God', but goes on to speak first of God the Father, then of God the Son and then of God the Holy Spirit. This threefoldness in God is the focus of our worship and thinking today, Trinity Sunday.
It may surprise you that the word 'Trinity' does not occur in the Bible and that there was a long, complex process before the early Church agreed the doctrine of the Trinity. To Jews and Muslims, this suggests that the idea of the Trinity is a departure from true belief in One God. And of course for atheists it is an elaborate dressing-up of the basic error of believing in God at all. But Christians have continued over the centuries to teach that God is indeed Three-in-One and that this is not a fanciful idea we have dreamt up, but a profound truth that God has led us to recognise: a wonderful discovery, not a bizarre invention.
So why do Christians believe that God is Three-in-One, and why does it matter?
Christians did not start to call God 'Trinity' because they were bored of the old way of talking about God and wanted to jazz it up with something a bit different, a bit of mystery and paradox. The earliest Christians were all Jews and took it for granted that there is only one God. But they had to make sense of their belief in the One God in light of the new thing that they had experienced: that the One God, the Creator, had now come to them in the flesh in the human being Jesus of Nazareth, and then through the sending of the Holy Spirit. It was not that God had never communicated before; through Moses and many other prophets God had spoken to Israel. But with Jesus and the Holy Spirit something quite new had happened; God had not just sent a messenger but had come in person. In the sending of Jesus and of the Spirit God had given himself; God had become present in the world in a new way.
A common response to this is to say: well, maybe we are talking here of different aspects of the one God, different faces God shows the world, but underneath these different aspects God remains fundamentally One. Think of the complexity of being a human being in relation to different people. To my wife I am husband; to my children I am Father; to my colleagues I am a colleague. But I am one person not three. Is that what the doctrine of the Trinity is saying: that there are three key ways God has related to the world, but that underneath there is just the One undifferentiated God, just as I am one person underneath my different roles?
No, the doctrine of the Trinity is not saying that. It's not saying that God has revealed himself successively as Father, Son and Spirit (but underneath is just One). It's saying that in this new presence of God in the world through Jesus and the Spirit the disciples see into the very heart of God, the very life of God; and they see there the loving relationship of distinct persons: the love that goes between the Father and the Son through the Spirit, constantly outpoured, constantly received. While I may unite within myself husband, father, colleague and many other roles, these are not distinct persons in relationship with each other. But the being of God is different from ours, far richer than anything we can imagine, and within the being of God there is the relationship in love of the distinct divine persons, Father, Son and Spirit.
It's worth reflecting here on the famous and very simple words from the First Letter of John: 'God is love'. What do we mean when we say that God is love? This is a lot more than saying that God is loving. We might all hope that, at least on our better days, we are loving people. Take your name and put it before the words 'is loving': 'John is loving'; 'Mary is loving'. True at least some of the time, we hope. But put your name before the words: 'is love': 'John is love'; 'Mary is love'. That's not so easy; in fact it doesn't make sense. But we can say 'God is love' and that's not just because God is more loving than we are. The point is that love is about relationship. Where there is no relationship there is no love. For there to be love, there must be both one to give love and one to receive love. Love goes between persons. That is why I cannot say of myself 'I am love'. On my own, I am not love, although in relationship to others I can give and receive love.
But what cannot be true of you or me as individuals is true of God, because God is love. God is not just very loving towards other beings. God is actually love within God's very self; God is a relationship of love within God's very self. Within God there is a giving and receiving of love. This flow of love is between the persons we call the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This flow of love within God has always been there. It is the origin of everything that is. Everything else that is comes from the love that God has always been.
This truth was not revealed – bang! – in one go to the disciples. Jesus did not sit them down and explain the doctrine of the Trinity to them on the first day he called them. But this underlying reality of what God is – the eternal loving unity of Father, Son and Spirit – was present in all that Jesus was, said, and did and in all that the Spirit did in and through the disciples. Think of the baptism of Jesus, when the Holy Spirit descends upon him and the Father declares from heaven: 'This is my beloved Son.' That is the eternal Trinity, breaking out into this world as the story of Jesus gets under way. And so it went on.
So from earliest days Christians spoke of God the Father; Jesus, God's Son; and the Holy Spirit of God; and they baptized new disciples in the name of the One God, Father, Son and Spirit. You will not find the word 'Trinity' in today's readings from 2 Corinthians and Matthew, but in both of them and in many other passages we see an emerging pattern of threefoldness in the way God is described. And, gradually, Christian teachers developed the language of the Trinity, the eternal threefoldness in unity of God, to describe the revelation and the experience of God found in the New Testament.
That was an attempt to explain how Christians came to believe that God is Trinity. But so what? Why does it matter?
The doctrine of the Trinity matters because it tells us that the source and bedrock of all reality is love, divine love and we are invited to live out of that love. Before anything else was, there was divine love. Everything else flows from that creative love. That love is still the bedrock of reality, holding all things together. And it always will be. That may of course be very hard to believe at times, both because of the awful things that happen in the world and the painful things that we experience and which make us question whether there is any kind of God at all, let alone a God of perfect, eternal love. But the love that God is is the love we see in Jesus, a love that heals and makes new, that restores and forgives, a love that embraces suffering and is with us in all things. But not a love that zaps the world into order and ends its chaos with a simple command. That is not the kind of divine love that was revealed in Jesus.
The love of God the Trinity is a love that constantly opens itself up to us, drawing us into the same dynamic of giving and receiving love. God sent Jesus and the Spirit to open up to the world the circle of divine love and to call us to receive that love and learn to give it. And just as God's sending of Jesus involved suffering, as we are drawn into the circle of divine love we too will share in something of that suffering, because suffering is the cost of love in this world. As we know, this world is full of pain and sickness, misery and heartbreak, injustice and violence. In this world the path of love – the kind of love we see in Jesus – is a path of suffering, but if we follow this path in the company of Jesus and in the fellowship of God's Spirit, it is also the path on which we will know the glory of God, who by raising Jesus from the dead has promised to make us and all things new in him.
So today we celebrate God the Holy Trinity. This ancient but ever new doctrine teaches us to open ourselves up to the God who as Father, Son and Spirit is eternal love and draws us into that love, to know its glory and also to accept the pain that comes with loving. We are called to live that love in our homes, in the fellowship of the Church and in ever wider circles in the world, wherever the love of God draws us.
Thank God, there is so much of that love already at work here at St Ursula's in many different ways, rich and costly love, reflecting the love of the God we worship, the God who is love. But that love is a restless, creative power always calling us to go further. So we pray that the love of God the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit, will be poured out on us: on us who often struggle to know what love means, who sometimes want to keep love at arm's length, who constantly fail to love as we should. We pray that we will be drawn deeper into the love which was before all things, which is today, and which will be forever.
Revd David Marshall
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is,
seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven,
was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
We come to the throne of grace, and pray to almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit for mercy and grace.
Father of heaven, whose love profound
a ransom for our souls has found:
We pray for the world, created by your love,
for its nations and governments,
for its societies divided by social differences and racial intolerance,
for its leaders tempted by self-interest and a craving for power,
for its people afflicted with a pandemic they do not understand,
for its environment endangered by people who do not listen to its heartbeat.
Extend to all who live in your world your peace, your pardoning love, your mercy and your grace.
Loving God
We plead before your throne in heaven.
Almighty Son, incarnate Word,
our Prophet, Priest, Redeemer, Lord:
We pray for the Church, created for your glory,
for its ministry to reflect those works of yours,
for its work in uniting your wandering and straying children,
for our bishops, Robert and David, giving vision and leadership,
for Helen, for David and for Archana, bringing your gospel to this place,
for the care we have for each other in these days of isolation.
Extend to us who are your body here and now your heavenly salvation, true growth, your mercy and your grace.
Loving God
We plead before your throne in heaven.
Eternal Spirit, by whose breath
the soul is raised from sin and death:
We pray for families and individuals, created in your image,
for those who are bewildered, unable to work, frightened or lonely,
for those who feel bereaved through the loss of relations or friends,
for those far away and those we do not know who are suffering unprayed for,
for the sick and the dying known to us, for those in this congregation,
whom we name out loud or in the silence of our hearts.
Breathe on them the breath of life, give them comfort and bring them to your mercy and your grace.
Loving God
We plead before your throne in heaven.
Thrice holy! Father, Spirit, Son,
Mysterious Godhead, Three in One:
We pray for ourselves,
for your Church, for all whom we remember before you,
for health workers, for public servants, for the mission and aid workers in the charities we support,
for those in the world around us who by simple acts of service and of sacrifice
are doing your will and shining forth your love.
Bind us together in love and breathe your spirit on us, so that we reflect your mercy and your grace.
Loving God
We plead before your throne in heaven.
Bring us all, with all those who have passed this way before us, to bow before your throne in heaven, to receive life and pardon, mercy and grace for all eternity, as we worship you, holy, holy, holy Lord, whose glory fills heaven and earth.
Merciful Father
Accept these prayers for the sake of your Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen
Peace to you from God our heavenly Father.
Peace from his Son Jesus Christ who is our peace.
Peace from the Holy Spirit, the life-giver.
The peace of the triune God be always with you.
And also with you.
1 Father of heaven, whose love profound
a ransom for our souls hath found,
before thy throne we sinners bend,
to us thy pardoning love extend.
2 Almighty Son, incarnate Word,
our Prophet, Priest, Redeemer, Lord,
before thy throne we sinners bend,
to us thy saving grace extend.
3 Eternal Spirit, by whose breath
the soul is raised from sin and death,
before thy throne we sinners bend,
to us thy quickening power extend.
4 Thrice Holy! Father, Spirit, Son;
mysterious Godhead, Three in One,
before thy throne we sinners bend,
grace, pardon, life, to us extend.
E Cooper
As our Saviour has taught us, so we pray
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done, on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power,
and the glory are yours now and for ever.
Amen.
Almighty and eternal God,
you have revealed yourself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
and live and reign in the perfect unity of love:
hold us firm in this faith,
that we may know you in all your ways
and evermore rejoice in your eternal glory,
who are three Persons yet one God,
now and for ever. Amen.
1 We have a gospel to proclaim,
good news for all throughout the earth;
the gospel of a Saviour's name:
we sing his glory, tell his worth.
2 Tell of his birth at Bethlehem
not in a royal house or hall
but in a stable dark and dim,
the Word made flesh, a light for all.
3 Tell of his death at Calvary,
hated by those he came to save,
in lonely suffering on the Cross;
for all he loved his life he gave.
4 Tell of that glorious Easter morn:
empty the tomb, for he was free.
He broke the power of death and hell
that we might share his victory.
5 Tell of his reign at God's right hand,
by all creation glorified.
He sends his Spirit on his Church
to live for him, the Lamb who died.
6 Now we rejoice to name him King:
Jesus is Lord of all the earth.
This gospel-message we proclaim:
we sing his glory, tell his worth.
Edward J Burns
God the Holy Trinity make you strong in faith and love,
defend you on every side,
and guide you in truth and peace;
and the blessing of God Almighty,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be with you
and remain with you now and always. Amen.
Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
In the name of Christ. Amen.
| We hope that you enjoyed the online service and
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