Go and Receive a Lot

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1 The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. 2 “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” 4 So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran. 5 He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Harran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there. 6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD. 9 Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev. (Genesis 12:1-9 NIV)

I have been blessed to live in many parts of the state, and once out-of-state for school, and all have been wonderful in their own regard. Some areas have struck me as places where not all the kids want to stay in, and kids that would never ever ever consider living any place else. Among those are kids who have never left the area. I was so amazed to take university students from the Rio Grande Valley to San Antonio or Hunt, Texas, that had never left the Valley. Their excitement was awesome! I myself, considered Kingsville back in my day, as a paradise of sorts. I had a creek to spend my days; family members near enough to see on a regular basis, especially the only grandmother I ever knew and both of my grandfathers. When the economy in Kingsville went south and my Dad was unemployed and trying new job after new job, when he finally got a good job in Houston, Texas, it was not a complete surprise that we were having to move from paradise to the evil empire of the north. This passage introduces us to Father Abraham, who is invited by God to move. Away. From his country. From his people. From his father's household. To an unknown land. v There is an argument to be made that Genesis 12:1 is the most consequential sentence in all of human history. Not because of its length — it is a single command with a single destination that is not yet named. But because of what hangs on it.

Everything that follows in the biblical story — the covenant, the exodus, the prophets, the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, Pentecost, the church reaching to the ends of the earth — hangs on this moment. One man. One call. One act of obedience in response to a promise he could not yet see fulfilled. And through that one man, all peoples on earth would be blessed.

It begins with a word that God has been saying to his people ever since: Go.

Leave What You Know

The call God gives Abram has a shape that is worth sitting with, because it is the shape of almost every genuine call God gives. He does not begin with the destination. He begins with the departure. v “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”

Three things are named in what Abram must leave, and each one is more intimate than the last. His country — the geography that has shaped him, the land he knows how to read. His people — the community that has formed his identity, the faces that have always been there. His father’s household — the inner circle, the family, the root system that holds a person in place in the world.

And the destination? The land I will show you. Not named. Not mapped. Not explained in advance. Abram is being asked to release his grip on everything that has given his life its stability and shape — and to walk toward a place God has not yet described, on the strength of a promise God has not yet proved.

This is the grammar of faith in every generation. God rarely gives us the whole map. He gives us the next step and the promise, and asks us to move. The call always costs something. It always involves leaving something behind. And what it asks us to leave is almost always the thing we were most holding onto for security.

Abram was seventy-five years old. This was not a young man’s adventure. This was the uprooting of an entire established life, at an age when most people are settling in rather than setting out. And yet: “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.” No argument recorded. No negotiation. He went.

The Promise That Makes the Going Possible

The call would be unbearable without the promise. And the promise God makes to Abram is staggering in its scope.

I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great. You will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you. And — the line that reaches all the way to Pentecost and beyond — all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

Seven times in these few verses the word bless or blessing appears. The God who calls Abram out is not a God who takes and takes and takes. He is a God who gives — lavishly, expansively, with a generosity that runs further than Abram could possibly imagine standing in Harran at seventy-five. The blessing that begins with one man is designed to flow outward until it reaches every people on earth.

This is the great missionary promise of the Old Testament, and it is the promise that Jesus tells his disciples they are standing inside when he sends them to the ends of the earth in his name. Paul quotes it directly when he argues in Galatians that the gospel was announced to Abraham in advance. The blessing of Abraham has come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost on all flesh is the fulfillment of the promise God made to one man on one day in Harran.

Abram could not see any of that. He could not trace the arc from his departure to Calvary to the upper room to the ends of the earth. He only had the promise. And the promise was enough — because the one who made it is the one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

For Reflection

The passage ends with a quiet and beautiful detail. As Abram moves through the promised land — still occupied by Canaanites, still not his — he builds altars. At Shechem, where God appears to him and renews the promise. At Bethel. He pitches his tent and builds an altar and calls on the name of the Lord.

He does not build a house. He pitches a tent. He is a pilgrim in the land he has been promised, and he knows it. The altar is not a claim of possession. It is an act of worship in the middle of not-yet — a declaration that the God who called him is present and worthy of praise even before the promise has been fully delivered.

That is the posture this passage leaves us with. Most of us are living in some version of the not-yet. We have heard a call. We have received a promise. But the land is still occupied by other things, the destination is still only partially visible, and the distance between where we are and where God is taking us is still real and sometimes long.

Abram’s answer to that in-between space was to pitch a tent and build an altar. To keep moving and keep worshiping. To hold the promise of God in one hand and the reality of the not-yet in the other, and to call on the name of the Lord in the gap between them.

That is still the faithful response. Go, as the Lord has told you. Build your altar in the not-yet. And trust that the blessing promised to one man in Harran is still flowing — through you, toward all peoples, all the way to the ends of the earth.

PRAYER: Lord, give us the faith of Abram — to go when you call, to leave what you ask us to leave, and to build our altars in the not-yet, trusting that your blessing is already flowing further than we can see. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Identify one step God has been calling you to take that you have been holding back from — one “go” you have been postponing — and this week take it, as Abram did, on the strength of the promise rather than the sight of the destination.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Like Abraham, go to where God leads you!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

The God of the Living and The As Good As Dead

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13 For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. 14 If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. 15 For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. 16 For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, 17 as it is written, "I have made you the father of many nations")—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18 Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become "the father of many nations," according to what was said, "So numerous shall your descendants be." 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. 20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 Therefore his faith "was reckoned to him as righteousness." 23 Now the words, "it was reckoned to him," were written not for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, 25 who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. (Romans 4:13-25 NRS)

Dear Friend, is your Check Engine light on or off? I have a dear friend, who, like me, is of a certain age and not too long ago as we spoke to catch up on the telephone, he said that he knows that his Check Engine Light is on now and must handle his body accordingly. This passage will address those who are living and as the scripture itself says, those who are as good as dead. Regardless of where you think you are, God is with you!

Abraham was a hundred years old. His body, Paul says with characteristic bluntness, was “as good as dead.” Sarah’s womb was barren. The biological possibility of what God had promised had closed decades ago. By every measurable standard, the promise was over before it started.

And Abraham believed anyway.

Paul holds this up not as an interesting historical footnote but as the defining portrait of what faith looks like — and as the key that unlocks who the Spirit’s promise at Pentecost is actually for. The God who kept his word to a hundred-year-old man with a barren wife is the same God who poured out his Spirit on all flesh in Jerusalem. The God who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” is the God whose Spirit is still being poured out today.

This is a Pentecost passage because Pentecost is the fulfillment of a promise that, by all human reckoning, should never have arrived.

Grace Wide Enough for All His Descendants

Paul’s argument in this passage has a Pentecost shape to it that we can miss if we read it only as doctrinal instruction about justification. He is making a point about who the promise is for.

The promise to Abraham, Paul insists, did not come through the law. It came through faith. And this matters enormously for the scope of who inherits it. If the promise required law-observance, it would be confined to those who kept the law — a bounded, manageable, culturally specific group. But because the promise rests on grace received through faith, it is open to “all his descendants — not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham.”

All his descendants. All who share his faith. The promise is as wide as faith itself, which is as wide as every person who has ever looked at an impossible situation and chosen to believe that the God who gives life to the dead is still able to do what he has promised.

This is the Pentecost heartbeat. When Joel prophesied and Peter announced that the Spirit would be poured out on all flesh — sons and daughters, young and old, slave and free — they were saying the same thing Paul says here about Abraham’s descendants. The promise was never meant to stay small. It was always meant to reach every nation, every background, every person who comes to God the way Abraham came: not with credentials, but with faith in the one who raises the dead.

Hoping Against Hope

Paul gives us one of the most luminous phrases in all of his letters: “hoping against hope, he believed.”

Hoping against hope. It is the faith that persists after every human reason for hoping has been exhausted. It is not denial — Abraham did not pretend his body was young or Sarah’s womb was not barren. Paul is careful to say he “considered” these things. He looked at the facts. He did not flinch from them. And then he believed anyway, because his faith was not anchored in circumstances but in the character of God.

He grew strong in his faith, Paul says, as he gave glory to God. This is the counterintuitive movement of biblical faith: it does not grow strong by ignoring difficulty. It grows strong by redirecting attention — from what is impossible in the situation to what is possible for God. The giving of glory is not a feeling. It is a choice. A deliberate reorientation of the gaze from the barren womb to the God who opens wombs and raises the dead.

The Pentecost connection here is direct. The Spirit was poured out on a community of one hundred and twenty people who had just watched their Lord crucified and buried. Every human reason to hope had been extinguished on Good Friday. And yet they prayed. They gathered. They waited. They hoped against hope — because the one who had promised to send the Spirit was the same one who gives life to the dead. And on the morning of Pentecost, the impossible arrived.

The same God who kept his word to Abraham, who kept his word to the disciples in the upper room, is the God who keeps his word still. The Spirit poured out has not been withdrawn. The promise resting on grace has not expired. For those who are hoping against hope today — looking at circumstances that say the promise cannot possibly be kept — Abraham’s faith is not a museum piece. It is a living model of how to wait for the God who gives life to the dead.

For Reflection

Paul closes the passage with the declaration that Abraham’s story was written down not for Abraham’s sake alone, but for ours. The faith that was reckoned to him as righteousness will be reckoned to us also — “to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.”

The resurrection is the hinge on which everything turns. Abraham believed in the God who gives life to the dead. We believe in the God who proved that promise in the most public and irreversible way imaginable — by raising Jesus from the dead on the third day. And the same God who raised Jesus poured out his Spirit at Pentecost, opening the promise to all flesh, making Abraham the father of a family wider than any nation, any culture, any law could contain.

On Pentecost Sunday, we are invited to do what Abraham did. Not to pretend the circumstances are different from what they are. Not to manufacture a feeling of faith we do not have. But to look at what is impossible and redirect our gaze to the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist — and to give him glory, even now, even here, as an act of hope that does not depend on what we can see.

He is fully able to do what he has promised. He has always been. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the proof.

PRAYER: God who gave life to the dead in Abraham’s household and poured out your Spirit on all flesh at Pentecost, strengthen us to hope against hope today, fully convinced that you are able to do what you have promised. In Christ Jesus we pray, Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Name one impossible-feeling situation in your life or someone else’s, and this week deliberately redirect your gaze from the barrenness of the circumstances to the God who gives life to the dead — giving him glory in prayer before the answer arrives, as Abraham did.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God, and you matter to me! Hoping against hope, he believed! So can you!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

The Holy Spirit in the Margins

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9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. 10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” 18 While he was saying this, a synagogue leader came and knelt before him and said, “My daughter has just died. But come and put your hand on her, and she will live.” 19 Jesus got up and went with him, and so did his disciples. 20 Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. 21 She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” 22 Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment. 23 When Jesus entered the synagogue leader’s house and saw the noisy crowd and people playing pipes, 24 he said, “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him. 25 After the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took the girl by the hand, and she got up. 26 News of this spread through all that region. (Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26 NIV)

My younger brother was a tax collector. He majored in commercial art at a Texas university and got his degree and in a way got into the "family" business, following in the footsteps of our Dad's first cousin, who had led an interesting life in the IRS. One of his daring exploits was being undercover at the Houston Ship Channel on a foreign boat, and he had to escape in a small boat while being fired upon! Thank God my brother, to my knowledge, did not have any shots fired at him, but he spent dangerous time in Afghanistan during crucial times. He said to our Dad he was headed to "Europe," and left it at that. Matthew's job was just as dangerous for what the position entitled him to, and he was called into ministry at just the right time.

In the space of a few verses, Matthew gives us a single day in the ministry of Jesus — and it is a day that looks nothing like what the religious establishment expected the Messiah’s day to look like.

Jesus calls a tax collector. He eats with sinners. He stops for a bleeding woman who touches him from behind in a crowd. He raises a dead girl. And in between all of it, he tells the critics who challenge his table companions to go and learn something — something they should already have known: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

On Pentecost Sunday, when we celebrate the Spirit poured out on all flesh — on sons and daughters, young and old, slave and free — this passage asks us a searching question: where does the Spirit go? To the respectable, the already-gathered, the people who have their place at the religious table? Or to the margins, the overlooked, the ones whom no one else has stopped for?

The answer, in Matthew 9, is unambiguous.

Follow Me — and Bring Everyone You Know

The call of Matthew is one of the most compressed conversion accounts in the Gospels: Jesus saw him, said follow me, and Matthew got up. No deliberation recorded, no conditions negotiated. Just a look and an invitation and a life changed.

But what Matthew does next tells us everything about the Pentecost character of the Spirit’s work. He throws a party — and he invites everyone he knows. Tax collectors and sinners, the socially disreputable, the people the Pharisees would cross the street to avoid. He brings his whole world to the table where Jesus is sitting.

This is what happens when the Spirit moves into a life. It does not stay contained. It flows — like the rivers of living water Jesus promised — outward into every relationship the newly-called person carries. Matthew could not follow Jesus and leave his community behind. He brought them with him, to the only place he knew to bring them: to the table where the one who had called him was still sitting.

The Pharisees’ objection — why does your teacher eat with these people? — is the perpetual complaint of those who have confused the boundaries of religion with the boundaries of grace. And Jesus’ answer cuts through it: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” The Spirit is not poured out on the already-whole. He is sent to the ones who know they need something they do not have. That is not a lowering of the standard. That is the nature of mercy.

Two Interruptions and the Mercy That Stops

On the way to raise a dead girl, Jesus is interrupted by a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years.

She is, by the ritual law of her day, untouchable. Her condition has made her ceremonially unclean for twelve years — which means twelve years of exclusion from temple worship, from communal life, from the ordinary human contact that most people take for granted. She has spent everything she had on physicians who could not help her. She is, by every measure the world offers, a person without resources and without access.

And she reaches for the edge of his cloak.

She does not ask. She does not announce herself. She does not go through any official channel. She simply reaches, in faith, toward the one she believes can heal her. And Jesus stops. In the middle of an urgent errand — a synagogue leader’s daughter has just died, the clock is running — Jesus stops and turns. “Take heart, daughter,” he says. “Your faith has healed you.”

Daughter. In a society that had made her invisible for twelve years, Jesus gives her a name that places her inside the family of God. The Spirit who is poured out on all flesh on Pentecost is the same Spirit that animated this moment of stopping — this refusal to let urgency override the person standing right in front of him. The kingdom of God has always made time for the ones everyone else walks past.

And then he goes on to the girl, takes her by the hand — another act of contact that ritual purity laws forbade over a dead body — and she gets up. The crowd that had laughed at him is left with nothing to say. Death itself has been interrupted by mercy.

For Reflection

The Pentecost connection in this passage is not decorative. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the Spirit of this Jesus — the one who called the tax collector, ate with sinners, stopped for the untouchable woman, and walked into a dead girl’s room and called her back to life.

When the Spirit is poured out on all flesh, it means exactly this: no one is outside the reach of the mercy Jesus modeled in Matthew 9. Not the socially disreputable. Not the ritually excluded. Not the person bleeding quietly on the margins for twelve years with nothing left to spend. Not the one everyone has already written off as beyond help.

Jesus told the Pharisees to go and learn what mercy means. That instruction has not expired. The Spirit-filled community is still being sent to learn it — to let mercy shape where we go, who we stop for, whose table we sit at, and who we bring with us when we come to the table where Jesus is.

Matthew got up and followed — and brought his whole world with him. That is still the shape of the Spirit’s work. Receive the call. Get up. And bring everyone you know.

PRAYER: Spirit of the living God, pour yourself into us until mercy overflows — until we stop for the ones everyone else walks past, sit at the tables where we are not expected, and bring our whole world to the one who called us. This we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, do what Matthew did — bring one person from your world to an encounter with Jesus, whether through an invitation, a conversation, an act of mercy, or simply by stopping long enough to see someone the world has been walking past.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Remember the Lord wants mercy not sacrifice.

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Sing to the God Who Made Us!

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1 Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous. Praise befits the upright. 2 Praise the Lord with the lyre; make melody to him with the harp of ten strings. 3 Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts. 4 For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. 5 He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord. 6 By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth. 7 He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle; he put the deeps in storehouses. 8 Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. 9 For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm. 10 The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. 11 The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations. 12 Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage. (Psalm 33:1-12 NRSV)

Dear Friend, we're about to study a kingly psalm. You will notice the authority and power behind each word, much like it was written by a king, and a king who knows and loves his God. A king who knows all that God has done and is capable of. A king who would not hesitate in giving an order to worship and praise God.

Psalm 33 does not ease into praise. Here is that king's command — rejoice, praise, sing, play — and then immediately tells us why. Not because life is comfortable or circumstances are favorable, but because of who God is and what God has done. The praise is grounded. It has reasons. And the reasons, when we look at them carefully on Trinity Sunday, turn out to be Trinitarian to their core.

The psalmist does not know the word Trinity. But he knows the Word of the Lord. He knows the breath of God’s mouth. He knows the steadfast love that fills the earth. And in naming those three things — Word, breath, steadfast love — he is tracing, however unknowingly, the outline of the God the New Testament will fully reveal as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Let us follow the psalm’s own path through the character of God.

The psalm’s account of creation is contained in two lines of extraordinary compression: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.”

Word and breath. Read in the light of the New Testament, these are unmistakably the Son and the Spirit — the two by whom the Father creates, through whom all things were made, by whose agency the formless void became a cosmos teeming with life and order and beauty.

The Word of the Lord is the same Word John identifies in the prologue of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” What the psalmist experienced as the commanding, creative speech of God — he spoke, and it came to be — John reveals as a person: the eternal Son, present and active in every syllable of creation.

The breath of his mouth is the ruach, the Spirit — the same breath that hovered over the waters in Genesis 1, the same Spirit who breathed life into Adam, the same Pentecostal wind that filled the upper room. When God breathes out creation, it is not a mechanical process. It is the personal, life-giving activity of the Spirit who has always been the one who enlivens, animates, and sustains every living thing.

The psalmist is in awe of what this means: “He spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.” The universe is not self-generating or self-sustaining. It is held in existence moment by moment by the same Word and breath that called it into being. Trinity Sunday is the day we pause to feel the weight of that — that the ground under our feet, the air in our lungs, the light of this morning were all spoken into being by a God who is eternally Word and breath and the love that sends them both.

Before the psalm moves to creation, it gives us the character of the creator: “He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.”

The phrase translated steadfast love is the Hebrew hesed — one of the most theologically dense words in the entire Old Testament. It is covenant love, faithful love, the love that does not give up when the beloved is unlovely, the love that absorbs betrayal and keeps coming. It is the love of a God who pursues his people through the wilderness and the exile and the silence and the cross. It is the love that, in the New Testament, takes a face and a name: Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, in whom all the hesed of God becomes visible and tangible and touchable.

The earth is full of it. Not a corner of creation is outside the reach of the steadfast love of the Lord. Not a person, not a situation, not a season so dark that the hesed of God does not extend there. The psalm is not speaking naively — it knows that nations rise and fall, that human plans come to nothing, that the counsel of the Lord stands while the counsel of the powerful is brought to nothing. But underneath all the turbulence of history, filling the earth the way water fills the sea, is the steadfast love of the God who made it.

On Trinity Sunday, we name that love Trinitarian. The Father’s love that sends the Son. The Son’s love that goes to the cross. The Spirit’s love that is poured out on all flesh. Three movements of the one hesed — the steadfast love that filled the earth before creation and has not diminished by a drop since.

The psalmist ends this section with a declaration that carries the whole passage on its back: “Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.”

On Trinity Sunday, we are invited to inhabit that happiness — not a shallow cheerfulness, but the deep, grounded, anchor-holding joy of a people who know whose they are. We are the people whose God is the Lord — the God who speaks worlds into existence by his Word, who breathes life into everything that lives by his Spirit, whose steadfast love fills the earth and has never known a limit.

The new song the psalmist calls for is not a song for easy days only. It is a song that knows what it is singing about — that has looked at the character of God and found there a reason to praise that does not depend on circumstances. Word and breath and steadfast love. Father and Son and Spirit. The same God, always, all the way through.

Sing to him. Play skillfully. Shout. Because the earth is full of his steadfast love — and that, on any Sunday and every Sunday, is reason enough.

PRAYER: Lord — Word who spoke us into being, Breath who animates us still, Love whose hesed fills the earth — teach us to sing the new song that knows your name, and to live as people whose happiness is rooted in you alone. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Find one moment today to stop, breathe deliberately, and name it as the breath of God — then let that awareness open into a word of praise, a note of gratitude, or a new song of your own, however small, offered to the God whose steadfast love fills the earth you are standing on.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Say this out loud: “The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.”

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

The Big Three at the Beginning

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1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. 6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day. 9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good. 11 Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day. 14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day. 20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” 23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day. 24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” 29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. 1 Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. 2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. 4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. (Genesis 1:1-2:4a)

Dear Friend, this is the very beginning of all things. This is the sonogram of all of us, pasted on God's refrigerator! I'm old enough (yes, again!) to remember rabbits having to die in order for parents to know if they were expecting or not. And you old rock fans will remember that in a lyric by Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion." But later, comes the sonogram and now couples share with parents "photos" of their soon-to-be grandchildren.

Before the first creature drew breath. Before the first morning broke over the first mountain. Before any human eye opened to see a sky or a sea or a growing thing — there was God. And the very first thing the Bible wants us to know about God is that he creates.

Genesis 1 is the foundation of everything. It is the text the church has read on Trinity Sunday for centuries, not because it contains the word Trinity — it does not — but because, read in the light of the full revelation of Scripture, it is unmistakably Trinitarian. The God who creates is already, in these opening verses, Father, Son, and Spirit — working together, speaking together, making together. The community that God is has always been there, from before the beginning.

Let us look at what creation tells us about the God who made it.

The passage opens with two movements that the New Testament will later identify as two persons of the Trinity doing what they have always done together.

First, the Spirit. “The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” The Hebrew word for hovering — merachefet — is the word used for a bird hovering over its nest, wings spread, present and attentive and ready. Before a single word of creation has been spoken, the Spirit is already there — brooding over the chaos, present in the darkness, ready to bring life and order out of formlessness and void. This is the same Spirit who hovered over the disciples in the upper room at Pentecost, the same Spirit who renews the face of the ground, the same Spirit who takes up residence in the life of every believer. He has been doing this from the very first moment of creation. He was there before the light.

Then the Word. “And God said…” Ten times in Genesis 1, those two words appear. God said — and it was. John’s Gospel opens with a deliberate echo of this moment: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made.” The Word by whom all things were made is the same Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus Christ was not a late arrival in the story of God’s relationship with creation. He was there at the very first word. Every star, every creature, every blade of grass was spoken into being through him.

Father, Son, and Spirit — all present, all active, all working together at the very first moment. The Trinity did not become community at the Incarnation. It has always been community. Creation is the overflow of a love that was already complete before the world began.

On the sixth day, God pauses before the climax of creation and speaks in a way he has not spoken before. Not “Let there be” — the commanding word that called everything else into existence. But “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.”

Us. Our. The plural has puzzled and fascinated interpreters for centuries. Some have suggested it is the royal we, or God addressing the heavenly court. But read in the light of the whole of Scripture, it is most naturally understood as the first whisper of the Trinitarian nature of God that will be progressively revealed through the rest of the biblical story. The God who is community speaks in community, creates in community, and makes a creature uniquely capable of reflecting that community back.

To be made in the image of a Trinitarian God is to be made for relationship. Not self-sufficient, not solitary, not complete in isolation — but made for the kind of love and communion that has always existed within God himself. When God looked at the man alone in the garden and said “it is not good for the man to be alone,” he was not correcting an oversight. He was revealing something about the image in which humanity was made: we image a God who is never alone, whose very being is the eternal exchange of love between Father, Son, and Spirit.

The hunger for genuine community — the longing to be truly known and truly loved — is not a weakness or a neediness to be overcome. It is the image of God in us, reaching toward the God who made us for himself.

Trinity Sunday invites us to begin at the beginning — to go all the way back to the first verse of the first book and ask: what does creation tell us about the God who made it?

It tells us that the God who created is never alone. The Spirit was already hovering. The Word was already present. The Father was already speaking. Before anything else existed, there was the community of the Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the eternal exchange of love that is the source and ground of everything that exists.

It tells us that we are made in the image of that God. We are made for love and community and genuine relationship because the God whose image we bear has always been love, community, and relationship. The longing we feel for these things is not incidental to who we are. It is essential.

And it tells us that the God who called the world “very good” has not abandoned what he made. The same Spirit who hovered over the waters at the beginning is hovering still. The same Word through whom all things were made has entered that creation in flesh and bone and nail and resurrection. The same Father who rested on the seventh day and saw that it was good is still at work, through Son and Spirit, bringing the creation he loves to the wholeness he intended.

That is the God we worship on Trinity Sunday. The one who was there before the light. The one who spoke, and it was. The one who hovered, and still hovers, over everything he loves.

PRAYER: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — you who were present before the first light and are present still — let the image in which you made us draw us deeper into the love and community that has always been at the heart of who you are. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, invest in one relationship with the deliberate awareness that you are made in the image of a communal God — listen more deeply, show up more fully, or reach out to someone from whom you have grown distant — as an act of living into the image of the Trinity.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me. Remember in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and God created you!

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Trinitarian Benediction

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11 Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. 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. (2 Corinthians 13:11-13 NRSV)

Dear Friend, when was the last time you hand wrote a letter to someone dear? I'm old enough to remember the days before email, before having our own home phone and television. I remember, vaguely, how to write cursive, though the ages of typing and keyboarding have affected how steady I hold my pen. I remember writing a local letter to my future bride and looking forward to her sweet replies. I remember being in my first church office with a typewriter and then getting business letters from the Church. The best letter writer was The Reverend Daniel Garcia, who had been my youth pastor when I was in 7th grade. Dan was the Registrar of the Board of Ordained Ministry of the Rio Grande Conference and so as a candidate I would get loads of letters from Dan and I would read and re-read the letters to help me better understand how to formally write letters in Spanish. I especially liked the closing of those letters with abbreviations it took me a few minutes to decipher, and so thankful these were typewritten.

Of all the great letter writers of the world, I have held, thanks to Nellie's asking, one of John Wesley's letters. John Wesley, you will remember, was the founder of Methodism and he lived a LONG time ago. He wrote with a ink pen, more likely a quill type pen, made from a feather, dipped in ancient ink. It was all I could do to hold it and not lose my breath.

And here, the best of the letter writers, the Apostle Paul, who wrote inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit, formation letters to the first churches. Not that the above mentioned writers were not led by the Holy Spirit. But here Paul closes his second letter to the believers in the city of Corinth. It's the Trinitarian benediction that gets us.

The great Trinitarian benediction that closes Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians did not begin as a doctrinal formula. It began as a farewell. It can also be called Theology at the Bottom of the Letter.

Paul has spent thirteen chapters of one of his most personal and painful letters defending his apostleship, confronting serious problems in the community, grieving over broken relationships, and appealing with everything he has for a church in Corinth that has been pulled in dangerous directions. And at the end of it all — after all the argument and the anguish and the love — he closes with three lines that have become the most familiar Trinitarian blessing in the history of Christian worship.

On Trinity Sunday, it is worth noticing that the doctrine of the Trinity did not arrive primarily through philosophical argument or conciliar decree. It arrived the way it does in this letter — woven into the lived experience of the early church, surfacing naturally in the way they prayed and blessed and spoke of God, because the shape of what they had encountered — Father, Son, and Spirit — required nothing less than three to describe.

Three sentences. And in them, a whole theology of what it means to live inside the life of God.

Before the benediction, Paul gives four rapid instructions that are easy to rush past on the way to the famous closing verse: “Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace.”

These are not decorative parting words. They are, in miniature, the shape of the life that Trinitarian faith is meant to produce. A community that puts things in order — that takes responsibility for its own health and integrity. A community that listens — that remains teachable, open to correction, willing to hear a hard word. A community that agrees — not the false peace of suppressed disagreement, but the genuine unity that comes from shared allegiance to the same Lord. A community that lives in peace — the shalom that is not the absence of conflict but the active, costly, Spirit-sustained pursuit of one another’s flourishing.

And then the promise that grounds all four: “the God of love and peace will be with you.”

The God Paul describes here is not a God of abstract principles. He is the God of love and peace — a God whose very character is love, whose presence produces peace, whose company makes communities like the one Paul is describing possible. The Trinity we profess on Trinity Sunday is not a doctrine to be admired from a safe intellectual distance. It is a God whose nature reshapes the communities that receive him.

The closing benediction is so familiar that we can lose the weight of its individual parts. Let us slow down and receive each one.

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Grace — the utterly unearned, unconditional, initiative-taking love of God that moves toward us before we move toward him. It is the Son who makes grace visible and concrete — who takes on flesh and suffers and dies and rises so that the gap between a holy God and a broken humanity can be closed, not by human effort, but by divine gift. Every good thing we have received from God has arrived through grace. Every morning we wake in right relationship with the Father is a morning purchased by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

“The love of God.” This is the love of the Father — the source from which the Son is eternally sent, the love that so loved the world that it gave its only Son. It is not a love that responds to our loveliness. It is a love that creates loveliness in what it touches. The love of God is not our destination. It is our origin. We were loved before we existed. We were known before we were formed. The Father’s love is the ground we are standing on, whether we know it or not.

“The communion of the Holy Spirit.” Communion — fellowship, participation, shared life. The Spirit is not merely the one who gives us experiences or gifts or power, though he does all of those things. He is the one who draws us into community — with God and with one another. The same Spirit who binds the Father and the Son in eternal love is the Spirit who binds believers together and binds them to God. Every genuine experience of community in the church — every moment when brothers and sisters are truly present to one another, carrying one another’s burdens, bearing with one another’s failures, rejoicing together and mourning together — is an echo of the communion that has always existed at the heart of God.

Grace. Love. Communion. One from each person of the Trinity. And yet inseparable — because the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are inseparable. The grace comes soaked in love. The love arrives through grace. The communion makes both of them personal and present. This is the God we worship on Trinity Sunday.

Trinity Sunday can feel like the Sunday when theology gets complicated. But this passage from 2 Corinthians reminds us that the Trinity is not primarily a puzzle to think our way through. It is a life to be lived into.

The benediction Paul prays over the Corinthians is not a closing formula. It is an invitation. He is asking that the grace of Christ, the love of the Father, and the communion of the Spirit would take up residence in that fractured, argument-riven, struggling community in Corinth. And if it could take up residence there — in a church with all the problems Paul has just spent thirteen chapters addressing — it can take up residence here, in us, today.

The Trinity is not a doctrine we hold at arm’s length. It is the shape of the God who holds us. Grace reaching down through the Son. Love surrounding us from the Father. Communion binding us to God and to one another through the Spirit. This is the water we are swimming in. This is the name we were baptized into. This is the life we have been given.

Put things in order. Listen. Agree. Live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all the way to the end.

PRAYER: Triune God — Father who loves, Son who graces, Spirit who communes — let the shape of your inner life become the shape of ours, so that the communities we belong to bear the unmistakable mark of the God we worship. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Choose one of Paul’s four closing instructions — put something in order, listen to an appeal, seek agreement, or pursue peace — and do it this week as a concrete act of living the Trinity you believe.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” 2 Corinthians 13:13 (NRSV)

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.

Always with Us!

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16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped 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." (Matthew 28:16-20 NIV)

Five verses. One mountain. The risen Christ standing before eleven disciples — some worshiping, some still doubting — and speaking the words that have shaped the church’s identity and mission for two thousand years.

On Trinity Sunday, the church pauses to worship the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — the God whose inner life is community, whose very nature is love given and love returned. And this passage, the Great Commission, is not merely a mission statement. It is a Trinitarian declaration. Every sentence in these five verses is shaped by who God is: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — one name, three persons, the whole life of God poured into the church’s calling.

Let us hear it slowly.

Matthew’s honesty here is one of the most quietly remarkable things in the entire Gospel. These are the eleven — the ones who had followed Jesus for three years, who had seen the empty tomb, who had heard the resurrection reports. And when they see the risen Christ on the mountain, they worship him. But some doubted.

Matthew does not explain or excuse or resolve the doubt. He simply records it, and then records that Jesus came to them anyway. He did not wait until they had sorted out their uncertainty. He did not require a clean faith before he issued the commission. He came to the worshipers and the doubters alike — and spoke the same words to all of them.

This is Trinity Sunday grace. The God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — whose inner life is perfect, eternal, untroubled love — meets us in our imperfect, uncertain, still-working-it-out faith and commissions us from exactly there. The doubt in the room on that mountain does not disqualify the commission. It simply means the commission is given to human beings, which is what it has always been.

Jesus opens with a claim that reframes everything that follows: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

This is not modesty. This is the risen, ascended Lord declaring the scope of his reign. Every authority — in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, present and future — has been given to the Son by the Father. The commission that follows rests entirely on this foundation. We do not go in our own authority or on our own initiative. We go because the one who sends us holds all authority, and he has chosen to accomplish his purposes in the world through the witness of his people.

Then the Trinitarian heart of the passage: “Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

Notice: one name, not three names. The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit share a single name because they share a single being — three persons, one God, the eternal community of love into which every believer is baptized. When we are baptized, we are not initiated into an institution. We are immersed into the life of God himself — welcomed into the communion that has existed from before the foundation of the world, the love that flows eternally between Father, Son, and Spirit, the name above every name.

And the commission runs to all nations. Not one people, not one culture, not one language or background or social class. The God whose own life is a community of three sends his people to gather a community from every people. The mission has the shape of its sender: expansive, inclusive, refusing to stay within any boundary human beings would draw around it.

The commission closes not with a demand but a promise. And it is the promise that makes the demand possible.

“And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

The word surely carries the weight of an oath. This is not a casual reassurance. It is a solemn, binding, unbreakable promise from the one who holds all authority in heaven and on earth. He will not send his people into the world and then turn his attention elsewhere. He goes with them. He is present — not occasionally, not when circumstances are favorable, not when faith is strong and doubt is quiet. Always. To the very end of the age.

This is where Trinity Sunday and the Great Commission converge most beautifully. The presence Jesus promises is not an abstract theological idea. It is the presence of the Spirit — the same Spirit poured out at Pentecost, the same Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation, the same Spirit who renews the face of the ground. The Father sends the Son. The Son commissions the church. The Spirit goes with the church into the world. Three persons, one mission, one unbroken presence accompanying every disciple who has ever taken a step in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

You are not alone in the going. The one who holds all authority goes with you. Trinity Sunday is the day to let that truth settle into the bones: the God who is community sends you into the world in community with himself. Every step of the mission is taken in the company of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Five verses. And in them, everything the church needs to know about who sends us, why we go, what we carry, and who accompanies us.

All authority belongs to the one who commissions us — so we go with confidence, not in our own strength but in his. We baptize into one name — the name of the God who is himself a community of love, into whose life every new disciple is welcomed. We teach everything he commanded — not a portion, not the comfortable parts, but the whole of the life he called us to. And we go with the promise that he is with us always — not sometimes, not when we feel it, but always, to the very end.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not a puzzle to be solved on Trinity Sunday and put back on the shelf. It is the shape of the God who sends us, the name into which we are baptized, and the community we carry in our chest wherever we go. Go — in his name. All of it.

PRAYER: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — one God, one name, one unbroken presence — go with us into this week as you promised, and make us faithful witnesses of the love that has always existed at the heart of who you are. Amen.

Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Take one step this week in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit — a conversation, an act of service, a word of witness — trusting that the one who holds all authority is the one who goes with you.

I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Remember what the Lord said, "Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.