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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.
