Hearth & Altar

Moses asks to see God's glory and what he sees is God's name: the Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity. The glory and the name are the same thing. To know who God is is to know mercy, graciousness, slowness to anger, richness in kindness. Moses bows immediately and asks: come along in our company. This stiff-necked people is the company he has. He asks the merciful God to pardon them and receive them as his own.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. Paul's closing benediction is the Trinity experienced from the inside - not as a doctrine to be explained but as the three movements of a single gift. Grace coming from the Son. Love from the Father. Fellowship from the Spirit. All of it, to all of you.

And the Great Commission: go, make disciples, baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teach them to observe all I commanded. Into the name - the single name of the Three who are one, the name Moses heard on the mountain and fell down to worship. I am with you always, until the end of the age.

Your household is baptized into that name. The Trinity is not an abstract doctrine to explain to your children. It is the name they were given at the font, the shape of the God who indwells them, the formula that structures the family prayer.

• For our family, that we would live in the grace of the Son, the love of the Father, and the fellowship of the Spirit - that the Trinity would be the experienced reality of our household rather than an abstract truth, we pray to the Lord.
• For those who worshiped but doubted, as some of the eleven did on the mountain, that the doubt would be held within the worship rather than used to escape it, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who are baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, that the name given at the font would be the name they live from, we pray to the Lord.
• In this Sacred Heart month, for the love of God - the Father's love named in the Trinitarian benediction - to be the ground of all we do, we pray to the Lord.

Go and make disciples. The Great Commission is not given to specialists. It is given to the eleven who were present on the mountain - and through them to every baptized person. This week, name one person in your life who is not yet a disciple and one concrete act that moves toward making them one. Not a program. One person. One act.

I am with you always, until the end of the age. The promise closes the Gospel. Teach your children this sentence as the ground under everything else - the foundation that holds when the specific instructions fail and the mission feels impossible. He is with you always. The Trinity is not absent from the stiff-necked company. It came to walk with them.