Today is Trinity Sunday — the day on which we hold up before us, and before the world, our faith that God is somehow, mysteriously, “Trinitarian” or “triune” in nature. Our passage from Romans is perfect for this day. For this is a very “Trinitarian” passage. With these words Paul — whether he specifically intends to do so or not, and he probably did not — demonstrates to us what a practical and down-to-earth concept the “doctrine of the Trinity,” as forbidding as that phrase sounds, really is.

            This passage blesses us with so many different understandings of the nature of the One God worshiped by all of the living religions — ours, of course, included! We are given here a number of different understandings of how God works in the world and in the midst of our lives. This passage speaks to us of the “Spirit of God.” We are told that this “Spirit of God” leads the “children of God.” Also at work, we are told, is a “spirit of adoption.”

            This passage speaks of spirits — our spirit and God’s Spirit. It also speaks directly of God. God, we are told, is “Father.” But in play here is what could be considered a counter-intuitive understanding of God as Father. For in these verses God is not a forbidding, vaguely frightening “father figure” in the usual sense of the word: removed, abstract, absent, looking down in judgment from a throne somewhere on the Other Side of the Sky, from somewhere way far removed from us and our reality. No, the God depicted here is Abba, and Abba is Aramaic for “Daddy.” That Spirit — God’s Spirit, the spirit of adoption, the spirit that bears witness to, that

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