Go Forth… in the Name of a Threefold God

Scriptures:     Psalm 8, Matthew 28:16-20

Liturgically, the Sunday after Pentecost is known as Trinity Sunday.  Say what?  I know, I’m already starting to see your eyes glazing over.  Good time to catch up on some lost sleep.  How is it that the idea of our God being a trinitarian God has any meaning for us today?  You remember what I said three weeks ago when we were talking about the Holy Spirit, don’t you?  Let me remind you:

“Most ministers find that the Holy Spirit is the most difficult part of the Trinity to try to explain.  The Rev. Dr. Clint McCann, who teaches Biblical theology at Eden Theological Seminary, often jokes with seminarians that if parishioners ask you to explain what the Holy Spirit is you should give them a serious look and say simply it is a mystery…and then get out of the room before anyone can ask a follow-up question.”

Well, if that’s how people feel about the Holy Spirit, trying to explain the Trinity is, if you’ll excuse the pun, three times as worse.  I looked back over the past five years to see what I had done with this Trinity Sunday before, and you know what?…..I’ve never dealt with it at all.  So, maybe it’s about time.

Many people have tried to explain the idea of the Trinity using analogies, but these usually fall short of the mark.  This is especially true in trying to explain it to kids.  Here’s Rey Reynoso from the blog Theologica showing how analogies fall short:

• God is like an egg:  yolk, whites and shell=3 in 1.  But God is not like an egg because you can throw away one part and still have an egg.  You can’t do that with God.
• God is like water that’s sometimes water, sometimes ice and sometimes steam.  But God is not like water because Jesus is God and is different from the Father God and the Spirit God.
• God is like a slice of pizza with a pizza pie.  When you have one slice you know exactly what the rest of the pie is like but you don’t have a whole pie when you have only a slice.  But God isn’t like a pizza pie because Jesus is completely God as much as the Father is completely God.
• You see that two headed Muppet on the TV?  God is like that one person with three heads; but God is not like that, confused or arguing with Godself.
• Do you see why I keep saying God is like but God isn’t like?  Because God is much bigger than we can understand.  You see all the stars in the sky?  Do you know if you counted them all you still haven’t started counting them because there are galaxies behind that?  We know that there’s a bunch of stars; we just don’t know everything about the amount. God is so much bigger than we can understand, but God is close enough to our understanding that we can figure out some things, but not perfectly.

Perhaps one of our earliest creeds, the Athanasius Creed, puts it most simply:

So the Father is God;
The Son is God;
And the Holy Spirit is God.
Yet there are not three Gods but one.

However, this still doesn’t help us get at the “how can this be?” question.  Pretty soon we’re right back to:  “well, it’s a mystery”.

And maybe the prior question should be “so what?” or “why?” – why is it important for Christians to affirm that they worship a triune God?  Shouldn’t the central affirmation of the Hebrew Shema be enough for us:  “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is One”?  (Deuteronomy 6:4)

What it comes down to, in order to answer that “why” question, is how important Jesus the Christ is to us and how significant we feel the Spirit’s presence in our lives is to us.  If Jesus is the most important human being who ever lived, reflecting the nature of God to us, and that’s all – then that’s one thing.  If the Spirit is a nice feeling that helps keep us on a moral path, and that’s all – thenthat’s one thing.  Then we can proclaim that God is one and God alone and not have to worry about these theological niceties.  But if Jesus the Christ and the Holy Spirit who comes in Christ’s name partake of the very nature of God – then we have a completely different ballgame.

A threefold God is necessary for us because that’s how we receive our marching orders.  Our text, which is often referred to as the Great Commission, says, “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…..”  We are told to go forth in the name of a threefold God.

I’ll come back to that in a moment.  But I still want us to struggle some more with the “why” or “so what” question.  It is not so much that the trinity is a mystery, but rather that it is a paradox.  By now I trust that most of you know that paradox is central to my understanding of what it means to follow the Christian way.  Think about the great paradoxes of our faith.  God is both transcendent (greater than anything we can imagine) and yet immanent (right here inside of me, as our young people talked about who God was for them last week); Jesus Christ is both fully human and fully divine – affirming this paradox is so crucial for what it means to be Christian; the basic criteria for being human are to love and to be loving, even though the basic characteristics of the world are evil and suffering; those who lose themselves will be found and those who find their lives will lose them (Matthew 10:39); God is all-powerful (creation) and yet totally powerless (crucifixion) in relation to humanity, and yet it is God’s complete powerlessness that is struggling humanity’s best hope for redemption (resurrection).  In the 20^th century religious thinkers continued to develop these paradoxes:  God is “’the wholly other’; but he (sic.) is also wholly same; the wholly present” (Martin Buber); God is both being and becoming (Alfred North Whitehead); it is impossible to prove that God exists, for God is “being-itself beyond essence and existence” (Paul Tillich) – while in other places Tillich speaks of God in highly personal terms, even as the essence of pure personality; finally:  human love is history’s “impossible possibility” (Reinhold Niebuhr).  Paradoxes – every one.

Our other scripture for today is also one of the most beautiful and powerful paradoxes in the whole Bible:  “what are human beings that you are mindful of them….. Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.”  I love this Psalm, perhaps more than any other (even including the 23^rd) because of how it empowers us as practically co-creators with God.  And therein lays also our sense of heightened responsibility.

For, you see, a God who is both being and becoming, a God who is silent and yet the essence of communication, a God who has died and yet conditions frail humanity’s every move; a human creature who strives toward the “impossible possibility” of real loving, men and women who are innocent though guilty – forgiven though shamed – free though with responsibility – open and vulnerable yet always humiliated – silent but struggling to communicate; a demonic which is powerfully evil yet laughably ludicrous – these are the absurd, contradictory, paradoxical images for our time which are the reality within which we must live – and which offer for us reasons why it is important to worship a triune God.

So, having established the reasons behind the “why”/”so what” question, let’s circle back to Matthew’s Great Commission.  Going out, baptizing, teaching, making disciples – in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (or as we prefer to say today in order to take gender out of it, in the name of the Creator, the Christ, and the Holy One) – this is our calling.  And a worthy calling it is.

But you probably already know where I’m going next with this.  Across church history this verse has been one of the most perverted and mis-used in order to establish a religious colonialism.  As Baptist minister John Ballenger puts it:  “the [verse] popularly known as the Great Commission − the part typically extracted from its context and proclaimed and heard on its own, has become associated for many with the arrogance and self-righteousness of a colonial approach to missions.  We have been entrusted with the truth and we will export it, along with our culture, to the natives of lands we wish to exploit − always maintaining control, of course, of orthodoxy and all church property.”  Now, this may be a bit cynical in its description, but it’s not too far off the mark in relation to the history of Christian missions.  We do need to confess our arrogance and repent of the ways in which we have tried to impose our own cultural ideas – which in most cases had nothing to do with the Gospel.

But as Ballenger goes on to note, the context in which this commissioning takes place is the betrayal, the fears, the doubts of all of the disciples – even when face-to-face with the resurrected Jesus.  Thus, Jesus is establishing for them his authority – an authority which will lead them to affirmations of faithfulness even in the midst of suffering and humiliation and oppression.  What the Great Commission is telling them, Ballenger concludes, is:  “And they go to the nations to disciple.  Not to count converts, not to be welcomed with flowers and open arms, but to make disciples, and to teach obedience − to teach the obedience they have themselves learned.  There’s a reciprocal nature to their mission…. They go to model what they were taught, what they now teach.  They go to live the life they saw lived.  They go, obedient and faithful, to earn an authority they do not have.”

Do you hear the differences in emphasis?:  reciprocal, modeling, earning (by being present with others) an authority they do not have in themselves.  This is a far different stance from:  “I have the gospel truth and you will accept it!”  It is a stance that includes the sometimes all-too-forgotten act of listening.  The teaching part of the Great Commission includes dialog and being willing to admit mistakes.  It is a way of sharing out of the passion we have felt as disciples of that triune God.  As William Loader puts it:  “This good news is worth sharing with all people…. It is worth sharing not because we are obsessed with having everybody do things our way or because God has such an obsession, although at times one might think so in the light of some statements and practices of mission.  Rather the compassionate and loving God is God and sets no limits to that love…..”

Nor are there any limits to the presence of Jesus.  “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”  I’ve always been fascinated with that ending word.  The New English Bible translation is even more direct:  “…to the end of time” (almost sounds like a song lyric, doesn’t it).  This is, as we’ve talked about before, God’s time.  Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, will be with usalways – and that’s as long an “always” as you can imagine.  This is Immanuel, as Isaiah tells us (7:14) – “God is with us”.  The Great Commission is also the Greatest Promise we could ever have.

Because of his resurrection Jesus has the authority given by God – “All authority in heaven and on earth” – and he transmits that authority to these frightened, shaken, still doubtful disciples – to us, who, like these disciples, are not quite sure sometimes – and says, “Go”.  I love the way Anna Carter Florence then urges us on:  “We shouldn’t be surprised that the verb in the Great Commission is always ‘go.’  This is a sending, after all, isn’t it?!  Don’t stay still! Don’t rest on your presuppositions!  The Word is moving, outward, onward!  Go after it, to see where it’s heading! Go!”  She concludes:  “And he is with us.  All of us.  Always.”

What Matthew is saying of Jesus here is that he is showing forth God’s presence and glory, which, like wisdom, was sometimes thought of as having an existence separate from God (the GreekSophia).  Yet, like the persons in the Trinity, presence, glory, and wisdom are all part of God.  God is God.  Jesus is God.  The Holy Spirit is God.  And because this is so we can go forth, in the name of our threefold God — out into all of our worlds and share this good news, offering the fruits of love to all we meet.  We do this because we have the Commission…..and because we have the Promise:  “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Amen.

 

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church, UCC

Las Vegas, NV

June 19, 2011