Name
Matthew 28: 16-20
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Most of the events that mark the Christian calendar rehearse significant moments in salvation history. Advent gives voice to our anticipation of God’s coming into the world even now. The nativity of Christ remembers his birth as the realization of God with us, Epiphany marks the arrival of magi, practitioners of a foreign religion, drawn by a star to see the Christ child. We celebrate Jesus being baptized by John at the Jordan river where God speaks and names Jesus as God’s son. The remembrances of Holy Week chronicle the final evening he spent with his friends and the next day when they abandoned him to crucifixion. Throughout the season of Easter, we are treated with appearances from the risen Jesus who has defeated death, his eventual ascension to the right hand of God, and the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The rhythm of the church calendar is the rhythm of a story that unfolds as we find out that it is our story. Which makes Trinity Sunday a little awkward. Here is a Sunday set aside not so we can remember the next part of the story, but rather in recognition of an idea. Ideas are great. I love a bright idea. But they don’t always make for the best stories and as such don’t always make for the best sermons either.
The question that this Sunday begs is a familiar one. Does the trinity even matter? I mean isn’t enough to say that we love God, trust Jesus and somehow sense a Holy Spirit that actively moves in our lives? Do we even have to say that much? Really, what difference does it make? Last week, as we celebrated the Day of Pentecost and the disruptive arrival of the Holy Spirit, I spoke about the limits of our words, and how our primitive talk is transcended by that Holy Spirit so that the truth of God’s merciful love can be heard and known. Words have their limits. But words also have power. We have seen that over this past week as people are raising the voices against injustices too long ignored or denied. One of the things that we’ve been witness to is that some word choices allow people to justify acts of violence. When we call people ‘thugs,’ or say they are threatening or make us afraid simply because of the color of their skin, those words have deeply destructive ramifications. Likewise, when we listen to words of pain without deflecting from what’s being said, it may make us uncomfortable. Because those words have power. The power of words can be seen in repeated attempts to discredit or silence those who speak them. They are silenced because those doing the silencing know that words can bring about significant change.
So, the trinity matters because how we speak about God matters. Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion begins by naming it this way. “Nearly all the wisdom we possess… consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” The way we understand and speak about God has direct bearing on the way we understand and speak about ourselves. If what we call God is the ultimate authority that we look to for the choices we make and the lives we lead, then how we talk about God matters very much. For instance, when we emphasize God’s singular nature, unparalleled and unrivaled, we tend to elevate notions about our own singular identity and the supreme value of independence. That can be a good thing if it bolsters our sense of being uniquely and wonderfully made. It can also isolate us by making us think that our individual rights and liberty are the highest good.
One of the more destructive ways that we have come to talk about God as Trinity comes in the way we have tended to rank the three hierarchically. In some ways this is unavoidable. The last directive that Jesus gives his disciples here in Matthew’s telling of the good news is to go, making disciples of all nations as they do, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We still do that to this day. When someone comes to the font and we pour the water on their head, we follow Jesus’ directions when it comes to the name in which they are baptized. Father first, then Son, followed by the Holy Spirit. One, two, three. Clearly that puts the Father at the top of the org chart. The Son reports to the Father, and the Holy Spirit reports to them both. But keeping Calvin in mind, a funny thing happens when we rank the Triune life of God in this way. We turn around and apply that same structure to ourselves and the world that we live in. In some walks of life, we don’t need any help with the pecking order. Social class and classism have likely existed since we came down from the trees and started forming social groups and decided we need to be seen as better than someone else. Certainly, the hierarchical ranking of people is what has reinforced monarchies through the ages. It has also contributed to patriarchal understandings that would subjugate women to men, and systemic forms of racism built on assumptions about the inferiorities inherent to whole groups of people based on where they come from, or the levels of melanin in their skin. Sadly, with our words about a God whose own inner life is understood in terms of hierarchy, the church has contributed to a multitude of pain over the centuries. Those words indeed have power to shape how we live and relate to the world around us. How we talk about this matters.
Maybe one of the reasons we are reluctant to talk too much about God as three has to do with the impossible paradox of how we do that. The Christian faith owes its origins to Judaism which is fiercely monotheistic. The history of the Jewish people in the ancient world is one set against a host of neighbors, all of whom worship a panoply of deitites. In contrast, God’s people were unique in worshipping one God. This is what lies at the heart of the shema, the ancient creed in the book of Deuteronomy. Hear, O Israel, the LORD is our God. The LORD alone. As followers of the risen Christ attempted to articulate who Jesus was as God’s Son, and the role of the Spirit in that equation, they came to see and understand God in a new way. Of course, all of this was happening against the pantheon that belonged to the dominant culture of Rome, one with popular shrines built to Artemis and Dionysus and all the rest. Yes, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were distinct in being three, but undivided as the same one God. Confused yet?
But here is the gift of talking about, understanding, and ultimately entrusting our lives to God as three. There is difference within the very life of the one from whom all blessing flow. There is difference in the life of the one who makes, redeems and sustains all of creation. And when we break away from an understanding of the three as ranked members of a spiritual organizational chart and embrace instead the dynamic interplay within the life of God we begin to look at our own relationships differently. What we see is a circle dance of mutual love and affection instead of dominance and submission. Instead of a monolithic deity in solitude above it all, we are shown a model of love that is not only in solidarity within itself, it is essentially in solidarity with all that exists as one with us- giving us life and movement and our very being.
This, in turn, invites us to see our neighbor not as some distant other to be dominated and brought into submission, someone we must defeat in contest of rivals, but rather as the differentiated part of the same unified whole. This is what Jesus is talking about as he instructs them to make disciples as they go, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It isn’t about following some formula for getting people into heaven. It’s about bathing one another in the kind of mutual love, caring and cooperation that we have seen at the heart of God’s own life. It’s about leading people in the endlessly generative Way of Christ who would die before playing the world’s ranking games, and in dying sets us free from our need to win because in him we have. All of us. The whole of creation has already won in his resurrection, unleashing heaven on earth.
To get there, to get to the place where we can truly join the dance of the three in one, the one in three, means that we’re going to have to repent. Meaning, we’re going to have to change direction from the current path we’ve been on, where systemic racism, patriarchal sexism, and all other forms of constructed dominance give way to the kind of equality, mutuality, and love that are forever at play in the life of our triune God in whose image we are made. That’s not something that we’re going to be able to do on our own. It will happen as we take seriously what it means to trust in God to shape and direct our lives. It will happen as we live into our own baptism, opening our hearts and minds to the kind of change and renewal found in the source, guide and goal of our lives. Glory be to our Rock, our Redeemer, and the Breath that gives us life. Amen.