June 7, 2020 (The Holy Trinity) – Matthew 28:16-20
Matthew 28:16-20
On the Edge of a Diverse, Loving World with the Trinity
The Holy Trinity – June 7, 2020
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
As if we needed it, this past week we have been given a forceful reminder that
we live in a diverse world.
In fact, the day I write this has been given over to raising awareness of continuing inequality
in our very diverse world: I write this on Blackout Tuesday.
A range of injustices is being protested.
A great brokenness in our world is being exposed.
The protests are an act of hope that change can occur.
But this is a painful process as countless people mourn the death of George Floyd and
so many – far too many – like him.
At the best of times we probably wonder what our faith has to do with
everyday events in the news and with our everyday lives and with
the challenges that our world faces.
But we believe that God is always speaking in a new, fresh way every day to the
things we face.
And so week after week after week I expect in my sermons that God will speak to us
a good word into our current situation.
This week, we celebrate our most important Christian idea –
so important that it is the only day of the year we celebrate an idea,
rather than a person or an event.
This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, a day we set apart to celebrate the good news that,
as we learn in confirmation class, God is most like a loving community of three persons.
When you, as a Christian, utter the word “God,” it is just shorthand for Trinity.
It is shorthand for “a loving community of three persons.”
The thing that is responsible for all that is,
the thing that is responsible for bringing you into being,
the thing that will not rest until all is as it intended from the beginning . . .
is most like a loving community of three persons.
Not One Big Person (who happens to be male with white hair and a beard. . .).
Not One Big Person and two little people.
But three, distinct, equal persons who exist in a loving circle of giving and receiving,
and whose circle is always able to welcome just one more to their table.
That is what Christians believe most deeply and must truly about their God.
One experienced as the caller of Abraham and Sarah who entered into covenant with Israel.
Another experienced as the person Jesus of Nazareth who healed and fed and
restored people to community.
And a third experienced as Spirit that revealed Jesus’ continuing presence with his followers and
who energized them for continuing his work.
Three distinct, diverse persons in loving community.
And we have to ask: what could this possibly have to do with what our world is experiencing?
As it turns out, quite a bit.
Today, our take away from this has to be: God in God’s very self is diverse.
Debie Thomas is a Christian writer of East Indian descent who lives in the U.S. and writes on
Daniel Clandenin’s Journey with Jesus website.
This week she wrote:
Why do we fear difference so much when difference lies at the very heart of God’s nature? Given the racial divisions tearing the United States apart at this very moment, I can’t imagine a more relevant characteristic to ponder than God’s innate diversity. As churches, communities, and countries, we will not survive unless we learn how to live gracefully and peaceably with difference. (https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay?id=2655)
As I have said many times over the last 20 years, difference is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is enriching. We learn and grow from listening to those who are different from us.
Difference is essential to life.
It is fundamental to reality;
for if the greatest reality is God, and God is diverse in God’s self,
then diversity is essential to reality.
And it is certainly essential to community.
The church is meant to reflect the life of God.
The church community is meant to reflect the Trinity.
The church is to be a loving, diverse community in which all are valued,
a diverse community in which everyone has something of value to share.
In the Gospel reading, this is what Jesus is inviting the disciples into.
These are the last words Jesus speaks to his followers in Matthew.
It is the last scene in the entire Gospel.
The risen Jesus told the women at the tomb to tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee.
So the disciples go and on a mountain they find him, as he had promised.
The return to Galilee from Jerusalem takes them back to where everything started:
so we are kind of anticipating a new beginning.
And what does Jesus tell them?
Go. Make disciples from among all peoples, baptizing them into the name of
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The command is to create communities of diverse peoples that reflect the
diversity of the Trinity.
It’s about that simple – although of course the church has got it very very wrong at
many points over the centuries.
Nevertheless, I am sure that is what Jesus is saying:
nurture diverse, loving communities that reflect the Trinity and participate in its work.
I think we can all agree that that is an apt description of First Lutheran Church:
a diverse, loving community that reflects the Trinity and participates in its work of
healing and feeding and including and forgiving.
Yes: the disciples are at a place of new beginning.
Yes: they have been tasked with an awesome responsibility.
And yes . . . they are apprehensive – to be sure they are apprehensive!
Matthew records that, When they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.
This could just as easily be translated,
When they saw him, they both worshipped and doubted.
Either way, there is doubt.
But about what? About Jesus? About what he was asking them to do?
About the chances of success of nurturing diverse, loving communities?
I do not know.
What I do know is that the Greek word for doubt here – distazo – has a sense of
standing in two places at the same time.
It is as if here in Galilee, back at the beginning, they have one foot in the old broken world of
slavery, oppression, haves and have nots, and injustice,
while at the same time they have another foot in the new, whole world that Jesus
is bringing to them, a world of harmony, justice, healing, and peace.
The risen Jesus is ushering in the new world, the new creation on earth.
The question is: will they follow him there?
Will they be who they are called to be?
Will they recognize Jesus’ authority by doing the one thing he calls them to do –
nurture diverse, loving communities – and by so doing bring in the new creation?
Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t tell us – the story ends here with Jesus’ simple promise that
when they do the thing he calls them to do, he will be with them, to the very end.
I think Matthew’s Gospel ends here because each generation of Christians must decide
for themselves what they will do.
It doesn’t matter what the first generation of disciples did – it matters what we do in response to
Jesus’ simple command to just Go, make disciples, nurture diverse loving communities.
What matters is whether we will hold up our little corner of the world at the intersection of
Sargent and Victor as a little place which has been claimed for God’s new creation.
What matters is whether we continue to support and nurture a loving community of
very diverse people committed to moving forward God’s new world.
What matters is whether we step up to ensure that our witness to the Trinity endures against
the hatred and injustice that are currently being exposed in the United States and
across the world.
There could be no finer time to be thankful that we worship and live and move and
have our being in a God who is most like a loving community of three persons.
So with the saints of every time and every place, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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