"Go."

Matthew 28:16-20

June 11, 2017 + Trinity Sunday

I.

Karl Rahner was a Roman Catholic theologian of the last century.  He once made a comment that applies at least as well to us Protestants.  He said that if we removed the Trinity from our worship and life almost nothing would change.  We’d barely notice.  He didn’t say it as a complement.  I myself once quipped that most Presbyterians would probably test out as functional unitarians.  That is, we may acknowledge the Trinity verbally because we know we’re supposed to; but an analysis of how we actually live would indicate that the Trinity has little or no impact on us.

This circumstance has led some to suggest that maybe the Trinity is a doctrine that has exhausted its usefulness.  It reflects theological controversies of by-gone centuries; no one understands it or cares anymore.  Some even contend that the Trinity doesn’t even appear in the New Testament… which is only true if you decided ahead of time not to find it there.

But the Trinity is simply conclusions drawn about the nature of God based on evidence found in the Bible, tradition, and the experience of Jesus’ followers.  For starters: In Genesis, God creates by means of speaking, which involves Word and Breath.  The activity of these three — Speaker, Word, and Breath — functions perhaps like a generator, the product of which is creation itself.  Creation is the overflowing of the divine love shared in the Trinity.  This three-fold pattern subtly permeates the whole story until it is made explicit in Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate through whom his disciples realize the Presence of the Spirit.

The Trinity is basically another way of saying that God is love, and that the whole universe is created, redeemed, and sustained in love by God.  One solitary entity can’t love; love requires two, which automatically implies a third, which is the relationship itself.  

This realization is the insight of the early church.  It is based on the teaching of Jesus.  And it is expressed here as a way to give specific content to the mission to which the risen Lord calls his followers.  

On this mountain in Galilee, the risen Jesus gives his followers their instructions going forward.  They are sent out to bring people into the life of God by doing three things which are really aspects the same mission: disciple, baptize, and teach people to obey Jesus’ commandments.  The thing that brings these activities together and gives them their meaning and purpose is the reference in the middle to baptizing into the Trinity.  It all has to do with “the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”  

Any organization — from the Boy Scouts, to a model railroading club, to a yoga class, to a political party — can go out, live, and teach people to live, in a certain way.  The thing that makes followers of the Jesus Way different is that the primary and central thing we do is baptize in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Baptism means “to immerse;” we immerse people in the trinitarian life of God which is to say, we surround people with God’s love, we bring people into God’s love, we see people participate in God’s very life, which is the ultimate truth, goodness, and beauty.     

II.

Baptism is a movement from an artificial existence into real life.  When Jesus sends his disciples explicitly to “all nations,” it is not just a neutral reference to the world.  It is much more loaded than that.  The Greek term used, ethne, often referred to all the different cultural and national groups that had been conquered by Rome.  The ethne were defeated, exploited, and terrorized peoples.  Their existence was dominated by a regime that had completely embraced and enforced the three Satanic temptations Jesus rejects way back in chapter 4: summed up as wealth, fame, and power.  So when Jesus tells his disciples to “go,” he is sending them out to people whose lives are crushed by the egocentric demand that they grapple with others for more of these three things.

To be baptized into the Trinity means a radical repentance, a change of mind and direction.  With Jesus, it turns away from and rejects these three destructive, consuming addictions.  Jesus’ entire ministry is basically an unpacking of the basic stand he takes against evil in the temptation story.  All his commandments, such as what we find in the Sermon on the Mount, are to show what it means to move in a direction opposite to what the Evil One and Rome demand.  

Jesus does not do this just to be contrarian.  It is a matter of life and death.  For as long as the desire for money, fame, and power maintains its stranglehold over people, they and the creation are doomed to violence, fear, degradation, and extinction.

To be baptized into the Trinity is an affirmation of the communion, compassion, generosity, sharing, participation, joy, gratitude, intimacy, and affection that swirls and hums in the nature of God, and overflows into creation.  The most powerful word used to describe the Trinity comes from the early church.  It is perichoresis, which literally means “circle dance.”  The Trinity is literally an exuberant dance of love and delight.

To see everything that God made — every rock, every microbe, every plant, every animal, and every person — as a reflection and manifestation of this infinite joyful love, bubbling over in wonder from the trinitarian Creator, and therefore to receive and cherish all of it as miracle and gift, is what it means to be baptized.  

To be baptized into the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to be totally overtaken by God’s reality, means you cannot hate.  You cannot exclude.  You cannot exploit.  You cannot reject.  You cannot oppress.  You cannot kill.  You cannot steal.  You cannot judge or condemn.  You cannot pretend that your family, race, generation, party, or nation is better.  To the extent that we do any of these things is an indication that we haven’t even put a hesitant toe into the Trinity, let alone been totally immersed and transformed in God’s goodness.

III.

The energy of the Trinity is inherently and necessarily explosive.  It radiates by its very nature.  It goes out from itself and creates the new.  It loves.  You cannot hold it, hoard it, keep it, store it, or grab it.  It just flows and shines and spreads.  It goes out.  

So the first thing Jesus tells his disciples here is: “go.”  Jesus sends them out.  He establishes a dynamic movement.  The early church calls itself simply “the Way,” also implying progress or movement.  The church is not like a retail outlet where you open the shop in the morning, get everything ready, and hope people show up.  We are not to expect people to come to us; we are to go to the people.  The church does gather, but it gathers in order to be sent.  We come together in order to go out.  The interior action of the Trinity does not stay cooped up in a divine container; it shines outward in creative brilliance.  It is the same with the church: What we do in here has to shine into the world.  

This is what Jesus means by “discipling,” and “teaching them” that is, the nations, the ethne, “to obey all that I have commanded you.”  This is important because there is definite, specific content to what we do and who we are.  The church exists by the self-emptying love, humility, grace, forgiveness, blessing, and generosity we see in Jesus Christ.  

Perhaps it would be instructive to compare what is going on with God’s love in the Trinity with another phenomenon the spreads and grows: cancer.  Cancer moves outward as well, but it consumes, cripples, and kills.  Cancer swallows up diversity in a rigid, toxic, lethal, enslaving uniformity.  Cancer makes everything the same; it is the brutal march in lock-step of calcifying, monochromatic singularity in which everything turns to dead stone.  

The Trinity means that God is a unity in diversity, and that creation is also a unity in diversity.  God makes this place a wild riot of diversity, adaptation, creativity, cooperation, and wonder, in which everywhere we turn is another spectacular miracle, in which every oak tree produces around 1,000 pounds of acorns and there are 600 different kinds of just oak trees.  Let alone every other kind of tree, or life form.  There are so many miracles happening all around us all the time that we have become cynical and jaded, imagining that that these are not miracles at all.

Creation is a miracle because it is a product of God’s very life as Trinity, a community of mutual love and joy that embraces difference, and yet remains bound together in affection and unity.  And when we “go” out, as Jesus commands us here, we go out with the same truth, wonder, joy, and love that he demonstrates to us in his own life.  We go out with the antidote to the cancer that is strangling people, which is the good news that God is love, all things are made in love, therefore everything belongs, especially you.

IV.

One of the more amazing things about this passage is where the disciples are up there on a mountain worshiping the risen Jesus, and it says “some doubted.”  The Greek doesn’t even have the word “some,” meaning that perhaps there was some doubt in all of them.

And yet, they worship.  They don’t wait until they had established absolute, unassailable certainty before they worship.  And Jesus doesn't wait until they are perfect spiritual masters before he sends them out.  Because ultimately it’s not up to them.  He promises to be with them himself always and forever!

Our doubt, our weakness, our confusion don’t matter.  We’re on the Way, meaning that we are not there yet… because in the Trinity there is never a time when we’re there and it’s done.  God’s love flows forever.  The one God is the three and flow among the three.  And our job is to worship, and then, to encourage people to join us in following God’s Truth, revealed in Jesus by obeying what he commands us, which is love, compassion, acceptance, joy, and peace.

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