June 7, 2020 Matthew
28:16-20 2 Corinthians 13: 11-13 Rev. Peter Hofstra
So there is one more. One more Sunday in the arc that began back on
Ash Wednesday. From Lent to Holy Week to
Easter to the Easter Season to Pentecost, it is concluded, in the Lectionary
calendar, with Trinity Sunday. This
Sunday is set apart to celebrate how God has made Godself known to we mere
mortals, these revelations figuring very prominently in the arc we have just
come through.
It
almost feels like an after thought. For
many years, the NFL had just one more game after the Superbowl. It was the Pro Bowl and it took place out in
Hawaii. Who actually remembers
that? It was so irrelevant that one
reason they moved the Super bowl out of January and into February is so they
could have the Pro Bowl first.
After
this Sunday, we move into “proper” time.
That makes me smile because this is a recent change to the
language. I always knew this as
‘ordinary’ time, time not in a specific Christian season.
This
might confirm in your minds that I am, in fact, a total Bible nerd, but I can
remember the first time I really had to sit down and think about the
Trinity. Ok, not Bible nerd, Bible
geek. I grant the point.
It was
in high school-Christian high school-and we were working on a project in Bible
class, yes, a class on the Bible, in which we were putting together our own
confession of faith. And one of the
topics I thought relevant was the Trinity.
And our two passages in today’s lectionary readings were central to that
topic. And the reason for that is
because these two passages make the clearest and most specific references to
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as a three-fold description of God.
And my
Bible teacher at the time questioned whether having concluding benediction
statements, so brief and without detailed explanation, were adequate to demonstrate
the importance of the Trinity as a topic in my Confession of Faith. Yes, I acknowledge it does require a
nerd-mind to recall such trivia so clearly.
Now,
neither of these passages serves as the basis for our usual benediction in our
worship services. The passage on which
ours is based comes out of the Law of Moses.
But both Matthew and 2 Corinthians are also commonly used. And I think it is precisely because they are
used as a benediction, as a way of blessing people out of worship and into the
world, that the language of the Trinity is SO important.
The
last line from 2 Corinthians, 13:13 “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the
love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” has been
claimed as some of the earliest language in the Christian community, that what
Paul, our first writer of the New Testament, is doing, is quoting a benediction
that was already well known and widely used in the church. And since it is widely agreed that this
letter was written around 55 AD, it is in the living memory of the eye
witnesses to Jesus.
What is
so important about the Trinity? Well, it
is how God has revealed Godself to us.
In these formal persons, the divine creator of all has sought to make
what is incomprehensible into something that we can comprehend. Is God a Trinity? Well, there is evidence from the bible that
God’s self-referral is in the plural form. I am talking specifically about the beginning
of Genesis. When God’s ‘speech’ is
reported on the decision to kick Adam and Eve out of the Garden, God’s
self-reference is to “we” and “us”.
The
most important thing, for me, about this benedictional formula, if I can get a
little technical with the language, what is so important is how it is shorthand
into the very wonder that God has done for us.
Thus, to have this trinitarian understanding of God is to quickly be
reminded of just what it is that God has done for us, why we believe in this
God, and why we come together to worship God’s Holy Name!
We
begin with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The key word is ‘grace’. Amazing
grace, how sweet the sound goes the hymn.
Grace comes from our Lord Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection to
bring us mercy and forgiveness, to save us from our sins. I once was lost, but now am found. This is the result of the Easter miracle for
us. When we offer the prayer, “Dear
Lord, please come into my heart today,” we are aiming at the grace of our Lord
Jesus Christ entering in and changing lives.
This is the plan of God fulfilled in Christ to restore our relationship
to our Creator. “Grace” represents so
very much.
We move
to ‘the love of God’. That may seem so
obvious as to be meaningless. But it is
the love of God that put the entire plan in motion for Jesus to come into the world
to bring us the gift of grace. There is
so much of an emphasis put upon the God of punishment, especially a God who
will punish the ‘sinners du jour’, those people who, in a particular time and
place, have committed sins that are far more abominable in the eyes of the
popular culture than in the eyes of heaven.
I am thinking of the condemnation of homosexuality in the last
generation as a current example. It ties
in to ‘fire and brimstone’ preaching. It
ties into stereotypes of the “Old Testament” God. But if it were not for the love of God, the
plan of salvation would never have come to us.
What is God without love for us? God
tried that, in the flood. All the evil
people were destroyed, the small family of believers were protected. And what happened? The next generation of evil people arose from
among Noah’s sons.
We
don’t worship God because we are afraid of God or because we are trying to
bribe the affections of our God to get something. There are plenty of examples of idol worship
that follow those particular tracks.
Rather, we have a God who created us that we may freely choose to
worship our God. And, in God’s love,
when we chose to turn away, God laid out God’s plan for us to return. Remember, the gift of salvation is free. We are not required to be nice people in
order to receive the gift of salvation.
The wonder and power of that gift is that it comes out of God’s love and
from it, from our gratitude and its life changing powers, we can become nice
people.
And we
have ‘the communion of the Holy Spirit’.
It is tough when we have more than one meaning for a technical
term. “Communion” usually refers to the
Lord’s Supper. But that is an
application of its broader meaning. The
way I think of it, to be in communion with someone is to be in common union
with them. We are united because we have
something in common-that may be a clearer way to put it. The common union of the Christian faith is in
two parts as I see it. We are in common
union with God through the Holy Spirit.
Remember,
it is the True Spirit that Jesus said the Father was sending to be the advocate
for the disciples after Jesus returned to heaven. It is the Spirit that filled the disciples on
Pentecost and went on, through the book of Acts, to be recorded as coming to
the people who were baptized in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the
ends of the Earth (which would include us).
Common union, communion of the Holy Spirit is God with us no matter
what.
But
communion is also between us, as brothers and sisters in Christ. We come not only as individuals to God, but
as a community to God. We stand together
in the faith. It is a vertical and a
horizonal relationship that is at work.
Another way to think of it is as the fulfillment of the law as outlined
by Jesus, love God and love neighbor.
The result of that love is communion, with God and with one another.
The
kicker is then ‘be with all of you’. It
is not just in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it is grace, love,
and communion called upon to be with the faithful to whom Paul is writing.
In 2
Corinthians, Paul completes his letter with this call. It is to achieve what he puts down two verses
earlier, “Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen
to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and
peace will be with you.” We have a heck
of a time living in agreement with one another, even as-maybe especially as
Christians. Despite Paul’s appeal. It can be managed if we live first in God, in
grace, in love, and in communion. The
rest can be the details.
It is
this divine shorthand of who God is and what God has achieved that is behind
the Great Commission, our other passage, from the end of Matthew. Jesus says to the disciples, “Go out and make
disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the
Son, and the Holy Spirit”. Baptizing
them in the power of grace, love, and communion. It is why we use this formula when we baptize
our own. It is why we use this formula
when we renew our baptismal promises as a community at the baptism of another
member of the household of faith or at the moment of confirmation, when our
young people (usually) accept the promises and commitments of baptism for
themselves, those promises made by their parents when they were brought to the
fount.
What
makes Christianity unique, in my consideration, is that we have this blend of
the overpowering transcendence of God and the friendship immanence of God in
our lives. A God who became human. Who experienced what we experience. Who suffered as we suffer. Who died as we die. What is the point of all of that? God is all-powerful. God has only to say and we will believe. God has only to say and we will obey. But that is not how we were made.
Because
in making us with free will, God created beings who could truly choose to
worship the Lord. True glory comes
through this true choice. And to make
the possibility for a choice for good, it requires the possibility of a choice
for the ‘not good’. Then, when the ‘not
good’ was chosen, God’s plan went into operation to restore us, by grace,
through love, and in communion. See how
the shorthand of the Trinity can remind us of what God has done?
For me,
it is a fitting conclusion to the Lenten-Easter-Pentecost arc. What is God’s plan? What has Jesus done for us? How do we live now in the love and power of
God? In the season of this pandemic, it
has been particularly powerful and necessary to be reminded of who God is and
what God does. Because for the first
time in recent memory, maybe for the first time in our living experience, we
are in the grip of something more powerful than ourselves. May it be inspiration to embrace the power
that has always been more than ourselves, more than the pandemic, more than any
power in the world to oppress or hold us back.
Now, may “The grace of the Lord
Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all
of you”. Amen
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