Relationship, Discipleship, & Trinity | Matthew 28:16-20 | 5.31.26

Grace and peace to you.

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, what a gift it is to be with y'all this morning as we celebrate Trinity Sunday, which is always the first Sunday after Pentecost.

We don't always think about the Trinity all that much.

So today we're going to think about it a lot.

You're going to hear it in the liturgy, you're going to hear it at the end.

We will reflect on it at the communion table.

Trinity Sunday is a celebration of this idea, this Christian understanding that the one God of the universe is expressed in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.

The triune God, as St.

Augustine famously called, the lover, the beloved, and love itself.

And the selected readings from the lectionary on this day are often passages where references to those three persons show up.

From which, out of these passages, the early church over the first few hundred years sort of developed this theology of the Trinity as a reflection of what Scripture says and does.

And today's reading is no different.

It comes at the end of Matthew's gospel, where the disciples, having been told by the women at the tomb to meet Jesus back in Galilee, where it all began, they return, and Jesus delivers his final mountaintop farewell speech, which includes this baptismal formation in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

But before we read those words from Jesus, let's pray and ask God to speak to us freshly this morning.

Will you pray with me?

Holy God, reveal your truth to us.

Help your voice to be the one we hear.

Help us to see and experience the truth in your creation and in your word and by your spirit and guide us to live in your love and service.

Amen.

Now let's read Jesus' words to his disciples from the gospel according to Matthew chapter 28, verses 16 through 20.

Matthew 28:16–20

Let's listen for God's word together.

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus told them to go.

And when they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted.

Jesus came near and spoke to them.

Teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.

And look, I myself will be with you every day until the end of this present age.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

The doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery.

If you're hoping to leave here with some complete understanding of it, that's not going to happen.

So take a deep breath.

And yet, for so many people of faith these days, the doctrine of the Trinity has also kind of been the spare tire of our faith.

We don't really think about it all that much.

We only really pull it out when we need it to fix something for us.

But most of the time, it's just tucked away in the trunk under the loose tennis balls and the old first aid kit and the random towel that's been in there so long we don't remember when we even put it in there.

But it's back there somewhere, the Trinity, you know?

And because of that, for a lot of Christians, it's just not something we think about.

And that's a shame because the Trinity is not the spare tire of our faith.

It is the chassis.

It is the foundation upon which we build and structure our understanding of God.

And maybe it's because we've neglected this foundation, this foundational understanding of God's nature for so long, many Christians have ended up with authoritarian or hierarchical or dogmatic and legalistic understandings of God.

Understandings that simply don't hold up to the triune vision that we've received in Jesus and the spirit and the source of all of this.

As it turns out, we tend to resemble the things we worship.

We tend to look like the God we worship.

And that's exactly why it matters so much for us to remember.

I wish it got more than one feast day per year.

A vengeful, uh legalistic God forms vengeful and legalistic people.

A compassionate and merciful God forms compassionate and merciful ones.

That's my thesis today.

Theology is simply the language we use to describe who God is.

But language doesn't stay abstract for long.

Because what we say about God shapes what we say about ourselves and about the church and about our neighbors and about how we live and how we spend our money and how we do our work.

And the God of our tradition reveals a God who, in God's very nature, we say, is relational.

God is a relationship, a verb, giving and receiving, singular and yet communal.

St.

Bonaventure described the Trinity this way: The Father empties into the Son, saying, My beloved, I delight in you.

And the Son empties into the Spirit, giving himself to its leading and life-giving nature, even through pain and suffering and death, and then the Spirit empties into the Father, fueling the life force of creation.

Nothing held back, he writes.

They know the center of the universe, he writes, is infinite love.

We don't always live like that, though.

I know most days I sure don't.

We don't live like we believe that infinite love is the center and source of the universe.

I'm not always able to ground my faith in that.

And because we're not always able to live from that place of abundance and grace, we end up living in a scarcity model where there's never enough.

Never enough food or money or security or health care or education or grace or mercy to go around.

We can't seem to risk letting go because we don't have faith that will be refilled.

It's confidence in what God pours into us that allows us to pour it out so freely.

But the good news is that the refilling, love and mercy that we need is who God is.

The nerdy theological term for this, for those of you fellow nerds, is peracuresis.

You want to give it a try?

Paracaresis?

Paracoresis.

Oh, that's fun.

It dances around the mouth because it's uh it's used to describe this sort of dance that the three persons of the Trinity move in, in and among each other, each containing the divine nature of all the others.

It's a Greek verb that means to make room.

We believe that God is always making room, making space.

The Father is in the Son, and the Spirit is in the Father.

What would it mean for us to make room in our lives for others?

To build space within ourselves for other folks who interact with us.

Would we find more loving community if we made that extra space?

For listening, for understanding, for unity even in our diversities.

I believe so, because I believe that's who God is.

God is a unity within a diversity of expressions, of persons.

God is not a solitary, angry judge in the sky.

God is mutual, self-giving love.

In a very real sense, God is a verb.

It's the closest doctrine, this Trinity, that I think we have to understanding what the gospel writer meant when he wrote that God is love.

In our scripture passage for today, we read that the disciples took the testimony of the women at the tomb seriously, and they traveled back to Galilee and they hiked up that mountain.

And as they were promised, Jesus met them there.

And then verse 17 says this.

Who hiked up a mountain and saw the resurrected Jesus standing before them.

And some doubted.

And I think that's worth pausing a moment and giving thanks for.

That some of Jesus' very closest friends met him after his resurrection and worshiped him, even though they still doubted.

And they were not excluded from the gift of his presence.

There wasn't anybody taking attendance.

They didn't check everybody's doubts on the way up the mountain.

Everybody got to come.

It tells me that doubt is not a problem to solve, it's a part of the journey.

Doubt's not something we we fix, it's something we experience as we're challenged, as the disciples were challenged by the grief of the loss of their friend.

His resurrection didn't stop their grief.

It didn't fix everything for them intellectually.

But you know what it did?

It revealed Jesus' presence to them, even in that.

Doubts are a part of the journey of faith that simply remind us that we are growing and stretching and strengthening.

They are the sore muscles of a growing faith.

And I pray that we always feel free to bring our doubts and questions with us into this room, to this table, into the life we share together, just as those disciples brought theirs.

Because if we if they were welcome on that mountain, then they're welcome in this place too.

This is the place where Jesus tells his friends, look, you have been with me.

You know what I stand for.

You've seen how I live.

You look at what it looks like to live a life of love, and I am with you always.

You have my spirit with you.

Go and live as I lived, love as I love, teach as I taught, make disciples as I discipled you.

This text here, which lifts up doubters as part of the very first group of apostles, it's been misunderstood, in my opinion, as a call to wield power and coercion over other people.

We have to confess that the church has often focused on Jesus' command to make disciples and used that command as carte blanche for colonialism and inquisitions, uh, crusades, manifest destiny.

Uh for many in the cultural arena, making disciples means creating converts.

It means taking people's identities away and making them look like who I think they ought to look like.

That's not what Jesus did with these men on the mountain.

The Jesus of the Gospels isn't interested in creating converts to a new religion.

He was gathering disciples, and disciples were Jewish.

Being a disciple was a Jewish way of living, with a rabbi who was a Jewish teacher.

It was about building relationships of trust and shared wisdom.

And he did it with a diverse gaggle of underdogs and misfits.

There's only one main verb in verse 19, just one.

In Greek, uh it's mathäusate, which just means disciple.

To disciple, that's the verb.

Everything else, go, baptize, teach.

Those are participles.

They describe how the discipling happens.

But the center, the gravity of this passage, the thing Jesus is actually commanding is a single word, disciple.

And that might not seem like a big deal.

Maybe there's not a distinction yet there for you in your mind, but what discipleship looked like in the world Jesus inhabited helps us see what I think it meant.

In first century Jewish life, a disciple, a Talmud, uh, was not primarily a student sitting in a classroom receiving information.

A Talmud was someone who had been chosen by a rabbi to walk with him through life in order to develop that person's faith and wisdom by literally following their teacher, following in their footsteps, watching them brush their teeth, sleep, go to the store, haggle about the prices of things.

It was more the practice of a trade and less the memorization of terms and formulas.

Does that make sense?

There's a saying in Percay of Ot, which is uh a rabbinic text, probably a few decades after Jesus.

But one of the ways they describe this relationship is that the disciple ought to cover their self in the dust of their rabbi's feet.

Proximity was the whole point, closeness, relationship.

You learned by watching the teacher eat, by watching him pray, watching him handle conflict, watching him misstep and recover and try again.

It was not primarily about receiving the correct content.

It was about the practice, the living out of a faithful and meaningful and connected life.

This is what Jesus is telling his disciples to go and do, to build relationships with people of all nations.

Not go create converts or win arguments or build an institution.

Go and do what I just did with you.

Build community with people, live with them, eat with them, walk with them through life, love them as I have loved you.

To disciple is to relate, to pour into and to receive from, to dance with.

It's a paracures.

And maybe that's the invitation for us today.

Because the church has spent a lot of energy over the centuries trying to make people into something, into converts, into members, into givers, into people who look and think and believe like they do.

And we have to be honest that some of that energy has caused real harm.

But what if the command was never about making anything at all?

It doesn't say actually to make disciples in the Greek.

It just says to disciple.

To disciple.

What if that verb to disciple is less about producing a result and more about entering a relationship?

Less about changing someone and more about walking with someone, being present with them as they go through the things that life brings us through.

What if the invitation Jesus is extending from that mountaintop isn't to go and fix the world as if the world were a problem, but to go and be with the world.

To love the world, the way Jesus has loved the disciples.

Make sure that you share that same dust.

Eat with them, walk with them, make room for them in your life, the way the Father makes room for the Son, the way the Spirit makes room for the Father.

I hope that the uh the paracaresis might spill out of this room and of our lives and all the places you will go this week.

And that when you're tired and when you doubt, as those first disciples doubted, standing right there in his presence, that when the work feels too heavy and the world feels too broken, and you wonder what of this could be possibly mine to do, that you remember what he said last.

Look, I myself will be with you every day until the end of the present age.

Not I'll be with you once you've got it figured out, not I will be with you once you get your proper degree, not I will be with you once all of your doubts have cleared.

Not I'll be with you once everything is running smoothly in your life, but I am with you and will be with you every day.

The same God who empties and is filled, the same God that makes room, the same love that hovered over the waters at the beginning of all things is still hovering and still here and still dancing.

May we go and join the dance.

Amen.