2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

Blessed Trinity 
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​I have a good friend, also a colleague, whom I met in seminary. He was two years ahead of me.
 
His first charge was a church in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Mine was a church in Waupun, Wisconsin. Our terms coincided for a year.
 
Only an hour away, we visited each other on occasion. Over the years, our locations changed, but our friendship and our conversations about church and ministry continued.
 
Once, during a particular difficult period in his ministry, he confided to me:
 
“You know what I don’t like about ministry? It’s that the job is never done. There’s never a sense of completion. There’s always more to do. Lately, I find myself envying our custodian. At the end of his job, he can look at all that he has done and find deep satisfaction in a job well done.”
 
Today is Trinity Sunday. There’s a sense in which we can say today that the job is well done. The mystery of God has been revealed; the work of salvation has been accomplished. The Father has sent the Son, the Son has conquered sin and death, and the Spirit gathers and empowers.
 
Today is a day to rest, to contemplate, above all to worship. Together with the Psalmist, we declare: “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised! His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall declare his deeds of power to another!” (Ps. 145:4).
 
Our lessons immediately place us in this spirit of worship. Indeed, our first lesson is drawn from worship.
 
We refer here to the words with which we conclude our service almost every Sunday: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” (2 Cor. 13:13).
 
What we have celebrated and proclaimed these last two months—from Holy Week to Pentecost—makes sense of these words. It gives them content.
 
Let us consider them briefly.
 
The grace of God has been revealed. Grace is an important word in the church’s lexicon.
 
When a personal crisis while I was a student in college prevented me from finishing the semester, I approached my professors to explain my situation.
 
They empathized. They assured me of their support and extended to me a “grace period” that enabled me to complete my course work. 
 
My professors responded with patience, kindness, and understanding. In short, they showed me grace.
 
Most of us can recall occasions like this, when someone showed us grace.
 
Grace came to you unexpectedly from someone when you were down and out. You felt ugly, lacking in confidence, and someone complimented you, or helped you, or spoke a kind word to you.
 
You may have been at the end of your rope and someone encouraged you to hang on. Grace has the power to turn despair into hope. Grace enlivens and enables.
 
Grace is a central thread that runs through the New Testament, especially the letters of the Apostle Paul. God’s grace is shown to us in this: when we were helpless, unable to save ourselves, Christ died for us. By grace you have been saved, not by anything you have done; it is the gift of God.
 
This grace changes and transforms. The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all. It teaches us to renounce ungodliness and to live upright lives while we await our blessed hope.
 
This was the Apostle Paul’s own experience: He worked harder than all the apostles, yet it was not he, but rather the grace of God, which worked so powerfully within him.
 
This is the very grace that the minister invokes upon the congregation to conclude the worship service: the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
 
This grace has its origin in the love of God. The grace that God shows us is motivated by his love.
 
It is God’s great love for the world that moved his heart to send his only Son, who loved us and gave himself for us. In him, God’s love is demonstrated.
 
God’s love has been compared to an ever-flowing stream, a gushing fountain.
 
God gives it freely and extravagantly, never diminished in the giving, never running out.
God’s love is faithful and therefore trustworthy.
 
God cannot stop loving. To do so would mean to deny himself. For God is love.
 
And because it is God’s love, it is greater than all the forces of sin and evil that resist it and reject the gift given to us in Jesus Christ and poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
 
Love cannot be quenched, even by death itself.
 
But this love would remain a fact outside of us if it were not for the Holy Spirit.
 
Because we are God’s beloved, God sent into our hearts the Spirit of his Son, by whom we cry, “Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:6).
 
By this Spirit, we are adopted as children of God. We are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, sharing in his filial love, because we are united to him by the Holy Spirit.
 
Augustine spoke of the Spirit as the bond of love between the Father and the Son.
 
The love with which the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father is the very love in which we share through our communion in the Holy Spirit.
 
The Spirit draws us into communion not only with God but also with one another.
 
Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians to live in harmony with one another rests on the communion they already enjoy in the Holy Spirit (Phil. 2:1).
 
The Spirit unites us to Christ our head and to one another, so that together we form one body of many members. The church is the Body of Christ.
 
And just as each part of the body is indispensable to the others, so each member needs the others.
 
The Spirit gives various gifts so that each, doing its own work, may supply what is lacking in the others, for the purpose of the building up of the whole body.
 
But the church is not closed in on itself. If we manifest ourselves as the Body of Christ in our worship and fellowship and serving one another, we also pray in our liturgy that God send us out to be the Body of Christ in the world.
 
It is appropriate in this connection to recall the theme of Pentecost, which we just celebrated last Sunday.
 
Christ had instructed his disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit. Only after the reception of this gift from the Father were they to go out to witness to Christ to all nations.
 
This, in fact, is what we see in our Gospel lesson.
 
Jesus summons his disciples to a mountain. Now in the Bible mountains are the site of revelation of divine presence and authority.
 
We have mentioned in past sermons that for the Jewish people God’s descent on Mount Sinai to give his people the Ten Commandments is the revelation.
 
Now here in Galilee the Lord gives the definitive revelation of himself and his will on a mountain.
 
There he reveals himself as the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth.
 
Bible students point out that the immediate background for Jesus’ self-revelation is in the Old Testament prophet Daniel (7:14):
 
On him was conferred rule, honor and kingship, and all peoples, nations and languages became his servants.
 
His rule is an everlasting rule which will never pass away, and his kingship will never come to an end.
 
Is it any wonder that the only response appropriate to this revelation is worship?
 
That is exactly what the disciples do.
 
The sequence is not incidental. Worship precedes mission. The church is gathered before it is sent.
 
This is the rhythm of the Christian life, reflected in our liturgy. We gather, we encounter God in Word and Sacrament, we pray, and then we’re sent with the triune God’s blessing.
 
Of course, it is not so neat and tidy as all this. The Gospel says that some doubted.
 
Does this not also reflect our experience of church? Does it not also ring true about our worship? Yet those disciples are not excluded. Even those who doubted, hesitated, and wavered in his presence are welcomed and included in mission. 
 
This is good news. This is grace. The Gospel proclaims to us that Christ does not wait for the wavering to end before he speaks to us.
 
He does not demand settled certainty as the price of admission into his presence.
 
He meets us here, in this place, in whatever condition we may be.
 
And he speaks to us, not because of our faith—or lack of faith—but because of his grace, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
 
Grace is fully itself when it is shared, in ever widening circles.
 
What Jesus has proclaimed and manifested and brought to pass cannot be hoarded or contained. It has to be shared. 
 
Therefore, he commissions the Eleven to go out and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep and treasure all that he has commanded them.
 
Here we come full circle. Just as we conclude worship in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so also are we initiated into this worship in the same name.
 
This happens at our baptism. Whenever we baptize, we repeat the words of Jesus we hear today in our Gospel.
 
At the climactic moment of the rite of baptism, the minister leans over the child, dips his fingers into the baptismal font, and applies them three times to the child’s forehead, saying, “Mary Jane or John Jacob, I baptize you in the name of the Father, of the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
 
What are we affirming when we repeat these words of Jesus?  Just what we’ve been saying all along:
 
This one has been claimed by the love of God, which unites her with Christ in his death and resurrection, makes her alive to God, and sets her free to live according to the Spirit.
 
Most of us, if we were born in Presbyterian households, if our parents were active churchgoers, were baptized as infants (babies). We had this name of God invoked over us. I was baptized as a baby in a Presbyterian church in Albion. 
 
Baptism is a once-and-for-all event, but it is never a one-off.
 
We should never see it as a rite administered to us in the distant past that no longer has bearing on our lives in the present.
 
Rather, we should see our baptism as an event that accompanies us throughout our lives. That is why we can and should remember our baptism.
 
John Calvin put it in these words: “We must realize that at whatever time we are baptized, we are once and for all washed and purged for our whole life. Therefore, as often as we fall away, we ought to recall the memory of our baptism and fortify our mind with it, that we may always be sure and confident of the forgiveness of sins” (Institutes, IV.15.3). 
 
Culture tells us that what we feel or experience most deeply is what is most true about us. It teaches us, from early childhood, that we are under a mandate to create our own reality, a reality that conforms to what we feel or experience most deeply.
 
Be authentic. Be true to yourself. This is culture’s first and greatest commandment.
 
But what is most true about ourselves is not what we feel or experience, but what God’s word tells us about ourselves.
 
Our identity is not one we create; it is one we receive. And we receive our identity in our baptism by the One who has created and claimed us as his own in Christ.
 
Presbyterian pastor Josh Anderson put it this way:
 
“Baptism tells me not only that God is good and loving in general, but that God is good to me, that God loves me, that I have been engrafted into Christ, that the blood of Christ cleanses me from all my sins, that I’ve been regenerated by his Spirit, that I have been adopted into the family of God, that I have been made a member of his people, to whom he has bound himself by an unbreakable covenant.”
 
The covenant is sealed at baptismal font; it is renewed at the Lord’s table. Baptism is ordered to the Lord’s Supper.
 
That is why we say in our liturgy, before we receive communion:
 
“If you are not baptized, but feel drawn to meet Christ in the sacrament, that is a sign that Christ is inviting you to be baptized.”
 
At the font, we are drawn into the triune life. At the table, we are sustained in it.
 
Let us realize that we have to do with the mystery of the Triune God no less in Communion than in Baptism.
 
In this connection, Calvin offers us a memorable image of Communion. He invites us to compare the Lord’s table to the family dinner table.
 
What happens at the Lord’s table? It is nothing less than the gathering of a household, where the Father graciously receives worshippers not only as servants but as sons and daughters.
 
God demonstrates his fatherly care for his offspring by nourishing them at a spiritual banquet, in which Christ’s own body and blood are the main course.
 
And the souls of the worshippers who are gathered are truly nourished by the eating of his flesh and the drinking of his blood, thanks to the Holy Spirit, who imparts to them what is signified by the bread and wine, despite the distance and separation between them and Christ.
 
This is a maxim of Calvin: The Holy Spirit brings close to us what is distant from us in time and space. The Holy Spirit brings Christ to us here and now.
 
This is a lot to process, I admit. It is some deep theology. But even Calvin himself, easily one of the greatest theologians in history, said about the Lord’s Supper: “I’d rather experience it than understand it.”
 
There is a lot more to say, but this is a good note on which to conclude on Trinity Sunday.
 
God is beyond human comprehension. As Augustine warns us: “If you say: I understand God, it is not God that you understand.”
 
But God has given us Christ, and through him we see and experience God’s love, as it is poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity. Amen.
 
 

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