Homily for Trinity Sunday

If one is a certain kind of mainstream Christian, it is likely that one will find any extended conversation on the subject of the Trinity to be tedious and pointless. This won’t stop one from invoking said Trinity, or naming things after it, or even, perhaps, believing in it, whatever it means — but as a subject for discussion, or contemplation, the Trinity is about as useful as last week’s newspaper: a curious starting point somewhere in the background of the more interesting things going on now.

And there is nothing especially “conservative” or “liberal” or “progressive” about this attitude. In fact it fits a remarkable variety of commitments. If one thinks that Christianity, and Church, is all about making the world a better place, and so on, it is rather hard to see what the Trinity has to do with it all unless it is the interesting but ultimately unnecessary intellectual rationale for doing what we know we should do. If, on the other hand, one thinks about Christianity, and Church, as a relationship between individuals and their savior — as something that really boils down to an all-important decision for or against faith — it is equally difficult to see why the Trinity might matter, unless one simply wishes to go above and beyond the call of duty and investigate the interesting, but, again, ultimately unnecessary background material for the central message of salvation.

And yet, our gospel reading this morning, which likely stands as one of the most beloved passages of scripture, speaks pretty directly about a divine relationship between Father and Son. And when we look to the end of Matthew’s gospel we find that the most direct and clear naming of the triune name is in the context not of highbrow intellectual speculation, but the command that stands at the start of all mission and all evangelism and all good works: “Go therefore,” Jesus says, “ and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

There is no more missional command in scripture, no place where Jesus is more directly committed to the outward movement of his apostles, no place where Jesus is less interested in the merely internal dynamics or survival or intellectual headspace of the Church. Go, he says, and make disciples of all nations. Whether we interpret this in a more spiritual or a more corporeal sense, whether we emphasize personal conversion, ethical teaching, prophetic announcement, or anything else, is secondary to the obvious and insistent outward focus. Go, Jesus says, because this work that I have done is not just about you and me, but about the whole world.

Why, then, at the heart of this outward movement, do we need reference to the triune Name? Is its presence here merely instrumental, merely an insignificant detail in the work of discipleship here promoted?

There’s a clue to the answer in the second word of Jesus’ command: therefore. A small word, but one that good Bible students should always notice, because it’s one of those words that forces us to deal with the flow in logic of Biblical sentences rather than rest satisfied with the bite-size pieces that we’d rather savor alone. “Go, therefore.” What is the “therefore” there for?

Jesus begins: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore…”

It is all too easy for us to pass over the first part of what Jesus says. We want to move on to what we’re supposed to do. But Jesus insists that our mission, our outward focus as his people, has its foundation in this fact: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” All authority in heaven on earth has been given to the incarnate Son, now raised from the dead, and soon after he says this, ascended into heaven. What does this have to do with the mission of the Church?

Well, it may come as a surprise to hear this, but it turns out, in Matthew, that the mission of the Church is about God.

What Jesus tells his disciples at the end of their time together — the summary of his whole earthly ministry, in a sense — is twofold: God has revealed himself and his power in Christ, and this revelation of God’s identity entails a certain stance towards the nations. Jesus doesn’t end his time on earth with a handy message about being nice to one another or spreading peace and goodwill; nor does he end his time with a three-step method for inviting him into our hearts as our personal Lord and Savior. No: the message is not primarily about us at all, but about God. And in fact John 3:16 is exactly the same: For God so loved the world.

Perhaps, since it is Trinity Sunday, we can just state this directly without lengthy analysis: God the Father has shared everything — every divine power, every divine work, every divine wisdom and goodness — with his Son. Motivated by his own infinite love, he has sent this Son. And it is only in light of this fact — this identity, and this mission at the heart of God’s own identity — that we are called to go.

So when we come again to the shape of what we do when we go out into the world — making disciples and baptizing in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit — it is now clear that this triune Name is not just an arbitrary marker that stands as the symbol of something else; it is testament to the reality that drives mission in the first place. It is only because the Son of God is sent, and because he then sends his Spirit, that the apostles, and us, can be sent.

God is, in other words, eternal movement. The temporal missions of the Son and the Spirit reflect their eternal identity in relation to the Father. And what this means is that somehow, even in God’s eternal and unchanging nature, there is distinction and movement: God’s power and being is not the static and motionless existence of the philosophers; nor is it the fickle and corruptible existence of the pagan gods. The brief scene we read today from Exodus gives Moses a glimpse of God’s unique holiness in comparison to every other imaginable form of deity. God’s changelessness is his own; God’s motion is his own; God’s existence is his own. God’s threeness and God’s oneness is without analogy.

If we can accept that dogmatic principle — that the true God is without natural analogy — then the Trinity ceases to be something for which we must constantly be seeking symbolic explanations, most of which fall more quickly into error than into understanding. God is not the thing that needs to be explained and justified. We are. The question is not how there can be a God who is three persons and one substance, but how, if God is who God must be to be God, there can be anything but God. How does one justify and explain the existence of creation? How, if there is a God, can anything exist, much less good and evil, justice and injustice?

The answer that the Church has already given is quite direct: because God is Trinity. Creation is possible because love is possible, because God is love. Because God’s freedom, already perfectly expressed in the Father’s freedom to beget the Son, in the Son’s freedom to return the Father’s love, in their mutual freedom to give the Spirit, human freedom is possible. Because this divine freedom is so unconstrained as to willingly accept the constraints of nature and necessity and the will of another, human freedom is possible.

You see, Jesus doesn’t tell us to go because there is some static principle — whether ethical or doctrinal — that needs to be upheld. Jesus tells us to go because his whole life has been a going from the Father to us: “For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son.” What else is creation but God’s freedom to go beyond himself? What else is the creation of man but the making of a disciple, of a follower who takes on the image of his master?

We are often tempted, today, to choose between a Christianity of private, abstract faith commitments and a Christianity of activism. But Jesus doesn’t give us that set of options. Go, he says, and make disciples. Not go and fix the world, not go and believe certain ideas, but go and make disciples, which implies as well: go and be my disciples.

It is no wonder that, after Trinity Sunday, we turn to the long, often boring work of discipleship suggested by the slow march of green, ordinary time. I love how in our calendar we count the Sundays “after Trinity,” not just the Sundays “of the year, because we’re in the time of the Trinity — which is all time, and beyond all time. Our discipleship has a location, a set of coordinates, and a direction: to the Father, with and through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. To be disciples of this God is to chart our course with the grain of the universe.

Are you such a disciple? Can others tell the source and direction of your joy, and your sorrow, and your work? What will it take for you, for me, to accept Christ’s call to go and to live and to witness in his name, to make our whole lives a testament to the Church’s song:

Thee, O God, the Father unbegotten; thee, O only begotten Son; thee, O Holy Spirit, the Paraclete; holy and undivided Trinity: with our whole heart and mouth we confess thee: to thee be glory for ever and ever.^[1] Amen.

^[1] Magnificat antiphon for II Evensong on Trinity Sunday.