June 7, 2020
Starting in Reverse
- Matthew 28:16-20
- T Alan Thames
Psalm 8
Matthew 28:16-20
II Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16–20 (NRSV): 16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
2 Corinthians 13:11–13 (NRSV): 11 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. 12 Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you.
13 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.
I start my day every day in reverse. Perhaps many of you do as well. It doesn’t matter if I’m heading to Starbucks for my daily dose of caffeine, to the office at the Indiana Interchurch Center or to Columbus, Terre Haute or the southeast side of Indianapolis to get a grandchild fix. I start in reverse. You see to get anywhere I have to back out of my parking place in reverse before I can actually move forward.
That imagery seems to characterize the day in the Christian calendar that we call Trinity Sunday. After all, Trinity Sunday comes at the tail end of ALL the really big seasons and holy days: Advent, Lent, Holy Week with Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and then Easter, and finally Pentecost. Those ARE the Christian calendar, you know? And then, the first Sunday after Pentecost is Trinity Sunday, almost like the poor stepchild, not getting any real recognition or acknowledgement. But to understand the rest of the Christian calendar, you have to start in reverse…you must start with Trinity Sunday.
And to get a grasp on why it’s so important to start in reverse with Trinity Sunday, we start at the end of the gospel of Matthew and the end of the second letter to the Corinthians today. It is in these two passages that we get a true sense of how the Trinity shapes us to be who we are and molds us to do what we are to do. Both passages help us start in reverse to understand everything that precedes them.
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you (II Corinthians 13:13). These are the words that conclude Paul’s second letter to the Corinthian church. If you’re familiar with this epistle, you know that the apostle covers the waterfront in his communication with the gifted, but often troubled and troubling, church of Corinth. He talks about someone who has been creating problems as well as the necessity of forgiveness; he reminds the church that they are ministers of a new message of love and hope; he challenges the members to live by faith in spite of persecutions and sufferings; he stresses the importance of reconciliation in dealing with obstacles; he celebrates repentance and generosity; he defends his ministry and sets it in contrast to what others are doing; and he ends up sharing concerns and warnings. But all of that is in the context of the blessing at the end…and so we start in reverse. It is the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit that formed Paul, that was to serve as the template to shape the Corinthian church, and is now the road map to show us who we are to be in relation to God.
One of the most cherished books in my library is my well-worn copy of Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr.’s “Christian Doctrine”. If you are familiar with this iconic book, written from a very Reformed and Presbyterian perspective, you know that it explores the theology of Christian beliefs. In the chapter about the Trinity, Guthrie ponders, as we all undoubtedly do: “Who is God? What is God like? How and where is God at work in the world? What does God think about us? What are we to think about God’s relations to non-Christians and to the world outside the Church…At the deepest level they are trinitarian questions. The doctrine of the Trinity, then, is not just a matter of hairsplitting intellectual gymnastics. It has to do not only with the mystery of God, but also with the mystery of our own lives in relation to God. We make the effort to struggle with it not just because we have to, or because we are supposed to, but because here we are confronted with some questions and answers which lie at the very heart of the Christian faith. (p. 92)”
In other words, for us to understand our own place in relation to God and to one another, we must understand God in Trinity. And understanding God in Trinity is about understanding the importance of relationship, of community, of being together in identity and in purpose. As Guthrie has said, “It has to do not only with the mystery of God, but also with the mystery of our own lives in relation to God.” Some of you may be familiar with the books of Donald Miller, who broke onto the scene in the early 2000s as a Christian author with “Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality.” In his follow-up book, “Searching for God Knows What” he wrote: “In a culture that worships science, relational propositions will always be left out of arguments attempting to surface truth. We believe, quite simply, that unless you can chart something, it doesn’t exist. And you can’t chart relationships. Furthermore, in our attempts to make relational propositions look like chartable realities, all beauty and mystery are lost. And so when times get hard, when reality knocks us on our butts, mathematical propositions are unable to comfort our failing hearts…What we need here, truly, is faith in a Being, not a list of ideas. (pp. 160-61)”
Donald Miller was perhaps more prophetic than he might have realized when he said, “And when times get hard, when reality knocks us on our butts, mathematical propositions are unable to comfort our failing hearts.” How many of us are comforted when we see the numbers of COVID-19 cases and the number of deaths each evening on the news? How many of us are comforted by the statistics about how many small businesses will fail before the end of the year? How many of us are comforted by the mathematical propositions about going back to normal versus living into something else? There is no comfort in a list of statistics, is there? And in the past two weeks, how many of us find any comfort in knowing how much any police force has in their budget? Or how many of us can relate to the abominable numbers of our black, brown and red sisters and brothers who have been oppressed and tortured and murdered? Numbers don’t move us. Relationships move us. We see the family of Armaud Arbery. We see the family of Breonna Taylor. We see the family of George Floyd. And we feel connected to them and to their pain. We feel as if there is a relationship with them that transcends the fact that they represent the fact that they are also part of the statistics of black lives being valued less than white lives. And we have to believe that there is comfort in our relationships…relationships filled with grace and love and community. It remains a mystery how those realities come together in the One person of God, but we know that without the relationship of grace, love, and community coming together we are lost.
The apostle Paul understood this truth so well. Although the words come at the end of the letter he wrote to the Corinthians, it was actually the point from which he started everything. In other words, he was starting in reverse. He understood that if he did not live in the reality and the mystery of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit, then nothing else he said to the Corinthians mattered much anyway.
And just as the closing words of II Corinthians point us toward our identity in relation to the Trinity, the closing words of Matthew’s gospel point us toward our purpose being shaped by the Trinity. “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’”
Matthew’s gospel has always been one best understood as being written within community and for community. The Sermon on the Mount, including the Beatitudes; the Discipleship discourses and the Commissioning of the Twelve; the Responsibilities of the Church to Come; and the Preparation for Ministry to All Nations---these are some of the highlights from Matthew’s proclamation about the Person and Work of Jesus. Matthew was particularly concerned that those for whom he wrote understood the importance of their purpose. They had been called by Jesus, and at the end of the gospel, we find that the purpose of that calling was to baptize, to teach and to model obedience. Even now we are called to this purpose. We are also called to baptize in the name of a God who is Trinity, a God whose expression is in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit…in other words we are called to help others be immersed in a God who cannot be fully contained in words, but in relationship. We are also called to teach all that Jesus commanded…and we know that his commands are the commands of love, to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our strength and all our mind, as well as to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are also called to model our lives around obedience to how Jesus fulfilled all of Scripture…as Matthew expressed it in another passage of this gospel, we are to obey by caring for the least of the sisters and brothers of Jesus in this world.
What an important purpose for this time, for right now…we see so much sadness, so much anger, so much division, so much that is antithetical to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit. We are called to start in reverse…to start at the end of Matthew’s gospel and discover what we do next. I love Brian McLaren, and have read nearly every one of his books since Jill Hudson introduced me to “A New Kind of Christian” nearly 20 years ago. His 2014 book on spiritual formation, “We Make the Road by Walking” includes one of the best passages about our purpose as shaped by the Trinity that I have seen: “…through the Trinity we transcend us-them, in-out thinking. Imprisoned in our old familiar dualistic thinking, we were always dividing the world into mine and yours, one and other, same and different, better and worse. In the Trinity, we move beyond that dualism so that mine and yours are reconciled into ours. One and other are transformed into one another. Same and different are harmonized without being homogenized or colonized. Us and them are unity without loss of identity and without dividing walls of hostility…If we open our hearts, we can feel the Spirit guiding us now to let the healing teaching of the Trinity continue its joyful revolution. (pp. 228-29)” Don’t you love that phrase “joyful revolution”? Because that’s exactly what we need to embrace right now, a revolution that moves us toward joy. Perhaps we are not ready to bear it…and even to dare to practice it. But if God is not violent, static, dualistic, hierarchical or exclusive, neither should we be.
We’ve started in reverse with both Paul and Matthew. But as they call us to embrace the Trinity, let us prepare to move forward more certain in who we are and in what we are called to be and do both now and in the days to come.