May 18, 2008 – The Holy Trinity
Matthew 28:16-20
Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.
As of this morning, this nation has entered into the season of Commencement Addresses. All across this country, high schools, universities, all sort of institutions of learning will play host to commencement speakers who will all share a common theme: As those speakers look out on their audiences of graduates, they will issue a summons to greatness.
“Graduates, you are about to enter a world that you did not create, filled with problems and frustrations that you did not generate. Those problems and frustrations are deep and severe” (etc., etc., etc.; you can fill in the blanks about the problems – just watch the evening news. And then:) “But you are a new wave of promise, filled with possibility, filled with promise and potential” (etc., etc., etc.; more about promise and potential. And finally:) “Your generation will carry hope into the future like the dawn of a new day” (etc., more about that promising future and about how those graduates will begin to solve the problems and frustrations we talked about at the beginning of the speech).
All in all, they will be stirring addresses, designed to inspire their hearers to be bold, to make their mark! Too bad that none of those commencement speakers, I’ll wager, will tell those eager, fresh-faced graduates what they really need to know about; the one thing that will get them through when everything that is supposed to work doesn’t; the one thing that will steady them when calls to greatness ring hollow; the one thing that we must have when we can have nothing: Endurance.
Endurance. It’s different from survival, although one must survive in order to endure. It’s different from wishful thinking, optimism and willpower. Those things are all valuable qualities, but they’re all limited because we generate them from within ourselves. Endurance is a power unto itself that comes to us from outside. Jesus is no commencement speaker, but endurance is the gift he offers as he talks with the disciples for the last time in Matthew’s gospel.
This lesson is always read on Trinity Sunday because it is one of the few places in Scripture where we see in one place a reference to Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is not a teaching we find in the Bible, but it is a Church doctrine. It is the way, historically, that the Church has understood the fact that God who created all that is and declared that creation “very good,” is Jesus, who gave his life so that you and I can have eternal life; is the Holy Spirit, who came from heaven to make its home among and within believers – that these are one God, and that this God has a dynamic relationship within God’s self. As the first and last verses of our opening hymn this morning put it: God in three persons, blessed Trinity.
It’s difficult to generate much enthusiasm for worshiping a Church doctrine, so it’s a good thing that’s not our task; our task is to engage the very live gift that comes from the Trinity, the gift of endurance.
There is, in Luke’s Gospel, a parable told by Jesus that very well describes this gift of endurance. It’s just a few verses in the 18th chapter, a parable that’s often titled “The Widow and the Unjust Judge.” (Luke 18:1-7a)
I confess that while I like this parable I don’t like either of the people in it. First of all, there’s the widow. All she does is gripe, gripe, gripe, kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. We might admire her stamina, but we don’t like her. She won’t take “no” for an answer, and people who adopt that attitude and then just hang around with it are generally not very likable.
And then there’s the judge. He’s certainly no prize. He has no fear of God and no respect for people; he’s arrogant, proud, detached. Jesus calls this dispenser of justice “unjust,” or as some translations have it, “unrighteous.”
And yet this widow triumphs, and she triumphs because she persists. She persists by simply wearing him down. She is the perfect picture of what you do when you can do nothing: You endure. But why does she do it, how is she able? Because she believes in something that she cannot see; she believes in a justice that has been denied her. She endures injustice because she believes that justice exists; she endures suffering because she believes that there is far more to her life than suffering. She is not simply a poor widow who has been victimized. That has happened to her, that is true; but it does not define her life. She knows that “better” exists, and knowing that propels her out of passivity and sustains her through the present evil until she is out of it, victorious.
And so Jesus, at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, commissions his disciples – that’s you and me – and he does it with a promise that fuels them. “Go, create disciples, baptize, and teach. And above all, remember that this One who the angels said would be named Emmanuel – ‘God with us’ – will truly be God with you.”
That’s it; those are the last words he speaks in Matthew’s Gospel. His disciples would need to remember those words in the weeks and years to come – there would be difficult times ahead – and in fact they needed to hear that promise that very day. Did you notice how this lesson started out? When those disciples came to the mountain in Galilee where Jesus had directed them, and they saw the resurrected Jesus, they worshiped him. And did you catch that next phrase? “And some doubted.”
That little phrase has given Biblical interpreters fits over the years because there is excellent evidence to suggest that that phrase should be more accurately translated, “And they doubted.” They worshiped, and they doubted. At the same time. Those disciples are beginning to look a little more contemporary, aren’t they?
In his book, Loving Jesus, Mark Alan Powell writes this: “Jesus tells the Pharisees that they worship God with their lips while their hearts are far from God. Pharisees often are the fall guys in Matthew and seem to stay in trouble the whole time.
“Still, one thing they never do is doubt. They are always certain about everything. They are the ‘God said it, I believe it, that settles it’ people of the Bible. It never occurs to them that they might have overlooked something or misunderstood something. As a result, they are often wrong, but they are never in doubt. By contrast, the disciples of Jesus worship and doubt at the same time, and Jesus doesn’t call their worship superficial. Doubt – Jesus never rebukes anyone for it.”
Worship, and doubt. It’s to us, the worshiping and wobbly church, that Jesus entrusts his mission. And he does it with a promise that fuels us. It’s that promise that gives us the courage to speak the truth in love, especially when that truth is extremely unpopular. It’s that promise that gives us the confidence to live a life of faith, especially when there is no discernable payoff to living such a life. It’s that promise that gives us the freedom to live our lives on behalf of others, especially when those others do not say “thank you.”
Endurance: It’s the gift we are given by the Trinity, the promise that there is a reality beyond what we can see; the promise that God will not abandon us in the difficult places but instead will keep us going through those difficult places. The secret of endurance is to place ourselves fully in the heart of God, and to remember that this Emmanuel will be with you, until the end of time. Amen.
