**Not Conquest, Communion**

Matthew 28

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 they 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.”

SERMON

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20 

Trinity Sunday

It’s Trinity Sunday! And you know, Elijah you did such a fantastic job explaining the Trinity that I think my job is done here today! Alright, blessings!!

Ok… maybe I should say a few more words than that. But understanding the Trinity is difficult. Articulated well, perhaps even more so. Throughout our history, even folks like St Augustine struggled in his writings to explain the concept of the Trinity.

So if you sometimes struggle in understanding the ins and outs of this ancient church understanding that while we have one God that we have three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit… and that the three are one and yet they are still three… well, you’re not alone in struggling with it.

In our Matthew gospel, we even see the disciples wrestling with their faith:

“When they saw him,

they worshiped him,

but they doubted.”

And that was even before Jesus laid out the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit language. Faith is hard… and I appreciate that our gospel today gets framed with the disciples have doubts even as they worshiped Christ.

Which is good. Because Trinity Sunday only makes it more complex.

What’s perhaps even more challenging is that… the church fought itself over its understanding of the Trinity for more than a century… people were called heretics and were actually killed over it.

So, we’re going to just do a little pop quiz today and… no? Alright… maybe we won’t go that route.

It is interesting, though, that we celebrate Trinity Sunday. It’s the only Sunday of the church year that is not directly connected to an event of scripture, but to a theological concept.

And, not to minimize the challenges of the past… but it’s almost like after the war was waged on what color carpet we were going to have in the Fellowship Hall, it became necessary to spend a Sunday every year to go into the Fellowship Hall, point at the carpet and say, “See? Isn’t that nice. I told you it would look good in here.”

And… actually, I think our understanding of the Trinity is a healthy mystery to have in the church.

I am not a fan of people having been killed in the name of doctrine, but the Trinity is a beautiful concept of humanity wrestling deeply in our understanding of who God is in the world… and what this means that scripture points toward God the Father, and then we have the Son and also there is this Holy Spirit and yet… yet with all of these we still have one God?

And rather than editing out the bits that made it a struggle to understand, we found value in wrestling with an idea as challenging as the Trinity as we try to put words to something we have experienced but still perhaps do not fully understand.

 But the joy of good theology is not necessarily understanding, but wrestling.

We try to connect dots through the patterns we see within scripture. We try to name faithfully what the church has come to know of God.

The God who creates and calls.

The Christ who comes near.

The Spirit who breathes life into frightened and ordinary people.

And somehow, all of this is God.

Not three gods.

Not one God wearing three different masks.

But one living God whose life is communion, whose movement is love, and whose presence keeps reaching toward a world so broken that we will kill one another over which vision of a loving God is the right one.

But maybe Trinity Sunday is not first about mastering an explanation.

Theologian David Lose suggests that rather than trying to explain the mystery, that we instead live into the identity.  That we become Trinitarian congregations, and here’s how he defines that:

“A Trinitarian Congregation is a congregation that sees itself as called and sent by the Holy Spirit to bear witness to the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed for the sake of the world God created and loves so much”

And I love that.

Because that means the Trinity is not only a puzzle for pastors to explain once a year while everyone else politely stares at us. It becomes a way of asking who we are as community in Christ.

What does it look like for us to spend intentional time dwelling within the Spirit?

What does it look like to lean in and listen to what the divine is calling us toward?

What does it look like to hear deeply how the Spirit calls us to be the church together, gathered not always in full agreement, but in full Spirit?

After all, we are here, I hope, because we are passionate about the work we are being sent to do together.

It matters to us that we work to be the hands and feet of Christ among our neighbors.

It matters to us to be a Matthew 25 church that is working toward being an energized faith community, engaged with our community as we share the Gospel.

It matters that we proclaim to the world the call of God's love for those who are too often cast away by prejudice.

And it matters that when harm is committed within the church, we do not simply pretend it did not happen. We work toward addressing challenges and living again into the discipleship community that we are called to be.

Knowing, of course, that we will fail again. And that it won’t just be that group that fails… but that we all are in need of change.

Because it is a constant process of listening and leaning in and loving and, as my namesake so often reminds us, putting our foot back in our mouth again and putting it all on repeat again.

That is part of being the church.

Not being perfect. But being formed and reformed.

Of listening to the Spirit again as we are called and claimed and sent out again.

****

But also part of that Trinitarian Congregation understanding is that we come with different expressions of who we are as church.  That we, as Paul writes, are part of the Body of Christ and that each of us is a member of it. And that we recognized the variety of parts we have among us. And that as disciples of Christ we will bring a variety of gifts to bare.

That’s actually something that I quickly appreciated about our congregation a few months ago as I was first getting to know you. We have a wonderful welcome statement on our church website. Have you read it, lately?

Here’s what it says:

" Here at First Presbyterian Church we welcome and engage ALL people as beloved children of God.

No matter your financial status, gender or sexual identity, educational background, culture, age, or physical ability,

we are a community that invites people from all walks of life to participate with us on a journey of faith.

We welcome and affirm our LGBTQIA+ members and their families.

We value the gifts and perspectives of all ages, from our youngest to our most “seasoned.”

We make space for big questions, broken hearts, and searching hope.

Bring your questions, bring your gifts, and bring your passions. Come, find your place here.”

And this Lutheran and his family have indeed been able to find a place here among you.

And we give thanks to the Spirit for that!

And it is my hope that as others visit our congregation here that they will find the same deep welcoming that we have received.

But that phrase… ‘find your place here’ is important.

Because there is a difference between inviting someone to find their place and telling someone where their place is.

My senior year of high school, Ashley had moved from southern Louisiana, where she grew up and where she was about to be drum major for her senior year.

And then she moved to Mountain Home, Arkansas with her family as her parents took new jobs.

And, she joined the band, which is where we actually met.

I was a trumpet player.

She had long been a saxophone player.

But the band director told her that we already had enough saxophone players.

He did not need any more.

So for her senior year of high school, he assigned her to play a different instrument: the French horn.

And even for people who have played brass for years, the French horn is weird to play.

The mouthpiece is unique. You have to hold your hand in just the right position to change the sound. It is an instrument that takes time to master. That’s not generally a “senior year” pick-up instrument… especially for a saxophone player.

And that also meant she had to learn mellophone for marching season first, because you do not march with a French horn.

So for the "good of the band," she was forced to learn not one, but two brand new instruments that were completely different from anything she had known before.

And maybe the band director had his reasons.

But there is something there for the church.

Because as we welcome people into the church and invite them to find their place, it is not for the "good of the church" that we place them.

Though, yes, at times it may feel like we have all been volunteered into this or that.

But being part of the body means feet get to be feet.

Hands get to be hands.

The heart gets to be the heart.

And you do not try to force an ear to be a nose.

When Jesus called his disciples, he called fishermen to continue to fish!

But to fish for people.

He invited folks to use the gifts they had and to step into ministry with them, but with a focus toward loving God and loving neighbor.

Their gifts were reshaped by God's love for the neighbor-love they were called to provide.

And that is very different from the Christian nationalist misuse of our gospel text today.

Because when Jesus says, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations."

This has been heard by some as conquest.

As if Jesus is saying, "Go force the world to become Christian."

For the good of the church, MAKE THEM!!

As if the call of the church is to coerce, or dominate, or instill fear in others until they convert and convert to the right kind of Christianity.

A couple years ago when I was pastoring out of Perry, one of our members who was living in a nursing home here in Stillwater was approached by a fundamentalist pastor in the area who told her that her Lutheran Baptism as a baby didn’t count—and that if she didn’t get rebaptized by him, that God wasn’t going to save her. And she wrestled with that for months!

And before this seems like me good, them bad…. 500 years ago, Lutherans throughout Europe were known to execute anabaptists who would rebaptize folks… and we would execute them by drowning them.

The church has a rough history. And we are still dealing with the consequences of that.

But Jesus does not say, "Go into the world and make everyone afraid of you."

Jesus does not say, "Go into the world and build a Christian empire."

Jesus says, "Teach them to obey everything that I have commanded you."

And if we take that seriously, then we have to ask what Jesus actually commanded.

Love God.

Love neighbor.

Love enemies.

Forgive.

Show mercy.

Speak truth.

Care for those who are hungry, thirsty, sick, and imprisoned.

Do not practice your religion just to be seen.

Do not judge others.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Full stop.

That is not cheap faith.

That is not casual discipleship.

That is a deeply demanding way of life.

But it is not conquest. It is not putting people in their place for the good of the church.

It is compassion and communion for the broken.

I know a pastor who served in a small-town congregation the midwest. While he was there, the beloved council president, a lay leader in the congregation, was arrested for murder.

He was found guilty and sent to prison.

And the pastor began visiting him in prison.

But folks in the congregation were upset.

"Don't you realize what he did?"

"Yes, I do," said the pastor.

"And yet he is still a child of God as well."

Some people were furious. Some even stopped putting money in the offering plate because they did not want their offering to help provide comfort to a murderer.

But still, he went.

Because we do not just visit the innocent.

When we do confession and forgiveness in church, it is not just for those who only have level three sins and below.

No.

The Trinitarian perspective of the church is that God's redeeming love is actively redeeming for us all.

Christ came, according to John 3:17, not to condemn the world, but to save it.

My hope for us as a church is not that we come together every week pretending everything is great.

My hope is that when life has us down, we can say, "Yeah... I’m here today BECAUSE I'm tired. I'm hurting. I'm broken. And I am here today because I need some reminders of God's presence. And that this people, they remind me of God's presence.”

“This place, this people, they help me reconnect to the sacred in real and meaningful ways.”

“And they help me bring the sacred back with me back out into the world.”

So maybe Trinity Sunday is not about explaining God perfectly.

Maybe it is about being drawn into the life of God.

Not isolation, but communion.

Not conquest, but compassion.

Not forcing people into the place we need them to fill, but helping one another find our place.

Not a church trying to control the world.

But a community called by the Spirit, sent in Christ, for the sake of the world God created and loves so much.

That’s what you and I are called to do. Nothing less than to be part of God’s story of resurrection and new life.

That’s crazy and... actually, kinda cool.

So go and be the church in the world that God calls us to be.

Bare the Mercy.  Carry the Forgiveness. Proclaim the good news.

Because we are sent by the Spirit to help make Christ manifest in our neighbors loves… even as we experience the risen Christ in our own.

Peace be with you.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.