Matthew 28:16-20

Introduction: I love my children, even if they are white American adolescents. Without them I could easily forget that I’m old – I’m starting to stare down 50. They think it’s funny; I’m thankful. I’m almost getting old enough to get a proper perspective on things. One of those things that I’m getting a perspective on is how our culture, maybe even our churches, especially Protestant churches, even myself, have forgotten to talk about God. We’ll talk about God for us, God in our lives, God helping me out, but we never talk about which God this is. Modern Christians have learned only to talk about God as an expression of human experience so much that we don’t even create interesting atheists. Christians were themselves once called atheists, because they denied that the gods of the Romans and Greeks were gods at all, but only idols. They knew that just because the society around them dropped the word ‘god’ didn’t mean the same thing that they meant. The Christians confessed that the God of Israel, now revealed in Jesus Christ, the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, was the true God, the Creator of heavens and earth, from whom all things have come and to whom all things will return. Here on Trinity Sunday, our readings remind of this. The Creator God has revealed Godself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our Gospel reading reminds us that we are sent into the world in the name of this particular God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Immediately, we’re confronted with the fact that God is a whole lot stranger than we often think.

I think that it was on the first Sunday of Epiphany that I mentioned a little interview I had read with a sociologist named Christian Smith who studies the theological convictions of Americans. Kevin Modesto had the privilege of studying with him. His book has since came out, the theological convictions of American teenagers. Smith finds that teenager’s convictions are very much like adults in the United States. The god of Americans isn’t really very strange, just bigger than us and on our side. Listen to an interview that he conducted:

I. What is God like?
T. Um, Good. Powerful.
I. Okay, anything else?
T. Tall
I. Tall?
T. Big.
. . .
I. Where do you get your ideas about God?
T. The Bible, my mom, church. Experience.
I. What kind of experience?
T. He’s just done a lot of good in my life, so.
I. Like, what are examples of that?
. . .
T. I, well, I have a house, parents, I have the Internet, I have a phone, I have cable.

Smith calls this God “The God of contemporary Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”. This god is primarily a divine Creator and Lawgiver. He designed the universe and establishes moral law and order. But this God is not Trinitarian, he did not speak through the Torah or the prophets of Israel, was never resurrected from the dead, and does not fill and transform people through his Spirit. This God is not demanding. He actually can’t be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good. In short, God is something like a combination of Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process”. (Smith, Soul Searching, p. 165) God becomes an object in what is around us just like any other object. God, though, has a special role. God is a Person just like us, except powerful enough to help us out.

The Living God, the True God is a whole lot stranger. In the Beginning, God created the heavens and earth. God is not the heavens and earth; God is not like us, or like anything within creation. God is different, not an object like other objects around us, except bigger. How different is God? Did you notice how we are to baptize? In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Notice anything funny about that? How many names are there? Three. Yet does the Scripture say in the names of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit? No. The Father, Son, Holy Spirit are one name, the name of the Holy One of Israel. The Creator God is not some force in the world. The Living God is not just like creation but with a deeper voice. The true God is strange, weird, different, not at all what we have been taught to project from the society around us – a Moral Therapeutic God who is good to us because we have cable. The name of God is not a stable something that we can describe with a single word. God’s name is threefold: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Yes, God is a lot stranger than we tend to believe.

2. That’s why we are commanded to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

When we were initiated into the body of Christ by water and Spirit, we are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is not a “thing”, an object within creation, one who has a really powerful will that is separate from God’s own Being. Since God is Creator and we merely creation, we couldn’t even speak of God if God hadn’t revealed Godself. But God has revealed who God really is: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It’s important to understand this language into which we are baptized. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not terms of things or some sort of threefold substance. Father and Son do not refer to beings who are male; Spirit doesn’t mean that God has a feminine side to help the boys stay in line. The name of God that is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are terms of relationship, three Persons that is the One God. Without a child, a father is not the father. A son can only be son with a father. Spirit is that which binds the Father and Son together as love, as gift. God has revealed to us that in God’s very Being gives and receives God’s own Life from God – God, as Triune, is at the same time Life-Giver and Life-Receiver. God’s sameness only comes in the eternal difference of Love and Desire for the Other that is God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In our baptism, we are baptized into overflow of Giving and Receiving that is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father is the Source of the Son in love; the Son re-presents the will of the Father in love; the Spirit unites the Father and the Son as Love.

When we are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are immersed into the name of the very Flux, Flow, Difference, love of the Creator who is God, the One in whom we live, and move and have our being. Baptism is immersion into the very life of Life, the One of whom all our language fails, not a thing to experience, but the One Who is Three, the Sameness in Difference that is Love. We do not know love in creation and then project it onto God and say, this is what God is like. No, this relationship that is God, the Father, Son, and Spirit, IS love, and in some way, we only know love in a small, puny, completely different way by that we participate in God by the Gift, the Spirit God gives us. As the Father, Son, Holy Spirit that is the One Name that is God, we see that Life, the Giving and Receiving of Life that is God, is not about power plays, is not about eclipsing difference by sameness, is not about an eternal conflict between competing self-interests, but a Harmony, Peace, Desire, Order, Love that is God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It is this God, the True God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and no other into whom the resurrected Jesus commanded us to go and baptize.

Conclusion: God is Mystery, friends. God is for us, but God is for us only because God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, has created us out of nothing, and then called us to participate in the Flow of Love that is God’s own Being. God is not our therapeutic divine Will to help us out on our terms when life gets hard because he’s got the power. God is eternal Love, Peaceableness, Harmony that calls all creation into a harmony that participates in the true, eternal Harmony that is God. So that we might participate in God, the Father sent forth the Son, Jesus Christ, and through the Son, the Spirit. God now calls us to this Table to be made the true body of Christ in the world through this mysterious body of Christ in the bread and cup, to give thanks to the Father, for the gift of the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Come in faith. And be thankful.