Matthew 28:16-20
“3-Fold Hope”
June 7, 2020 – Trinity Sunday
If you are like me, you may have said in the past, or even recently, something like this: “It doesn’t matter what color you are. We are all the same on the inside.” But that statement is only half right. In these tense and terrible times, that makes it all wrong, horribly wrong. African-Americans and other people of color all around our country are trying to get white people to understand that it absolutely does matter what color you are.
All the peaceful protesting is a desperate attempt to communicate to white people how very much difference in skin color makes in the way people are treated by police. But the response they want to hear is not that we must be a society where those differences no longer matter. Their hope is not for you and I to be “color-blind,” but for us to see dark skin and appreciate it, and respect it, in all its difference from our own.
We are taking up again the subject of Christian hope. This Trinity Sunday of the church year and this morning’s text from Matthew 28 teach us that hope for everyone in these times is rooted in being different. That’s because God’s own self incorporates difference. The fact that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and that Jesus came so that anyone can be baptized into that 3-fold name of one God is at the heart of our hope that the division and violent discord of these past days can be overcome in His kingdom, in His own being as three-persons-in-one-God.
Differences in color are part of the way God made us. They are beautiful, important, and matter very much. Yet angry, grieving people around our country, and around the world, continue to march in protest against systemic racism which has misunderstood the meaning of those differences. From the beginning of our country, those differences were turned into excuse, even a supposedly biblical excuse, for slavery, injustice, inequality and violence against people of color.
Therefore, I humbly, and with great hesitance in speaking for others, suggest that when people shout from the depths of their souls that “Black lives matter!” they want those of us who are white to grasp that race itself matters. You or I might wish to say something we imagine is helpful, like, “It doesn’t matter what color a person is, we’re all the same.” But such a statement trivializes the life experience of a person who has continually found that color really does matter, both in the way one is treated by other individuals and by social systems. The differences do matter in profound ways.
Difference matters. That is why the significant differences within God Himself matter so much. Western Christianity has tended to focus more on the unity of God, but all Christian theology grasps that there are, at the core of God’s own being, fundamental differences between the persons, between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One classic way of representing that fact is the “Shield of the Trinity,” which appears to go back to at least the 13th century. It was an attempt to diagram the Christian experience of God.
A simpler, less pretty version in English helps us all see what the Shield is meant to illustrate. When people met Jesus and slowly began to understand that He, though human, is nonetheless God, they realized that Jesus, the Son, is in many ways not the same as the Father who sent Him. Then, beginning with the Holy Spirit’s arrival on Pentecost, as we celebrated last week, they came to grasp that the Holy Spirit is also God, but neither is the Spirit the same as the Son nor the same as the Father.
As you can see, on the perimeter of the triangle, the Shield clearly states that the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father. There is difference in God. At the same time, the in-reaching lines toward the center state the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. There is unity in God. Difference in unity is one aspect of the eternal life of God’s own self.
When we remember that human beings are created in the image of God (as the Old Testament lesson for this Sunday from Genesis 1 teaches us), we begin to see how these abstract concepts about the Trinity offer hope. We are meant, we were created to reflect in human life that unity in difference which is God’s own nature. Race matters because our racial differences are one way in which God created us to reflect His Trinitarian encompassing of difference.
We like to imagine, especially perhaps in the United States of America, that we are all the same. But the last two weeks have rubbed our noses in the icky, smelly fact of our differences. What is needed is not some formula to erase those differences, even if it’s a good Christian formula like “we are all made in the image of God,” or that “we are all His children.” What we need is some hope that it’s possible to reach across those differences, to close the gap between us and, like God, to be together and one while still being different.
That hope arrived in the world when God Himself closed the gap by sending His Son Jesus across the infinite difference and distance between God and us. Jesus came to invite us in all our variety and difference, especially our difference from God, into the kind of life which God has always enjoyed, a life of unity in difference.
In our Gospel lesson for this Sunday, Matthew 28:16-20, we hear Jesus commanding the disciples to go forth and baptize people of “all nations.” Right there the Lord recognized the differences among us. There are nations. There are different peoples of the earth. They are different colors. They speak different languages. They eat different foods. They organize their societies in different ways. They make different music. They tell different stories. They look at the stars in the sky and see different pictures. “Go,” said Jesus, to all those different places and people and… do what? Tell them they are really all the same? Invite them to reflect on their common humanity? Get them all to talk and dress and behave the same way? Con them all into shopping at Walmart and eating at McDonald’s?
No, Jesus didn’t say anything at all about getting rid of the differences. Instead, He asked those eleven very similar men, alike in race and language and culture, to head out into the wide world of human difference and do this: “make disciples… baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Cross the differences and invite people to receive the good news of God whose very name implies the existence of difference at the heart of reality.
God is always reaching across the differences in God just in order to be God. The persons of the Trinity reach toward each other across the eternal reality that the Father is different from the Son is different from the Spirit is different from the Father, yet they are one God. God knows all about difference. It’s part of God. That’s why He can reach wonderfully far enough even to save us.
Black theologian J. Kameron Carter goes back to a seventh-century Eastern theologian to help us understand how far God reaches and how African-Americans may feel that saving reach of God even more than you and I:
In healing the human condition, Christ emptied himself (kenosis) to take the form of the slave, and one is led to conclude that the site of God’s wealth is Jesus’ poor and enslaved flesh. Having taken on the form of poverty and the form of the slave, God in Christ is the impoverished slave. As such, God enters into the hurts of those who suffer so that from inside those hurts, being fully identified with them to the point of communicating his divinity through them, he heals them. It is the poor slave, one might say, who is closest to God and so reveals God.[1]
The differences which this season in America has been revealing among us can easily make us despair. When we consider the deep divides between black and white, between Republican and Democrat, between rich and poor, it is pretty easy to give up hope of any recovery of unity. And some of those in positions of leadership only seem to be doing their best to further polarize and divide us, to accent the differences and destroy any common ground we might try to seek.
Jesus came and Jesus comes into the middle of all our differences not to wipe them away, but to bring us the good news, the Gospel, that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and that there is divine power, divine life that can reach across and embrace difference, without needing to make everyone the same.
One of the terms theologians use to talk about the Trinity is the Greek word perichoresis. Christians began to use that word to talk about how Father, Son and Holy Spirit are connected, how they indwell within each other, despite being different persons. In recent Christian thought, some writers and teachers have focused on the literal meaning of the word, a combination of the Greek preface peri “around,” and chorein, from which we get the world “choreography.” That gave them the idea of a dance, of the Trinity as three persons “dancing around” with each other. That idea of a divine dance is not quite what perichoresis was first meant to express, but it has been a rich and fruitful way for Christians to grasp the hope we have in the 3-fold being of God.
Black theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher has written a book entitled Dancing with God. In it she wants to help us see how the truth of the Trinity offers hope especially to people of color, but also to everyone, as God expands the dance of God’s own being beyond Father, Son and Holy Spirit to reach out, grasp hold of and partner with human beings.
Another black Christian author, Christena Cleveland spoke at Urbana in 2015 and talked about how when Jesus invited us into the family of God, speaking as a member of the Trinity, as part of the family which is God. She too spoke about perichoresis saying that the persons of the Trinity are distinct, different as I’ve been saying. Yet the members of that Family which is God cannot be who they are without each other. The Father cannot be the Father without the Son. The Spirit cannot be the Spirit without the Father. God cannot be God without three different, very different, persons in relationship to each other.
Likewise, you and I cannot reflect the image of God individually or alone or even with other people who are just like us. We are only truly displaying the image of God, only truly living out our baptism into the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when we are different kinds of people reaching out to each other and somehow becoming partners in God’s great dance.
The reaching out is hard. Think of that huge distance across which God reached to save us. If our life is going to be like that, then we too will have to reach far sometimes across the differences.
There is a wonderful scene in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” at the wedding of Tevya’s first daughter Tzeitel. In the celebration that follows there is dancing. But everything stops when a young radical named Perchik who is in love with Tevya’s second daughter steps across the rope dividing the men and the women. It’s scandalous for men and women to dance together. But the rabbi is consulted and only gets out the words, “Dancing is not exactly forbidden…” and off they go. The rope is taken down and Tevya announces that he is going to dance with his wife. Then Motel takes his bride Tzeitel by the hands and they too begin to dance together. Soon everyone there joins those three couples. What follows may be the most joyous scene in the whole play.
The 3-fold being of God gives you and me the hope of that kind of joy when we take hard and even, to some eyes, scandalous steps across the barriers we put up between people who are different. Those steps take courage and hard work and, most likely, some suffering. That first apostolic mission to all nations took all of that courage and hard work and more. Jesus is still sending us out on that same courageous and difficult mission.
Coming together across barriers and being with those who are different means that Christians call for taking down walls and fences, not putting them up. Our aim in Christ is not to dominate but to be together with. The holy vision of God’s kingdom looks far more like a wild and joyful dance than like law and order.
In short, we may not simply leap to unity over the differences, downplaying or ignoring them. Differences are just as important as unity. Unity is easy if everyone is the same. But the hard-to-cross differences between black and brown and white are as significant and as important as whatever might make us the same. Any genuine community and any genuine justice is going to have to embrace and celebrate and work within those differences if it is going to be able to achieve any genuine unity.
To start with, let’s be willing to let people who are different from us be the center of attention for a while. I’ve said it before. It is absolutely crucial to be willing to say, “Black lives matter,” without immediately qualifying it with “all lives matter.” God focused on Hebrew people and made them the center of attention for a while. God focused on widows and orphans and made them the center of attention for a while. God focused on Gentiles with Paul and made them the center of attention for a while. It’s O.K. God dances around and does the same thing within Himself. Sometimes the Father has center stage, then the Son, then the Holy Spirit. Each is different, yet each is God. Each human race and color and culture is different, yet all have God’s full attention. Let us be willing to reflect that careful and specific attention in our own reaching out to those who are different.
At the end of his wonderful fantasy novel, Perelandra, C. S. Lewis also writes about the Great Dance of God which all creation and all peoples are called to join. Part of the description is that everything, every grain of dust, every planet, every people is at the center of that Dance. Because God is at the center and every thing and person that exists was made by Him and for Him, they too are all at the center. Lewis writes:
In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its own season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else has been directed. Thus each is equally at the center and none are there by being equals, but some by giving place and some by receiving it, the small things by their smallness and the great by their greatness, and all the patterns linked and looped together by the unions of a kneeling with a sceptered love. Blessed be He!
Our hope today is that the Great Dance of God is already happening all around us. All we need do is join it, reaching across the divides and taking genuine steps of justice and reconciliation. Raise a voice, vacate power (as Lewis suggests), vote for change. Those are steps we can take, steps the three-personed God has already taken in Himself and then toward us. And therein lies our hope.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] From J. Cameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008), quoted in Jonathan Tran, “The New Black Theology: Retrieving Ancient Sources to Challenge Racism,” Christian Century, January 26, 2012.