God in Community

 Matthew 28:16-20

Trinity Sunday

June 4, 2023

 

This is Trinity Sunday.

We’ve known God, then we knew Jesus

and we have celebrated his life, death and resurrection.

Now Pentecost has happened and we’ve become

conscious of the Holy Spirit, now we celebrate the fact

that God is one, but God is also three.

Most often known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And this is the Sunday that many pastors have focused

on the facts instead of the celebration.

 

Lots of sermons on Trinity Sunday have been spent

with pastors and others trying to explain the Trinity

using apples, or ice and water, ice cream, or clovers, or triangles,

and using sleep-inducing

words like ”modalism” or  “perichoreisis”

 

Now I like thinking and debating doctrine

as much as any seminarian, but I’m not sure doctrines

like this are so important to people’s faith

that we need to spend an entire sermon picking

apart the esoteric pieces of it,

and there are plenty, believe me.

 

But we should always remember and celebrate

what is underlying the doctrine of the Trinity, which is that

relationship is at the heart of God’s being.

God is three and God is one, together.

God does not ever work alone.

God is, in God’s self, a community.

 

To celebrate Trinity Sunday, is to celebrate Community.

 

The word community is one of those

words that can have a couple of meanings

The differences are subtle, but they’re different.

 

When we hear community,

we might think of neighborhoods or cities,

people in schools, or churches.

They use the word a lot in the news I’ve noticed.

They call a place a community just because

there are people who spend a lot of time in the same place.

And the dictionary does say that community is

a group of people living in the same area,

or having the same interests.

 

But it’s more than that, isn’t it?

Just because something is called a community

doesn’t mean that it’s a Community.

Just like Home with a Capital H.

I’m talking about Community with a capital C.

 

Community with a capital C brings along

images of more than just people who live

on the same street or share an interest.

It brings images of people who support,

and of love one another.

Who treat each other as equals.

It talks of shared respect, shared work,

being mutually accountable to one another

and helping each other.

Having love for one another that includes others.

People who are not all related to one another

that treat each other like family.

 

There is a lot of talk about Community these days.

Mostly , I think, people are talking about it so much

because we feel that it’s slipping away

It’s something that some of us remember from the past,

or seen it in the movies, read about it

or heard about it from others,

but over time, Community with a capital C has become scarce.

We don’t easily form Communities here in the US

we don’t rely on them, we don’t seem to need it.

So for many people, Communities don’t exist.

 

Lots of things have taken away our Communities

There’s technology which is giving us wider spread communities

but without human contact or responsibility.

We’re also more self-sufficient than we have been in the past –

when we’re more financially secure,

we don’t have to rely on others.

We can buy what we need ourselves.

 

And I think we spend a lot of our lives now

living in protection mode, there is a level of

paranoia that we seem to be living with,

and so we spend a lot of energy protecting what we have:

our families, our time, our privacy, our feelings, our things,

and with the need to protect everything so much,

it’s hard  to let other people into our lives.

In some ways it’s easier not to be part of a Community of any kind.

To just be responsible for yourself and your business.

It’s just simpler to be alone with family, a few friends.

As a culture, Americans have been shying away

from being part of a Community with a capital C.

But at the same time, we long for it.

People talk about it, we dream about it.

There are countless articles written about it.

“Community” is the marketing buzzword

when talking about those who are thirty five and younger.

We might not have it, we might not know how to make it,

but we want it, we are drawn to it.

 

I think that is because God created everything to be in community.

And everything that we see and know --

the earth, the sea and stars, plants, animals

and humans, we were created to be in Community,

Because we are all created by a God

who in God’s self is a community.

 

The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that

God is three in one.

All equally important parts who work together

Not just a couple but three.

A table for three where more can always join.

It tells us that the nature of God is Community

 – with a capital C.

 

To be part of a Community is our natural state,

to be in relationships that stretch beyond family and

selected few friends - is in our DNA, it’s part of us.

 

The world would love us to live for ourselves,

and just our small family units

because we’re more manageable that way.

The market would love for us to surround

ourselves with things instead of people.

The devil would love us to be in separate silos

to not trust or rely on anyone else.

But Community is part of God,

and therefore Community is part of us.

 

In the Gospel reading for today,

we hear Jesus’ last words in Matthew.

On Easter morning, Jesus told the women

to tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee.

The disciples find him there on a mountain and he gives them

these instructions, “make disciples of all nations.”

 

Now some have taken this command

that to mean that we should convert every person

to our culture and our religion by force if necessary.

And sometimes it’s hard to look at this scripture any other way.

But that’s how humanity has taken Jesus words 

in the wrong direction and made them a weapon instead of a tool of love.

 

What I hear Jesus saying to us is this:

Go and gather people that are different than you,

people that you don’t know, people of all different colors

that speak different languages than you,

people who have different cultures and lifestyles,

gather a diverse group of people, and make yourself a Community.

 

Meet them and talk to them gather around the worship of Jesus.

Learn to love one another and care for one another.

Become sisters and brothers with one another.

Individual parts, but one body.

Go and make Community in my name:

Father Son and Holy Spirit

Creator, redeemer, and sustainer

God eternal, God in flesh, God in inspiration.

God in us, God for us, God through us.

 

However you want to say it,

We love and worship a God that works in relationship.

An equal relationship.

Sharing the pain, the glory the sorrow, and the joy equally.

The work of any one rests on the other two.

Any one would be less without the other.

God the Trinity.

 

And the Community in the Trinity,

that is the Community we imitate.

That is what churches are:

Not hothouses to grow theologians in,

not a place to send your kids and grandkids to

so that they can learn morals.

Not a place of facts, but a place of celebration.

 

A place where we all go to learn how to live together

using the teachings of Jesus.

A place of Community, with a capital C,

imitating the God that we worship.

 

And Jesus said where two or three are gathered in my name --

Where there is an effort to form this love

across bloodlines, beyond family,

across cultures and languages, across our differences,

Then we will know that God – the community in one –

will be there with us always till the end of the age.