Episodes
Sunday Sep 07, 2014
One, One, and One Makes...
Sunday Sep 07, 2014
Sunday Sep 07, 2014
One, One, and One Makes…
A sermon preached by
Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC September 7, 2014, the thirteenth
Sunday after Pentecost.
Scripture: Matthew 28:16-20
Some people can do math in their heads. I am not one of those people. The other day at our Greater Washington District clergy meeting, a guest presenter was rattling off (off the top of her head!) the number of lunch bags that had been distributed for a mission project, comparing the growth over a number of years. The numbers weren’t “ballparked” or rounded off, they were precise numbers like 50, 674 bags. I stared at her in awe and disbelief. (I was impressed by the mission, mind you, but I couldn’t help but be distracted and dazzled by her numerical bravado!) No, numbers are not really my strong suit—though, when pressed, I can sort them out with the assistance of pen and paper (or a good calculator). Now ideas, concepts, visual and spatial relationality, process, “vibes”...engaging those things are where my strength lies. Perhaps it is one reason why I love theology so much and the Christian version, in particular. Because, numbers, well, they don’t tend to be used in our theological tradition in the kind of way that would be aided by use of a calculator—and they rarely signify the actual number. For example, the number 40—you know, 40 days on the ark, 40 years in the wilderness and such—generally means, technically, “a long, damn time.” Now THAT I can understand.
And today we hear the one passage in scripture that clearly utilizes one of the other mathematical mysteries of our tradition, that mystery known in common parlance as the Trinity. According to Christian teaching on the subject, One and One and One makes: ONE. That is to say, Christianity, following Judaism from which it grew, is a monotheistic faith. We believe in ONE God. However, the one God whom we worship has been experienced throughout Christian history as three distinct “persons”: as parent, as child, and as the Spirit of divine love and conscience. The passage of scripture we have heard this morning is, in Matthew’s telling, the first and only encounter the disciples have with the resurrected Jesus. And Jesus uses this one encounter to offer the words we just heard: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them all I have commanded you.” Now, for some, these words may call to mind the worst of Christian evangelism over the years: forced conversions, spiritualizing the issues of the poor and oppressed, and judgmental attitudes that cut off and exclude any person or culture that doesn’t readily accept what are interpreted as Christ’s commands. I know that Jesus’ so-called “Great Commission” has been used to support these things. But (thank God) this is not what Jesus is really calling the disciples to do.
Jesus is charging the disciples with the responsibility to carry on Jesus’ own mission: to embody and invite persons into the Trinitarian life of God. What does this mean? Well, our crazy, Christian math reflects that God’s life, God’s being is communion, relationship. This divine relationship is characterized by mutuality, self-giving love, unity in diversity, peace with justice, and joy. The being of God is the pattern, the vision, the example of the Kin-dom of God, which is, as we explored some weeks ago, a deeply interconnected web of kinship. In other words, God’s own being-in-relationship shows us how we are to be in relationship. When Jesus commissions the disciples to baptize in the Triune name of God, he is telling the disciples to invite any and all into the fullness of God, into the very life of God, into this interconnected relationship of loving, just, and mutually affirming community. This invitation is not simply to ascribe to a set of rational beliefs or prescribed morals; rather the invitation is to enter into a way of life that touches every aspect of our experience. To be baptized into the Trinitarian life of God is to be set in community—in a very particular way: our communal life is to reflect God’s life. And this life is, by its very nature INTERCONNECTED. We, who are many are ONE.
Of course, the Judeo-Christian tradition is not alone in professing a deeply interconnected, interdependent paradigm as the very nature of reality. But our Christian story is a story of a God who doesn’t just create the world as a self-contained system of interdependence and then flee the scene, hoping for the best. Our story is of a God who seeks relationship with the creation and, as a result, is a God whom we experience in history, in our lives. Our God enters into the created world, taking on human flesh, to reveal to us how God’s vision of wholeness and interdependence and peace have been so deeply broken by human sin—and to make a way for that brokenness to be healed.
“Well that’s lovely, preacher,” some of you may be thinking, “But what difference does it make?” Today our world seems as broken as ever. One and one and one in our world do not make ONE. One and one and one in our world make three opposing factions. Violence against other humans is rampant. Thoughtless destruction of the environment for short-sighted “gain” is a norm. Self-giving love is so often eclipsed by self-focused and disordered desire. What passes for “peace” is simply the absence of outright aggression instead of the justice that is required for true peace. Just a couple of days ago, I participated in a dialogue on the issues of race and violence, particularly as these issues have been highlighted through the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The sin of racism continues to plague us; it is a deep wound in the human family, a broken place that, like a bone that has been dislocated from its joint, leaves the whole body in pain and limping. As one of my colleagues in that dialogue said, if any of us believes that we can isolate ourselves from the pain of a sister or a brother—whether that pain is in front of our face or half-way around the world—we are deceiving ourselves. As John Donne famously wrote: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every [one] is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…any [one]'s death diminishes me, because I am involved in [humankind], and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”[i]
What difference does God’s overflowing love and mercy in Jesus Christ make? Well we are here today, for one, being reminded that WE are the ones commissioned to see, to teach, to embody, and to share the life of God, that interconnected reality of loving and just relationship. As those so called, we are also compelled to not only see the deep brokenness in our world but also to recognize our own complicity in it and to be about the work of healing the broken places. We know and God knows we can’t do it alone. And God so loves us, so loves the world, so desires connection and restored relationship with us, that God comes right into the midst of brokenness, reveals to us our propensity to be disconnected from one another and from God, and makes a way for us to participate in God’s wholeness, God’s peace, God’s joy. Jesus’ own body is broken on the cross as a sacrament of God’s love. And as we gather at the table of Communion, we receive that broken body, a reminder of our complicity in the sin that continues to create scapegoats and to break bodies in the world. We also receive that broken body as a reminder of the freely given grace of Jesus Christ who, in this sacrament of love, re-members us, mercifully puts our broken lives back together and draws us into communion with God and with other people. We who receive the Body of Christ become the Body of Christ in the world. Every “one” here gathered, together with all the “ones” around the world who also gather at God’s table become ONE. As Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” (1 Corinthians 10:16-17)
[Some—perhaps many—upon hearing these reflections will balk and protest on many counts—beginning with numbers that don’t add up. I myself wish there was time for us to reflect on more of the concrete implications of our call to be ONE—something that I trust will happen as we continue in this sermon series so titled. But I will simply close with a reminder that, while in our current climate unity is often equated with likeness of mind, some of those closest to Jesus (even in his presence after the resurrection) doubted. We heard it today in our Gospel passage. We don’t know exactly what they doubted; but that “some doubted” is there in black and white. This one little line in the Gospel according to Matthew makes it clear that the goal is not unity through an intellectual assent to a set of statements of belief—such that we have no doubt. Doubt is possible, even expected, because the point is not first and foremost to believe a certain set of teachings, but to enter into a relationship.]
Jesus reminds us that—regardless of our questions and doubts—when we turn to God and receive the grace that flows through the sacraments of God, what we enter into is the life for which we were created, the life that reflects God’s own life of love, justice, and joy, the life that—in re-membering the broken places—participates in the healing work of God that makes we who are many…one.
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