Matthew 28:16-20; Isaiah 44:9-20
May 22, 2005
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Around our neighborhood, we try to not allow our trees grow too tall. The spectacular bay views are more dramatic than branches and leaves. So perhaps twice a year, I’m out around our house with pruning hooks, long-blade clippers, and telescopic saws cutting down the trees to size. Since I’m about 5 feet, 8 inches, guess how tall all my shrubs and trees are? About 5 feet, 8 inches tall!
After that, I still need to do more cutting down to size because they won’t recycle until the branches are no more than 3 feet long or fitting into those ACE Hardware green recycling paper bags. We cut things down to fit nicely into our world. When things get too big, they get out of hand! When we can’t see over the tops of our trees, we wonder what might be perching up there.
Three in One
After Jesus’ ascension two weeks ago and after Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit last Sunday, today in the church calendar year is “Trinity Sunday.” Although the character Trinity in the Matrix movies is a complicated action hero, we are talking about God here. God as the Trinity is awesome, complicated and mysterious.
At school, we all passed arithmetic when we can add 1 + 1 + 1 = 3. But today we are telling you that 1 + 1 + 1 = 1! God is three persons with distinct functions but still one. All existed before time began. And each has a specific role that God provides for us to know God. When I teach the topic of the Trinity in my Inquirers Class for those interested in Baptism and church membership, most of the students sit there confused. God in three persons as the one true God is a hard concept to communicate.
But it is a particularly difficult thing to talk about in the climate of today’s church. Our problem is not only that we have difficulty understanding God, but it may be more that we have lost any sense of God’s otherness, God’s transcendence and holiness. We have cut God down to our size when the concept of Trinity strikes us as strange and unfamiliar. We want to see what’s perched on top of the trees. Let me explain.
The theologian Alan Bloom in his book, The American Religion says that American Christians have made only one distinctive contribution to the theology of the church. Theology has always stated, says Bloom that we have a need to be with God, that we ought to spend our lives on this earth attempting to get to know God, attempting to obey God, and live with God.
But American Christianity, says Bloom, has come up with the notion that God has even greater desire to be with us. God is pleased with us, is dying to pal around with us.
In other words, we have completely sacrificed any sense of God’s transcendence, God’s distance and otherness and replaced them with the idea that God only wants to be with us on earth.
Today’s good news is that God is sheer largeness, the wonderful otherness of the Trinity and the delightful, and sometimes overwhelming, sense of awe that we feel when in the presence of so great a God as one named Trinity.
Awesome
Have you ever felt in awe before? I have had a few times. One time was when I was in high school and attending our state-wide Baptist youth convention in Massachusetts. Although I sat far in the back of the school auditorium, I was in awe when the Baptist ministers and a priest in their black robes along with youth served the Lord’s Supper. Maybe it was the fact that this was a new auditorium of a Catholic high school that hadn’t been used by their own school students yet but the Catholic school leaders gave us that first privilege to celebrate Communion as Baptist youth. I was brought to tears of God’s awesome power to bring unity to our Christian communities.
Another time was at a national youth gathering when we met at the University of Redlands in California. In the evening at the outdoor amphitheatre, I was struck by the power of the Holy Spirit that prevailed over the thousands of American Baptist youth singing and praising God. The sound of their singing and the responses to Christian decision and discipleship moved me beyond words. The only thing I could do was to stand still and let God be the awesome God.
More recently, I stood up here filled with uncontrollable emotions—weeping just like a baby because the presence of Holy Spirit filled my heart and led me to share with you how even in the face of death, we must have that “leap of faith” in God to be true.
Don’t you wish that we can feel that awe more often in church on Sunday? I say that, not just because awe is a wonderful human experience, and all too rare, but also because if we never feel awe here on Sunday then we really haven’t been in the presence of the God whom, the Bible describes. We really haven’t been met by the Trinity.
God is a mystery that is utterly beyond our limited human comprehension and containment. All images of God are inadequate; all of our categories are too small. Any attempt to make God fit our values and our projects renders God into little more than an idol that we have made with our hands. Yet, God is not unknowable. The mysterious God reaches out to us, constantly seeks to encounter us as the Trinity—Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Isaiah
The prophet Isaiah experienced the awesome God in a vision of God in the temple recorded in Isaiah 6. Isaiah saw the Lord sitting on the throne with seraphs above him saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” And when Isaiah thought to himself that he was unworthy to be in the presence of God because he had unclean lips, one of the seraphs placed a live coal on Isaiah’s mouth to cleanse his sins and suddenly, Isaiah heard the Lord calling out, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Isaiah said, “Here am I, send me!”
That’s the effect of awe. To be brought into the presence of the true, large, real God is to be devastatingly reminded of our own falseness, our smallness, and our sin. In the presence of the Lord high up on the throne, Isaiah said, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, I live among a people of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts (Isaiah 6:3-5).” There was no way that Isaiah could have cut God down to his size!
But we try to cut God down to our size. In Isaiah 44, the prophet ridicules anybody who chops down a tree, uses part of that tree to cook his food and warm himself, and then “the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, ‘save me, for you are my god’”
Isaiah is saying this not because God is so mysterious and distant that nobody can know anything about God. Rather, Isaiah, having been met by the true and living God, knows that any fabrications, any idols that we make, cannot come close to being anything like this great God who has reached out to him.
We sang what the seraphs said to Isaiah, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts,” realizing that “holy” does not simply mean that God is “very, very good.” “Holy” means that God from a distance is awesome, wonderful, sometimes terrifying mysterious.
Remember what God told Moses, “Come no closer. Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Ex. 3:5). Moses was shaken by so great a God, but also commissioned. “I am the God of your ancestors, I have work for you to do,” God said.
When Isaiah realized God is awesome, he said, “Here am I, send me.” When Moses shook standing on holy ground, God instructed Moses to tell the Israelites that it is “I am” that sent me to lead you out of the land of Egypt. When you and I experience God’s presence among us, we too will be struck with awe that will lead us to serve God. God not only speaks to us but also summons us. A great God expects great things of us.
Maybe that’s the reason why we tend to keep our “gods” cut down to our size. Awe comes with a price to pay. God calls us to do something in the world.
The Trinity
God as the Creator affirms the glory of God, the sheer uncontainable glory that is the source of awe. In Genesis 1:1, we read, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” Especially at this time of the year, as spring is here and summer begins, we are reminded of the glory of God. We witness the great mountain peaks of Yosemite. We watch the roaring waves of the ocean or lush, green forest or the burst of flower colors and we experience the greatness of God the creator. One pastor once preached a sermon on astronomy and when he was asked what was behind this strange message, the preacher said that even though the subject might seem of little use for their Christian walk, it was to enlarge the hearers’ idea of God.
We are able to exclaim like what the Psalmist said, “O Lord, Our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Ps. 8:1).
We know of the Trinity through God the Redeemer Son. Here in the church, we know of the great sacrifice of Christ on the cross on our behalf and have become enthralled by the reality of Christ’s abiding presence after the resurrection. We experience the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
When we participate in the Lord’s Supper, we take common everyday items such as oyster crackers and grape juice and discover that these symbols represent Jesus Christ’s body and blood given for us. It is amazing enough when we learn of someone sacrificing or giving something or doing something to help another. But when we come to God and believing that it was God in his awesomeness on the cross through Christ that we are humbled at this thought. We may cut up bread into little pieces or pour juice into little cups so that we might be able to participate, but imagine the power symbolized here. We are in the presence of God!
And thirdly, we know of God when we experience the power of the Holy Spirit, that near presence of the Trinity, working among us, speaking to us, in fulfillment of Jesus’ promise in today’s gospel where the risen Christ tells his disciples, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:20)
The Holy Spirit comes unexpectedly to unsettle our predictable lifestyles and throws us off schedule. And after the dust has settled a bit, we realized that once again, God was here all along and will be with us to the end of the age.
There is a flattening in our contemporary churches when it comes to the Trinity. We have sanctuaries like carpeted bedrooms. We come into an auditorium to hear the pastor speak and the choir performs. On Sunday morning, there’s much smiling, so much light, so much happiness, so much celebration of our relationships. What room is left for awe? Where might we go to experience God’s holiness? Where might we be confronted by something, someone so wonderfully large and other that all we can do is to fall on our knees shouting, “Holy, holy, holy!”?
Go & Make Disciples
The answer can be found in our gospel lesson for today. Jesus commissioned the disciples: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (28:18-20)
When we leave the comfort of our sanctuary and our church to go out into the world to raise up disciples through our faithful witness, we will realized God is awesome. When we have courage to leave our close friendships and become new friends with the outsider, stranger, alien, and foreigner, we will see God’s awesomeness in them. When we recognize the fact that we are creatures made from a wonderfully loving God in his own image to praise and bring God’s love to the world, we find ourselves kneeling at the altar, singing, “Holy, holy, holy!” When we stop cutting God down to size and realize that God is beyond the universe, we will come to term with what our role is not only in the eyes of God but in our relationship with our brothers and sisters on this earth.
Maxie Dunnam tells a story of a young man who left for college. Apparently his mother had packed his suitcases. So when he went to put his clothing away in his new dorm room, he discovered two long narrow pieces of cloth among the shirts, the socks, and the underwear. They were neatly folded and ironed. At first he didn’t know what they were. But when he looked at the design of the cloth, he recognized the pattern. These were the strings from his mother’s apron. She had cut them off for him.
We might want to cut God down to size so that we won’t need to pay the price of serving him in discipleship. But God is cutting the apron strings so that we would be able to bear witness to him in the world. We can’t keep God tied up close to us when God is “Holy, holy, holy, Lord of hosts!”
When we baptized people and they professed their faith in Jesus Christ, we say, “We baptized you in the name of God, the Father, God, the Son, and God the Holy Spirit” so that you will go into the world to bear witness to this awesome God—three in one.
When I stand in the back of the sanctuary and proclaim God’s commission and benediction, I say, “The grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”
Our God is not simple, not an easily comprehendible God. Our God is named Trinity—Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Our God is complex, dynamic, relational, ever-reaching, ever-seeking, ever-creating, ever-loving, and ever-speaking.
O great distant and near Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: give us that which we cannot have through our own efforts: awe.
Let us pray.
Gracious God, you are beyond our ideas and imagination yet as close as our brother and sister. We pray that we will follow through with our commission to go into the world with your authority to baptize and give witness that our God is an awesome God who saved us from our sins so that we may have eternal life. Amen.