A Sermon for 2020 A.D. By Carsten Bryant To be preached for Union Grove UMC In Hillsborough, NC Salutation: Good morning. Thank you for tuning into Union Grove’s first solo attempt at a prerecorded worship service. As much as I’ve loved enjoying the fruits of our collaboration as the Orange Cooperative Parish with the other Methodist churches in Northern Orange County, it’s also felt like a homecoming this week to get to do all the pieces of worship here at Union Grove with our Union Grove people (best in the world)!

Thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has helped out over the past few days: to the folks who sent in candle videos, to our new field ed interns Jordan Haywood and Steff Hilton and to our old intern Tim, to our musicians Jordan, Jamie, Sally, and Rich for sounding so great and being willing to record the “only one more, I promise it’s the last” song at least three different times, to Pastor Rich for trusting Christine and me to assemble the pieces as he departed for a weekend at the beach, and especially to my sweetie, my bride, the love of my life, for undertaking the massive project of stitching all my harebrained ideas into one massive worship service video file and of editing out all the silliness from the music recording session and for putting up with the most annoying version of me that somehow always shows up when it’s my turn to preach while she’s still teaching twenty fourth graders and carrying our ever larger child. Christine, I’m with Charles Brown: I don’t know how you do it!

Intro: Today is Trinity Sunday, the one Sunday a year the church sets aside to make sure it talks about the Father, the Son, and the all on the same day. Not coincidentally, like the Sunday after , it’s one of the preaching Sundays most notoriously handed off from head pastors to someone else, as if to say “Hey, you just finished getting your head filled up with all that seminary learning; why don’t you tell everybody what’s up with that whole ‘Trinity’ thing.” Rich promises that agreeing to do a wedding at the beach this weekend had nothing to do with it being Trinity Sunday—sure….

Prayer: Will you pray with me and for me that through me and when necessary in spite of me our Triune might use these words to speak something true, something needful, something beautiful to us this morning?

O God, Holy, Almighty, Eternal One, we give you thanks that you revealed yourself, all Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to us because if you had left it up to us to figure you out we never would’ve guessed that Trinity is what the word God means. Hard as that would’ve been to guess, we never could have imagined how determined you are to entice each and every one of us into the love that you already are in yourself. Arouse our feeble desire this morning so that we long for you as the deer thirsts for water, as the drowning want air. Arouse our desire so that we’ll fool around less with all the things with which we distract ourselves, so that we’ll want what you want. In your holy, almighty, eternal name – the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit – Amen.

Sermon

When the church baptizes human flesh and thereby makes it into Christian flesh, the person doing the baptizing who is at that moment standing in for all Christians throughout all time gets water onto skin and says, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

The church does this because that’s what told us to do! In our lesson this morning, we skip back two weeks, back before the coming of the Spirit at , to Jesus standing on a mountaintop with his eleven so-called disciples, the ones who sat for the as twelve ardent true believer disciples but Judas had since killed himself because he felt so bad about selling Jesus out to be executed by the government and the rest had bailed about as soon as Judas puckered his lips.

As Jesus is fixing to ascend, as his feet are only barely touching the ground, as the angelic choir is warming up to welcome home the crucified and resurrected Lord of all, Jesus the Christ, the Son of Mary, Son of God, right then he leaves his flighty friends with these words: a reminder that he has all the authority, all the power in heaven and on earth. Then Jesus starts giving orders, “Go! Scat! Get outta here! Go and make more folks like you, more disciples, more folks who follow me, more folks learning to talk like me and walk like me, to think like me and pray like me. Teach them how to do all the stuff I’ve been telling you to do these past three years! All across the whole world: Jews, Samaritans, other Gentiles, everybody!”

But he doesn’t stop at telling them to teach and show, to offer instruction, advice, and correction, to talk and write and preach and converse. Because they won’t be doing all that Jesus wants them to be doing unless they’re also doing more than running their mouths: the church ain’t the church unless it’s baptizing in the Lord’s name, the name of the God who created the heavens and the earth and called it good, who made humankind in God’s own image, the God who declared to Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, to Isaac and Rebecca, to Jacob and Leah and Rachel and Bilhah and Zilpah that God would be their God, that they and their descendants, the Israelites, the Jews, would be God’s people, the name of the God who told Moses what God’s name is from the burning bush, the God who brought Israel up out of Egypt to the Promised Land.

We baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the name of the God who was born of the Virgin Mary, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, who was crucified, died, and was buried, and descended to the dead, the name of the God who rose again, and (shortly after giving today’s gospel lesson as a pep talk to the disciples) ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of God, and thence will come again to judge the living and the dead. We baptize in the name of the Spirit who was breathed into the disciples with fire and wind and power at Pentecost to turn the world upside down through the gathering of disciples we call the church, the Spirit who is the Gift of the Love between the Father and the Son poured out in our hearts.

This is not the kind of God we’d dream up, not the name for a God we’d invent for ourselves. The God who is infinitely conscious Being-beyond-being? Maybe. But the God who is also the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? The God who is the Father who gives everything he is in begetting the Son such that the only thing left that the Father is but the Son is not is that the Son is not the Father, who is the Son who gives back, gives away everything the Father has given him, who counts his equality with the Father not as something to be clung onto, and takes our flesh so that we can stand before the Father as the Son does, who is the Spirit, God breathed into us and amongst us, blowing wherever the Spirit wills, making us one, bringing us to join the Spirit in the position of the joyful third, the witness to the love between the Son and the Father? The God who is Beloved Community, who is give-everything, hold-nothing-back love, is perfect, eternal harmony? There’s no way we’d come up with that kind of God.

But that’s the God we’re stuck with: the God whose name is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We’re stuck with this God because this God has determined to be the God who is for us, the God who is with us, the God for whom there is no indignity that God won’t suffer to be able to bring us into the love that God is.

We’re stuck with the God who refused to take up arms, the God who came to us instead as a helpless baby and died humiliated on a cross, the God who says that it’s the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry for justice, the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, the persecuted who are blessed, who are blissful.

We’re stuck with the God who says we can see him in the least of these, in the ones being thrown in jail, the ones who aren’t welcomed into polite company, the ones who are suffering and hurting and oppressed and sick and tired of living their whole lives with their backs against the wall.

We would honestly prefer to have a different God, an easier God, a God who smooths things over and makes our lives easier, who checks our God box, who pats us on the head and makes us feel warm and fuzzy, the kind of God we’d make for ourselves.

Lucky for us, we don’t get to pick our own God. The God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has claimed us as God’s own in our baptisms in God’s own name.

All that’s left for us is to let God make us by the Spirit in the church more and more like the self- giving love that God is, a little bit more like God every day until Jesus Christ comes again. God already loves us the way God loves God, and God is determined that someday all of us will love God and each other the way God loves God. Even if we don’t cooperate and we do our best to stand in God’s way, rest assured: God is God, and we are not— at last God’s going to get what God wants.

All glory, honor, praise, and thanksgiving be to the name of that God, the Father Almighty, Jesus Christ his Son our crucified and risen, and the Holy Spirit who makes us one with God. Amen.