St. Matthias RC Church
May 31, 2015
John Buchanan
Matthew 28:16-20
“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 of 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.”
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – the Trinity – the Holy Trinity – the very heart of what we believe as Christians. But, it’s something of a mystery, isn’t it?
I love a little story the late Cardinal Richard Cushing used to tell. He was the Archbishop of Boston and a close friend of the Kennedy family; President John F. & Mrs. Kennedy. When he was a young priest, Cardinal Cushing said, he was called to the bedside of a man who had suffered a heart attack. The man was lying in his hospital bed, not moving, apparently comatose. Father Cushing leaned over him and asked: “Do you believe in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit? Suddenly the man revived, opened one eye and said: “Here I am dying and he’s asking me riddles.”
The Trinity is the particular way Christians talk about God. With our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters, we believe in one God. God is one, not many. It’s called monotheism. What distinguishes us is that we talk about God in three ways: “God in three persons” is the way we say it. But we do not mean that there are three Gods. Not at all. In fact that word “persons” can be misleading. It is actually from the Latin word “persona” – the word for the masks an actor might wear in an ancient Greek or Roman play. An actor might play three different characters in the play and wear a different mask for each character: one actor, playing three different roles.
So, God in three persons – God the Father, the creator, the maker of the world, the all the universes.
God the Son, God who came to be with us in the life of Jesus. God who became one of us and knows what it means to be human. God who knows everything about us: our joys and sadnesses, our love of the world this beautiful day in May, our love for one another, our disappointments and gripes. God knows all of it because God, the Son, was one of us.
God the Holy Spirit: God who is present with us now, who is the source of human energy and creativity: God who is with us in great music, and great heroic human strength: God who disturbs our conscience when we see suffering and injustice. God who makes us impatient for peace and justice and a world where people are treated equally with kindness and compassion: God the Holy Spirit.
The really important part of this text – the very last thing Jesus said to his disciples according to St. Matthew is this: “Remember: I will be with you always, to the end of the age.” Think about that. Jesus promises to be with you and me, every single day of our lives, no matter who we are or where we go, no matter what is happening to us, Jesus is with us.
That is a great promise – because one of the things we fear most is being alone, abandoned. The psychologists tell us that it is deep inside us from the day we are born: the fear that our parents might leave us, might abandon us, might not be with us. “Separation anxiety,” they call it. Consciously or unconsciously, we worry about separation, abandonment, being alone.
A friend of mine, Tom Long, who teaches at Emory University, tells the story of Jack Casey, a paramedic and ambulance driver. When he was a child, Casey had to have dental surgery that required general anesthesia. He would have to be put under, knocked out, and he was terrified. A nurse said to him: “Don’t worry, Jack, I’ll be right here beside you the whole time, no matter what happens, I will not leave you.” She was true to her word. When he woke up, there she was, holding his hand, and everything was ok.
Years later, now a paramedic and ambulance driver, Jack Casey was called to the scene of a horrific traffic accident. The driver of a pick-up truck was pinned, upside down, beneath his pick-up truck, terrified, crying out that he was afraid of dying. Casey got down on his hands and knees and crawled in the cab of the truck, even though gasoline was dripping on both of them. Rescue workers were beginning to use power tools to cut the metal and one spark would create a catastrophic inferno. Jack crawled in beside the man and said: “Look, don’t worry. I’m right here with you. I’m not going anywhere,” exactly what the nurse had told him years before.
Both men were rescued. Jack visited the man in the hospital the next day. He said to Casey: “You were an idiot. You know that thing could have exploded and we’d both have been burned up.” “I know,” Jack Casey told him. “I felt I just couldn’t leave you.” [Thomas G. Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope, p. 49]
Jesus’ friends didn’t know what they were going to do when he was gone. They had been following him for three years, walking the dusty roads of Galilee together; watching as he healed the sick, listening as he talked about God and how God loves with an everlasting love, talking about how God comes after us to be with us even when we stray, even when we forget God, even when we try to get away from God. God, Jesus says, comes after us like the father in the most famous story he ever told, who hikes up his robes and runs down the road and throws his arms around that young son who had tried everything he could think of to get away. They had followed him to Jerusalem and watched as he was arrested and tried and executed as a criminal. They remembered how the very night of his arrest, sitting at the dinner table with him at what would be their Last Supper together, he had said, “I will not leave you orphaned.” (John 14:18)
A few years later, St. Paul, near the end of his own life, asked simply: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” And then he listed all the things that might do it: “hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, the sword.” Paul must have been thinking about Jesus’ very last words – “I will be with you til the end of the age,” when he gave his own ringing, magnificent answer. “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor this present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christian Jesus our Lord.” [Romans 8:35-39]
That’s the very best thing I can think of. That is great news. We are never alone. Jesus promised to be with us. No matter who we are or where we are: facing real physical danger, lying in a hospital bed waiting for surgery, worrying in the middle of the night about tomorrow – the math test, the job interview, the first day in a new school with nothing familiar, no friends, feeling alone: a college freshmen, who watched as her family drove away and left her alone.
No matter who you are or what is happening in your life – no matter what you are afraid of – you are not alone.
It’s the very best news of all.
“Remember, I will be with you to the end of the age.”