Trinity - Cycle A
Are you all heartsick this morning? Exhausted, overwhelmed by the events of the last few weeks, and just heartsick? I sure am. And I come to you on Trinity Sunday, the one Sunday of the church year dedicated to a doctrine.
Does it really matter what we believe about God? Well, the writer of our first reading, Genesis 1, thought so. I’ll get back to that.
First, the way I believe that it does not matter. I believe that at the Last Judgment, we will not be handed a test, a check list: Do you believe this about God? Do you believe that? Do you believe there is one God, three Gods, a whole bunch of gods? – Check one. Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God? Do you believe that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, or proceeds from just the Father?
I do not believe that our entrance into heaven depends on getting the answers to these kind of questions right. You may disagree with me about the importance of some. I’m just going by what Jesus said about the issue when he separated the sheep from the goats, the day before they strung him up:
“Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.
See, that’s what he meant when he said as in today’s gospel, “Make disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” These doctrinal issues don’t matter.
And yet they do. They don’t matter at the final judgment. They do matter, what we believe about God is of desperate importance right now today, because – what we believe about God forms what we believe about ourselves and our place in the universe.
