Trinity Sunday (Fr. Roberts)

The water was still on him. This is how Matthew's Gospel begins. Jesus had just been baptized in the Jordan, the Spirit had come down on him and a voice had spoken from heaven, and that same Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. There, at the end of a long testing, the devil took him to the top of a high mountain. He showed him every kingdom of the world, all its power and all its glory, laid out beneath him like a feast. Take it, he said. All of it, today, every crown. Only fall down and worship me.

And he would not. He turned the whole world down. He would rather have nothing at all than take it that way, than bow to the wrong god to get his hands on it. He came back down the mountain with empty hands, and he meant to keep them empty.

That refusal had a road in it, and the road ran downhill the whole way. A man who keeps his hands open in a world that grabs what it wants ends in only one place. They came for him in the dark and he did not lift a hand. They stripped him and he let them. They drove nails through his open hands and he kept them open, and he died with nothing in them at all, the way he had come down from the mountain. The empty hands he chose in the wilderness were the empty hands they nailed to the wood. He would rather die with empty hands than fill them by force. That is how far the “no” on the mountain went.

And then, at the very end of the same Gospel, in the reading we heard today, there is a second mountain. It comes after everything, after the grave, and the eleven are waiting on it because he told them to come. When he appears, some of them fall down and worship, and some of them, even now, even here, are not sure what they are looking at. He does not wait for them to be sure. He comes to them and tells them what has become of him. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. The whole world, the very thing the devil spread out on the first mountain and offered him for a price, is his after all, and it has come to him as a gift. He did not seize it. His Father has laid it in his open hands, all of it, free, because he would not have taken it any other way.

And standing there in the middle of the world he refused to steal, he tells them what it is for, and it begins with a name. Go, he says, and make disciples of every nation, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

That name is the answer to both mountains. The question that has hung over this whole story, what kind of God would rather die than grasp, what kind of God turns down the world sooner than seize it, is answered the only way it finally can be, by God telling us his name. And the name is three. He would not seize the world because closing his hand is something he has never done. Before there was a world to close it on, before there was anything at all, he was already giving himself away. 

He did not begin to love on the day he made us. There was no day he began. God was already love, and love must have someone to love, and so, with no beginning, there is the One who loves, the Father, and the One he loves with his whole heart, the Son, the Father's own self given away and never for a moment lost. The Son was not made, the way the world was made. He is eternally given, the way a father gives himself to his child, only with no beginning and no end.

And a love between two, if it is truly love, does not curl up and keep to itself. It opens. It makes room for a third. The love the Father pours into the Son and the Son pours back is so alive, so wholly God, that it is itself someone, a third who loves and is loved, as fully and forever God as the other two, and him we call the Holy Spirit. Three, and one God, because it is all one love, one life flowing among them without end. They are not one God taking turns behind three masks, for they are all of them at once, always, turned toward one another in love. Each one is the whole of God. The Father is the whole of God, pouring himself out. The Son is the whole of God, given and giving himself back. The Spirit is the whole of God, the love that runs between. And not one of them has ever, for a single instant, closed a hand.

He has shown himself like this before. There is an old word for it, theophany, which means a showing of God, the moment he steps out where he can be seen. The great one came at the river, the morning this story started, with the water still running off him. 

He stood in the Jordan, and the Spirit came down on him like a dove, and the Father's voice came out of heaven, this is my beloved Son. That was the first time the world saw all Three at once, the Son in the water, the Spirit upon him, the Father naming him from above. The Church in the East still calls that day the Theophany, the showing, because it was the morning God let himself be seen as what he is. And what was shown at the river is what is given on the mountain, the same Three, named again, by the Son this time, and poured out now on us.

It goes back further than the river. All Three were there at the beginning, in the words that were read here this morning. The Father speaks. The Word he speaks is the Son, and everything that is made is made through him. And the wind moving over the dark water is the Spirit, brooding over the new world the way a bird broods over its nest. The Three who made the world, who showed themselves at the river, are the Three named on the mountain.

On that same first page, when it came to making us, God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness, speaking of himself as more than one. And he made us male and female, in the image of God. We say the Trinity is hard, and we suppose the trouble is the three being one. How can three be one? But the trouble may run the other way. The trouble may be the one being three. For we begin from ourselves, certain we know what we are. We are individuals, each of us separate and entire. 

We imagine we start as finished, single selves, who may then choose, or not, to bind ourselves to someone else. That is not what Scripture says we are. It says we came out of one. There was one man, and out of his own side God made the woman, and out of the two of them a child, and out of that child, in the long run, every face that has ever lived. Abraham was one man, and out of him came Isaac, and Jacob, and a whole people who carry the one man's name to this day. We are one that is always becoming many, and many who are never, in the end, truly apart. That is the shape we are cut to, and it is not the lonely self that later decides to love.

And if that is the image, what must the original be? Perhaps we have stood in front of God all along asking the wrong question, asking how three separate persons could be folded down into one, when the truth underneath us and underneath him runs the other way, that the One was never alone, was always pouring himself out, was always more than one. What we do slowly, down the years, parents giving way to children and children to children, he is forever and all at once. We find him hard to understand not because he is dark to us, but because we are still dark to ourselves. We think we are most ourselves when we are most alone and most our own. We are wrong. To be is to be given, and to give yourself away, and the God in whose image we are made was three before there was a world, because that is what love is when it has no beginning. We were never made to stand alone. We were made to be taken up into the one.

And that is what the water does. The name the psalm says fills the whole earth, the name that has been to the top of two mountains and down into a grave, comes down at last small enough to be said over the head of one baby who has done nothing and can do nothing, who cannot lift her own head. The priest pours the water and says the name, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, and she is taken into it before she knows the first thing about it. She did not earn it. She could not have seized it. It was given, the only way it is ever given, free, into open and empty hands, the very way the Son received the world from his Father. The river and the font are the same water. The Three who stood over him stand over her. She is not merely marked with the name now, she is taken up into the life it names, into the giving that has never stopped, given her place in the one, for the whole of a life that begins right here, learning to take God in and to give him away.

And this open-handed God, the God who would rather die than grasp, is the one we have fought over more bitterly than anything else on earth. We have damned each other over him, torn his Body in two over him, gone to our graves sure we had him right and our neighbor wrong. Of everything there is to seize and clutch, we have seized this, the one truth that is only ever a gift. Paul saw it begin in his own churches. When he had finished pleading with the Corinthians not to tear themselves apart, in the very letter we heard read this morning, he left them the only cure there is, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, the Three named over them in a single breath. 

Those same words are said over you at this rail. We are never nearer to losing this God than when we are surest we have caught him. 

He cannot be caught. He can only be received, the way the baby receives the name, the way your own open hands will take the bread in a few minutes, empty, asking for nothing.

And then he says the last thing, and the book stops. I am with you always, to the end of the age. He says it to the ones who worshiped him and were not sure of him, which is to say he says it to us. He has never once waited for our doubt to clear. He did not wait on the mountain, and he does not wait now. He came into this Gospel with a name an angel gave him before he was born, Emmanuel, which means God with us, and he leaves it making the same promise in his own voice. Whatever we cannot work out about him this morning, this much we keep. He is here. He is not leaving. He told us so himself, in the last words of the book.

I am with you always, to the end of the age.