May 31, 2026

I want to start this morning with a rather straightforward, but maybe really hard question: Why are you here?

What has brought you to be in this space at this time? Maybe it is unthinkable to you that you would do anything else on a Sunday morning—that this is how you were raised, it has been what you've done for your entire life, and it is so culturally, emotionally, and physically ingrained in you that you cannot do otherwise.

Maybe you had no concept of church growing up at all, and at some point you had a profound and life-changing encounter with our loving, transforming God, whom you find in this place through this commitment each and every week.

Maybe you're somewhere in between. Tradition and social conditioning brought you here, but fellowship, friendship, and support compelled you to stay. And somewhere in that relational connectivity, you sense a presence of something larger than yourself—even if it's not quite the embodied, personalized God that I so often talk about.

Maybe, just maybe, you have no idea why you are here. You are wrestling with a lot of questions, or feel directionless or anxious about the world today, and you are desperate for a place of refuge and respite.

Friends, this morning I want to start by welcoming you for whatever reason you are here. And to those of you who are worshiping online, whatever brings you to this moment as well: I want to reassure all of you that any and all of those reasons for being in this space are legitimate ones. In fact, they are all reasons that I personally have found myself in church over the last 40 years of my life. And they are also not mutually exclusive; I often find myself feeling many of these feelings at the same time.

Today is Trinity Sunday, and it is often referred to as the most difficult Sunday to preach in the church year. Because the nature of our God being both three and one is quite possibly the most difficult theological concept in the whole of our faith tradition. I could spend an entire homily listing the various frameworks that theologians have developed over the centuries to explain this, but all of our eyes—mine included—would glaze over and our heads would hurt by the end of it.

I'm going to be honest. Just briefly, on the denser theological front, my 60-second answer is that our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters probably have it most correct: that we can both affirm the Trinity and also accept that it is one of the great mysteries of our faith. In its fullness, it is beyond our complete human understanding—a "known unknown," as it were.

This is exemplified most powerfully by the 15th-century icon writer, Andrei Rublev. I had an image of his icon to share, but we're having tech difficulties. So, imagine an image of the triune God in three distinct personages, framed around a table—framed around a meal. It is communicated as community.

One of the realities of God is that God is somehow ultimately community in God's very nature. If you look closely at the Rublev icon, in the negative space between the three personages, you find the shape of a chalice. God is community in the sharing of that most basic necessity: a meal. We encounter and know the unknown in the breaking of bread, the sharing of the cup, and in sustaining each other.

And that brings me back to why we are here today. I've been thinking about that question because of our Gospel passage from St. Matthew, referred to as the Great Commission. It is wild to me that we only hear this once every three years, because it is so foundational to the Western European Christian tradition.

Genesis 1 tells us that in the beginning, God creates us to be the caretakers and conservators of the Earth. In Matthew 28, we are given our new call:

"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."

It is a moment filled with awe. I want to unpack that, because awe is a powerful concept. Originally, its root meant fright, fear, or distress. Over time, it took on a sense of majesty, wonder, and unimaginable goodness. We’ve never lost that duality. When Robert Oppenheimer named the first atomic test "Trinity," he reflected on this sense of awe—something both frightening and majestic.

This has real import for the Great Commission. Historically, this passage was central to the Christian colonial enterprise. We believed we had a "better" way of being, a "more real" God, and that it was our duty to bring Christ to the "barbarous" rest of the world. Like generations before me, I was shaped by this fearful, obligatory reading.

I still cringe at night thinking about a poor woman in Casper, Wyoming, who had to suffer through me coming to her mall kiosk for three days trying to teach her the "Roman Road" to salvation—asking her where she would go if she were to die tonight. It was so embarrassing looking back.

But if we pay attention to Matthew 28, Jesus doesn't just say "baptize." He says: "Teach them to obey everything I have commanded you." And what was his greatest teaching? To love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself.

To obey Christ is not simply about converting people; it is about communicating the love of God to the world. Missiologists tell us it is vital to remember the brokenness and sinfulness of the colonial mission. Ultimately, the truth is that there is nowhere in the world where God is not already present.

The Great Commission is a call to help people see the God who is already at work in their lives, not to bring God to them. It is a call rooted in joy and love, not dominion.

I want to end by offering one Trinitarian-shaped example of how we are called to do this. Pope Leo has just published his first encyclical, Magnificita Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in a time of Artificial Intelligence.

He writes that humanity is facing a pivotal choice: to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. He reminds us that whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we look to the incarnate God.

When we celebrate the Trinity and hear the Great Commission, we are invited to step into a mystery that embraces the fullness of our humanity. We are called to share a proclamation of dignity and love in a world broken by objectification—a world increasingly driven toward the binary ones and zeros of technological dehumanization.

We need to hear the call back to humanity. May we proclaim the power of a physical, enfleshed, embodied God who teaches us to care for an embodied creation. A world shaped not by obligation, but by liberation. Not by dehumanization, but by dignity. Not by alienation, but by care, love, and ultimately, community.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.