Okay, I’m going to talk about the Trinity, the Great Commission (which is our gospel reading), and Jackson Kemper. That’s a lot to cover, so we’re going to move fast. Hang on.

Today is Trinity Sunday, which always falls on the first Sunday after Pentecost. We had such a wonderful, wonderful Pentecost celebration last Sunday that I can’t help but think that the Church, in making this Sunday about a theological doctrine (and one that no one really even understands), is trying to engage us in an exercise in humility. But what I’m going to try to do is look at the Doctrine of the Trinity and try to see how it can be useful to us today.

You find the Doctrine of the Trinity all over the place. Lots of our prayers, like the collect for this Sunday, end with something like, "O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."

The Trinity was worked out over several hundred years of dealing with the issue: "What does the incarnation of Christ tell us about God’s character, God’s inner life?" And so the early Christians asked questions like, "Is this one God, or three gods, or what? Does this mean that God was just acting when God became incarnate as Jesus, like an actor playing a part? How do we know that the character we experience in Christ is the authentic character of God? And by the way, how does this ‘Holy Spirit’ fit into the picture?"

Well, they worked all this out in fourth century language, addressing fourth century concerns, and using fourth century philosophy. I’d be glad to teach you about how all that developed, but, mercifully, I don’t have time (or rather, you don’t have patience) to do it here. Suffice it to say that their often rancorous debate gave us a creed formulated on the proposition that the persons of the Trinity are distinct, but not so distinct as to be separate entities. We believe in one God whose inner life consists of three persons, all of whom are "one Being."

Confusing? I think so, especially since they were concerned with the issue of "Being," and of how many gods there were, and whether we could trust Jesus as God, and other concerns that just don’t really bother us much today. So, why not just relegate the Trinity to the obscurity of church history textbooks? Why end so many of our prayers with a statement affirming the Trinity? Why a Sunday devoted to it?

Well, the questions they dealt with, and the answers we pretty much take for granted, really are important. But perhaps most importantly, in their fourth century quest to understand God’s inner life, I think they discovered truths that we can translate into very important and helpful twenty-first century information about God.

We don’t fret too much about technical terms dealing with "being," as they did in the fourth century, but we are all children of the revolution of thought reflected in the relatively new science of psychology. So what means a lot to most of us is not the fourth century argument over "homoiousia" or "homoousia," but is relationship. Are we in relationship, and what kind of relationship are we in? And the Doctrine of the Trinity says to us twenty-first century Christians that God’s very being is loving relationship; God’s very inner life is all about healthy, wonderful, perfectly loving relationship. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinct enough to be in relationship, and yet are one in perfectly integrated, loving unity of being.

That sounds very strange — until I think of how I talk to myself (sometimes even out loud). I formulate thoughts and share them with myself, and then myself answers back: "Ah, Jim, you shouldn’t have done that!" "Well, everybody makes mistakes. I didn’t do it on purpose, and it was an easy mistake to make." "No, you’re just rationalizing; you screwed up."

It turns out I’m a community within myself. (Oh, right, pretend like you don’t talk to yourself!) I think being a community within ourselves is part of what it means in our Genesis reading when it says we are made in God’s image. I am a community. But I am not a perfectly integrated, loving community. These parts of myself are not always in sync. Like St. Paul, I do and say things that I (or some part of my communal self) doesn’t want to do or say. ("Ah, Jim, you shouldn’t have done that!")

All of us, I think, are built with relationships in our inner life, but we’re not perfectly integrated, perfectly in sync, perfectly loving. Imagine what that would be like, to be perfectly integrated and loving internally. I think that must be part of what we mean by, "the Peace of God."

So, here’s a statement of the Trinity for twenty-first century Christians: perfect, integrated, always in sync, loving, relationship is God’s heart. God’s very being.

Okay there’s the Trinity (we’ll come back to it). Now on to the Great Commission, to Jesus’ last words in the Gospel of Matthew: "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." We are all commissioned to spread the Good News of God in Christ, and that is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. It’s not something about which any of us should think, "I’ll let somebody else handle that." Every one of us can probably reach someone that no one else can.

As Episcopalians, we have a hero of spreading the Good News, of being a missionary. His name is Jackson Kemper. We celebrated his feast day last week. Kemper was born in New York in 1789. He was ordained priest in 1814, and immediately began bugging his bishop about taking the Church to the wild, wild west of Western Pennsylvania. At a time when only the Eastern Seaboard was settled (at least from a European perspective), he wanted to go into the uncharted, unknown, and very dangerous lands to the west to take the Good News.

In 1835, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church ordained him as the first missionary bishop, a bishop without a diocese, but with a charge to go where the church had not been and spread the Good News. He spent the rest of his life doing just that, facing scorching heat, hostile Indians, blizzards, torrential rains, swarming mosquitoes, and journeys into lands that were uncharted and unmapped. He founded colleges and a seminary, and he preached wherever he went. He also showed a respect for Native Americans which was uncharacteristic of his time, encouraging the translation of services into their languages and describing a worship service with the Oneida tribe as marked by "courtesy, reverence, worship — and obedience to that Great Spirit in whose hands are the issues of life."

Although Jackson Kemper was assigned to Missouri and Indiana, he also laid foundations in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Kansas. When he died, his unofficial title was, "Bishop of the Whole Northwest." This was a man who devoted his life to the Great Commission, and it is appropriate that we remember him as one of our heroes.

When I think of the adventure of his life, I think it’s too bad we live here in and around College Park in 2002. No Indian tribes to break the Good News to around here. The last frontiers are space and the deep sea, neither of which I’m going to get to and neither of which is very conducive to evangelism anyway. I guess this is just one more example of what I’ve felt many times in my life, that the great adventures, the great challenges, are taken, done, history. We’re just too late.

Well, maybe not. I’d like you to raise your hand if you belong to an organization called The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. Now, raise your hand if you are a member of the Episcopal Church.

Okay, it was a trick question. (I’m not above that.) The same General Convention which ordained Jackson Kemper as our first missionary bishop in 1835 also designated that every Episcopalian belongs to The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. In fact, The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society is another name for the Episcopal Church. So everyone who raised their hand the second time should have raised their hand the first time. We’re all members of the Missionary Society.

But where to be missionaries? Most of us don’t feel called to foreign lands, and there are no more frontiers around College Park. Right? Wrong. There are different kinds of frontiers. There aren’t Indian tribes and uncharted lands, but there are spiritual frontiers, lots and lots of opportunities for evangelism, for missionary work of bringing the Good News to people who haven’t heard it.

And this is where the Trinity comes in. Because before we go out talking about the God we know, we need to be sure we know God. And the Trinity, this statement that God’s very being, God’s very heart, is perfect, loving relationship, and God acts in that character all the time, is the Good News that so many people in our world have never heard. Maybe because they grew up in a church that preached hellfire and damnation and left little room for a God of love, maybe because they are gay and have been shunned, maybe because they grew up in a church that is so loaded with dogma that the message of love gets lost in all the legalism. Maybe because they grew up in a family that simply didn’t go to church and probably has an understanding of Christianity that is very different than ours.

I believe that these people, whether they know it or not, are hungry to hear the Good News, the news that God’s very being is loving relationship, and God has acted in character with that by sending Christ, and that God’s Spirit still acts in character with that to bring us all into loving relationship with God and one another.

My fellow members of The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, there is probably someone out there on the spiritual frontier who wants desperately to hear that Good News, and who can only hear it from you.

Make Jackson Kemper proud.