Which One

The Named God

Matthew 28-16-20

Pastoral Prayer: Almighty Father, made known to us by the Son through the Spirit, yet One, we gather to hear Your Word and to celebrate at Your Table. May the Words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be Your Triune Word for us this day. And all God’s people say, Amen.

I sat and filled out the required paperwork while waiting for word of Mom’s condition. She had called about Noon on Saturday to say, “I’m sick.” I can count on one finger the number of times that Mom has called with that news. “I need to go to the Doctor,” she added. We pulled into the new OU Medical Urgent Care facility, not two miles from their house.

One of the queries on the information sheet asked about religion. Which one or none would be the spectrum of expected answers. “Christian,” I wrote in for Mom.

Which one.

Reading through the Story of God that starts in Genesis 1 with the Voice that broke the chaos with the words, Let there be could be understood as the story of a particular God. That is, the people we know as Ancient Israel encountered a number of gods along the way as they learned just Who is the God who spoke to Abram, Issac, and Jacob. The One who spoke to Moses in a bush that did not burn. The One who spoke to Jonah and others.

For example, the Canaanite god Ba’al makes appearances as Israel is both confronted by the coastal people that sent marauding bands inland, and notably when they sent their giant to mock and taunt Israel’s army. While in Egypt, Israel would have encountered Ra. Confronted by the Moabites, they would have heard of Chemosh. When facing the Amonites, they would have become aware of Molech. Years of Babylonian captivity would have exposed them to Marduk and Nebo. We could add Asherah, Astarte, Asteroth, Dagon, Rimmon, among others.

Which one?

We were transferred to OU Medical by mid-afternoon. Once there, I waited, not a forte, especially given the circumstances. I was told someone would give me an update. By this time, the girls had joined me in the waiting area. A very nice chaplain came to tell us we could soon go back, only two of us. These rules, given the circumstances, are not my forte either. I learned this from my mentor, who was rarely kept at bay by waiting rooms and rules.

Mom was in the hospital three years ago after a fall. On that occasion, I met the chaplain as he came around. Very nice. He had checked his notes, Protestant of the Baptist variety. This time, there was no such discussion. Most surely, it was because we were in the trauma section of the Emergency Room. It took a while and some stern words to finally convince them that she was sick and that the X-rays they were reading showed old injuries, which they admitted. They were only doing their job, and I am grateful. And, I was only doing mine.

The chaplain position requires versatility, a breadth of hospitality, for the chaplain is not there to proselytize but to comfort. He provides what the limited information he receives allows until he knows the patient and the family better. On this occasion, this Chaplin in the trauma unit was as much an informant. He informed us of the perspective of the staff and relayed the information we needed to the staff. On this afternoon and early evening, there were many who arrived who required much more demanding attention than Mom did. The Medi Flight crews were coming and going.

By the time Mom was moved to the ICU, we were told that a doctor would come early in the morning and brief us, and that she would require a procedure. The CT scan and other symptoms had left the doctors very concerned, which translated to threat level concern for us. We were prepared for unsettling news. The Prayer Chain went out. We waited. Not only did we wait for the procedure before Mom’s to end, but we also waited for hers to begin.

We did not wait long before the Doctor, whose ponytail I may have envied, and his assistant came to where we waited. “We did not find what we expected. There is nothing there.” What they had described to us was the likely reason for Mom not feeling well. They were specific, descriptive, and particular. We were braced for bad news, not for the news that nothing was there. Yet, we had asked for prayer. And those prayers to a particular God were answered. Now hear me. My Mom is sick. She has a couple of conditions that will not be cured. But, in this moment, what we had been told was, was not.

Which one.

Not Ba’al, Ra, Chemosh, Molech, Marduk, Nebo, or any other tribal god worshipped by the various tribal peoples Ancient Israel encountered on her way to learning whose Voice thundered, Let there be!

The Story of God, the One we discover in the Scriptures, revealed in events monumental and mundane, is the Which One. We learn of the One particular God with a particular story, that includes or takes in all stories whose name Moses learned is Yahweh. The presence of any and all other gods expresses the human awareness that we don’t make rain, make crops fruitful, or are guaranteed an increase in the size of our families.

Today is not Trinity Sunday as it appears on the Christian Calendar. But, every Sunday we worship the God whose name was given to Moses and in Jesus’s ministry is named Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is said that sermons and Bible Studies on the Trinity, the Triune God, eventually end up in some heresy. And, given what is meant by Trinity - the Three-Personed God, that is very possible. However, the point is not to explain what is hard for us to grasp, but to name which one we refer to when we use the generic term god. What we discover is that God is not a noun. Instead, when we follow the God revealed in Jesus, God gets the verbs, which is to say that God is the name we give to the events in which God reveals Himself.

After Mom’s first procedure to get eyes on what tests had revealed, another doctor came. When he began to explain who he was, we asked how he was connected to the doctor with the ponytail. “That was the weekend team.” We identified the different doctors not by the givenness of their names but by the events in which they were involved to help reveal what had made Mom sick.

We do this every day. That is, while we know one another’s names, the names are filled with meaning by the events in which we have learned about one another. Admittedly, we sometimes learn things we did not expect. Like the event of my referring to Mom’s health in this sermon. You discover that I might like a ponytail like the one worn by the doctor who performed the endoscopy.

When Mom refers to a particular moment during her stay in the hospital, she describes the event that includes the nurse, tech, or administrator. When we received the news that what they saw on the CT scan was not what they normally find, that they found nothing, we could do nothing more than thank the God who spoke to Moses from a bush, to the Father to whom Jesus prayed, and to the Spirit Jesus said he would send. The event of an answered prayer reminded us again, Which One?

The passage Laura read, one that many of us learned as a memory verse, one that gets used over and again as a means to inspire us to give the Good News, includes those of us to whom faith comes more easily than others, and for those who see and still have questions and doubts. Jesus gathers the eleven, which includes both. He does so on an unnamed mountain. Maybe, as some think, it is Mount Arbel that overlooks the area of Galilee where the vast majority of Jesus’s ministry took place. We do not know. Maybe it is left out, lest we make the mountain a holier place than the One Who Is Holy.

Jesus includes the Story of God. “All authority has been given to me.” Returning to what is referred to as the Farewell Discourse, which includes Jesus’s High Priestly Prayer in John 17, we understand that Jesus prays to the Father in the Spirit. Thus, Jesus has the full authority of the Triune God. That is how the Story of God works. Jesus then tells the eleven to “make disciples.” That is, it is an ongoing event. It is not a one-time or one-off activity. Making disciples takes in baptizing. That is, we should hear that word in two ways. First, baptism is the passive activity into which we are immersed. The Apostle Paul describes baptism as being buried with Christ and raised to new life. We take this to mean water baptism. It is certainly a sign, a symbol. But, it is more. It is the recognition that God in Christ Jesus has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves. When a pastor or minister or parent baptizes a person in the course of church life, that pastor or minister becomes for that person the bodily expression, Christ’s Body, who immerses that person into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

There is another way to hear the word baptizing that makes it more than a one-and-done. And I don’t mean a re-baptizing after we learn more. That is, I trusted Jesus at 9 and was baptized. Over time, I have come to know more and learn more. The temptation is to think I did not know what I was doing. Now that I understand more, I need to be baptized again. But, that is to think that God’s work of grace requires something of me, that I know more. It does not. That is the creeping Law.

Instead, what all of us experience, sometimes with more intention than other times, is the immersion into the Trinitarian reality of the God whose name is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The late Dallas Willard made this point in a talk he gave some years ago. He pointed to this passage and asserted that making disciples is immersing people into the Trinitarian reality - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Put another way, we keep telling this One God, the One we learn from Jesus, the One in the Heavens, the One to whom Jesus named Father, the One the Father names Son, and the Father and Son who send the Spirit. Not just any Spirit, but the Spirit of Jesus. That is how the Story of God gives us Which One. No other god descended to us with the determination to love us and not be God without us. No other god comes to give Himself to us in grace and mercy. The God named Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is more than a God who sends rain, makes crops grow, and makes our families grow. This God, the One named Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the One who thundered Let there be and who uttered Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

We saw a number of doctors. Hospital floor doctors are now called hospitalists. Other doctors are identified by their specialty. Nursing staff are referred to according to their role on the team. All of them become the events in which the One God cares for us. That is one way to describe the Body of Christ. We are all together and with one another so that there will be a living witness, a living Body of Christ to care for all others, and as we are going to immerse in the Trinitarian reality of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And the reality is that the Son suffered at the hands of men who sought the outright allegiance of their subjects by exerting power and domination. The Body of Christ is no longer the Body of Christ when it takes up such practices. And the Body of Christ, you and me, will have a warped understanding of the Trinitarian reality of Father, Son, and Spirit when in our lives we entertain commitments to those whose example is other than Christ Jesus.

Take Herod, for example. Herod heard of the birth of the Messiah, and in order to maintain his power, he had children killed. Herod was confronted by John for his immorality. John’s popularity scared Herod. But then, at a banquet, the table was set for a show of power and domination. During the festivities, the celebration of Herod, he impulsively offered to do anything Herodias’s daughter asked. Thus, Herod killed the prophet by taking his head. Herod wanted to be worshipped. And in order to gain the allegiance, he performed, like the pattern of the Roman Empire, to gain that allegiance by force of will.

A friend sent me an essay that included a line from Hamlet. The writer begins,

Hamlet, instructing the players, warns against theatrical excess: “I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it out-Herods Herod.” It is a funny line, but also a useful one. To “out-Herod Herod” is to mistake performative force for truth, spectacle for authority, masculine display for moral courage.

Out-Herod Herod.

Which One.

The Triune God does not our Herod Herod.

Instead of inviting us to a table to offer a show of force and to execute his enemies, the Triune God determined not to be God without us. And as such comes to all of us with an invitation to gather around a table for all, albeit scorned by many. And through those that gather at the table, the offer is to take in not just the Story of God, but the One who gave himself for us all. That leaving this table, we venture into the world as the living Body of Christ, immersing all we know in the reality of the God named Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Come to the table.