Isaiah 40: 12-17, 27-31; 2 Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20

Jesus said: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising 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. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

I am with you always to the end of time.

One of the great struggles that human beings have is matching up the idea that God is with us always with the fact that so many things happen that seem to have in them no element of a loving God. Just this week our papers have been full of the Burmese cyclone and Chinese earthquake disasters, and of many murders, among them 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen, killed in an unprovoked attack in a bakery.
People respond in different ways. Some decide that, particularly in the case of natural disaster, that there can be no God since these disasters cause too much devastation for there to be a God who loves and cares.

Others struggle with their faith, since they cannot understand how the God they have been taught about as loving and faithful could allow such suffering.

And others still hold on to the promises of God, that Jesus uttered in those words we heard today - I am with you always to the end of time. They cannot understand necessarily why these things happen, but they can accept that God is with them in the midst of the suffering, that God has not deserted them, though disaster has overtaken them.

The Old Testament and particularly the Psalms wrestle with the question of how it is that bad things seem to happen to good people, while the wicked prosper. It’s been an age-old question.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day when we think about the nature of God, who God is, rather than what God has done.  It is significant that the episode from the ending of Matthew’s Gospel which we heard today takes place on a mountain-top. For Matthew, as for many others before him, the mountain-top is the place for a special revelation from God.

In the Old Testament, we have the rescue of Isaac from the alter at the top of a mountain, the giving of the Ten Commandments, Elijah’s encounter with God the still, small voice, and so on. And Matthew has the Sermon on the Mount - the new Ten Commandments, if you like, and of course the new revelation of God that the disciples had in the Transfiguration.

So the mountain-top setting of today’s reading shows that this is an important encounter with God. And there is another significant point too - in Matthew’s first chapter, he recalls the prophecy that the birth of Jesus will bring about Emmanuel - God with us. Now, at the end as Jesus departs, that promise of God with us remains.

So, if God is with us, how do we cope with tragedies such as the Burmese disaster and the Chinese earthquake, both of which have been made worse by human endeavour - in Burma the government’s intransigence and stubbornness which prevents aid getting through and in China the enhanced danger because of the poor quality of the buildings.

It comes down to how we see God - who is the God we worship?

A Lutheran theologian Karen Bloomquist puts it like this: “Is God primarily a monarch reigning on high, untouched by people’s suffering, or a Triune God, intimately involved with us and our world? Too often people begin with certain human ideals of power and authority and then project these onto God. At its best the doctrine of the Trinity has been a sustained criticism of the dominating concepts of God’s power and human power. Instead of a God set above on high, invulnerable and untouched by human realities of poverty, God is relational. This points to the relationships within the Trinity and with us and the rest of creation. God is love, God-with-us, suffering with creation.”

The whole point about the Trinity is that God is relational. God lives in relationship - Three in One - and with us. The doctrine of the Trinity is not just a dry theological mind-bender, but reminds us that God lives in love with God and with us.

And that means that God becomes involved in the world. There’s a wonderful hymn by W. H. Vanstone that expresses Christ’s role in the world.

Morning glory, starlit sky,
soaring music, scholar’s truth,
flight of swallows, autumn leaves,
memory’s treasure, grace of youth:
 
Open are the gifts of God,
gifts of love to mind and sense;
hidden is love’s agony,
love’s endeavor, love’s expense.
 
Love that gives, gives ever more,
gives with zeal, with eager hands,
spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
ventures all its all expends.

Drained is love in making full,
bound in setting others free,
poor in making many rich,
weak in giving power to be.
 
Therefore he who shows us God
helpless hangs upon the tree;
and the nails and crown of thorns
tell of what God’s love must be.

Here is God: no monarch he,
throned in easy state to reign;
here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain.

Those arms of love tell us about who God is, a God whose love is sacrificial, who suffers with us and on our behalf. Our God is dynamic, a moving, living God.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot live apart from one another; there is always the flow of relationship, of love, between them. Love that bore pain through the death of Jesus and the ripping apart of those relationships - my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But a love that was strong enough to conquer the separation death wrought.

At the heart of God is a relationship of love, love of the Father for the Son and the Spirit; love of the Son for the Father and the Spirit; love of the Spirit for the Father and the Son. And we are invited to become caught up in that love. The three persons of the Trinity work in different ways - we perhaps get an inkling of that from our second reading this morning which talks of the grace of Jesus, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit.

The grace of Jesus is what enables us to be set free from sin and death. The love of God is what makes that possible in the first place. And the communion of the Holy Spirit enables us to become part of the relationship within the Trinity and to be bound together in one body.

This is all important, for how we see God will affect the way we act and behave.

If we see God as the stern, strict parent always trying to catch us out doing something wrong, then the way in which lead our lives will be affected by that, and forgiveness will lose some of its power. If we see God as a far off being unconcerned with the world and humanity, then we will lack a concern for other people.

But, if we see God as a relational being, the three parts intertwined and inseparable, but calling us to be part of that too, we will act. We will not be able to sit idly by while others suffer. How we see God affects how we behave.

From time to time, people show what this means in practice. They manage to live out the kind of love that makes up God. Only this past week, we heard the words of Jimmy Mizen’s mother, a devout Roman Catholic.

She said this of her son’s murderer: “I just want to say to the parents of this other boy . . . I want to say I feel so, so sorry for them. I don’t feel anger, I feel sorry for the parents. We’ve got such lovely memories of Jimmy. and they will have such sorrow about their son. I feel for them, I really do.

“What can I really say to them? You can imagine, that’s their child. They held that boy in their arms as a baby.

“They must be in pain. It’s so painful to know that one of your children has been so cruel, so wicked.

“People keep saying ‘why are you not angry?’ There’s so much anger in this world and its anger that’s killed my son. If I am angry then I am exactly the same as this man. We have got to get rid of this anger, we have just got to.”

It was anger, among other things, that sent Christ to the cross, that caused the split in the godhead. This mother, in the midst of her grief and pain, recognised that there are other ways than retaliation and anger. There are ways that imitate the path of love set out by God.

In the same way that the Persons of God exist in relation, we exist in relation to God and with each other. Jimmy’s mother recognised that there was something that bound her to the parents of the murderer, something greater than her grief. It was the same sort of recognition that enabled Jesus to utter from the cross the words: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Love is stronger than hate and death. Love is what binds Father, Son and Holy Spirit together, and what enables us to be incorporated in those relationships.

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.

(with acknowledgements to Clare amos - Roots Worship)