2026-06-05
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
Trinity A • “The God Who Sends”
Matthew 28:16-20 • John 17 • Deuteronomy 6:4
The Federated Church / Trinity Sunday
Rev. Michael Anthony Howard
Sunday, May 31, 2026
I. What Kind of World Are We Hoping For?
This past Monday,
I stood in Evergreen Cemetery
for the Memorial Day service.
Before the ceremony began,
I looked out over the crowd.
Hundreds of people.
Veterans. Children.
Parents. Neighbors.
People who probably disagreed about a thousand things.
And yet, for a moment,
We all gathered together.
We walked together up the hill.
We remembered together.
We grieved together.
We hoped together.
I had been asked to offer the prayer that day.
Which meant I had been asked to do something strange.
I had been asked to use sacred language
to help us understand what we were doing there together.
Because memorials are never just about the past.
They are about the future.
After the service,
I spent some time walking among the monuments.
One in particular caught my attention.
It was erected by the Church family,
one of the founding families of Chagrin Falls.
Jane Church helped erect the monument
to the Union soldiers after the Civil War.
She had lived through the war.
She had lost family to camp fever.
Her brother had returned home.
She wanted people to remember.
Not merely remember what happened.
Remember who they were called to be.
Nearby stands another monument.
A lion. A lamb. It once had little child leading them.
Imagery clearly from Isaiah 11:6.
Clearly biblical imagery of the world reconciled
And I found myself wondering:
Why put that image in stone?
Why a lion and a lamb?
The answer, I think, is because…
stories shape people.
Images shape people.
Communities become what they remember.
The lion and the lamb do not describe the world as it is.
They describe the world as they hoped it might become.
A world where enemies are reconciled.
A world where violence gives way to peace.
A world where a child can lead.
Stories shape us,
whether told with words
Or images carved in stone.
Families live by stories.
Churches live by stories.
Nations live by stories.
We tell stories that help us understand who we are,
what matters, what is worth sacrificing for,
and what kind of future we hope to build together.
II. Trinity Sunday Makes Pastors Nervous
Well, Federated, today is Trinity Sunday.
But let me start with a confession.
Trinity Sunday makes pastors nervous.
For nearly two thousand years
Christians have wrestled with how to talk about God.
We have written books.
Held councils.
Created formulas.
Argued over language.
Sometimes it feels as though
we have spent so much time
explaining the Trinity that
we have forgotten what question it was trying to answer.
And when that happens,
the Trinity starts sounding like a puzzle.
Three in one. One in three.
Abstract. Complicated. Distant.
But the language of God was never supposed to be a puzzle.
It was supposed to shape our imagination.
It was supposed to help us understand
who we are and how we live together.
It was supposed to answer a question.
What kind of God is this?
Or perhaps an even more important question:
Where is God?
III. The God Who Is One
The first followers of Jesus never stopped
praying the ancient prayer of Israel:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One.”
(begin stepping away from the pulpit)
I pray that prayer often myself.
Not because I have solved every mystery about God.
But because it reminds me
that beneath all the divisions of life
there is a deeper unity.
“Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad.”
In John 17, which we’ve been wrestling with for weeks,
The prayer at the heart of Jesus’ ministry,
The divine purpose that Jesus’ ministry was achieving…
Was the ministry of reconciliation:
May they be One…
As You and I are One.
The Church never abandoned that prayer,
At the heart of the Jewish tradition,
That the Lord our God is One.
The Church simply found itself wrestling with something astonishing.
The God who created the world.
The God revealed in Jesus.
Is the God still present among us.
How do we speak about that?
How do we tell that story?
And Matthew is asking the same question.
By the time Matthew writes his Gospel,
the Temple has been destroyed.
The old center is gone.
The sacred geography has been shattered.
The question becomes:
Where is God now?
Not just:
Who is God?
But:
Where is God?
IV. Reverend Bentley and the Chalice
(Pick up Chalice Hymnal)
This hymnal contains part of the answer.
Many of us simply know it as the Chalice Hymnal.
But this is the hymnal of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
Every day on my way to work,
I drive through Bentleyville.
Bentleyville is named after Rev. Adamson Bentley,
one of the leaders connected to the Stone-Campbell movement
that helped shape this congregation’s story.
Rev. Bentley, and those early Disciples wanted Christians
to stop dividing themselves into smaller and smaller camps.
They wanted to recover a vision of unity.
A vision of gathering.
A vision of reconciliation.
But there were two practices they refused to let go.
Baptism.
And communion.
Why?
Because practices shape imagination.
Practices form a people.
V. The Font and the Table
(Walk to the baptismal font)
In Matthew 28, our text for today,
Jesus says:
Go and baptize.
Go and immerse.
Immerse people into the life of God.
Immerse people into a new humanity.
Immerse people into a story larger than themselves.
Baptism is about belonging.
Participation.
Becoming part of a people.
(Walk to the table)
And then there is the table.
This table stands at the center of our Christian life
because it keeps asking the same question.
Where is God?
On the night before he died, Jesus took bread.
He blessed it.
He broke it.
And he said:
“This is my body.”
Then he took the cup.
And he said:
“This is my blood.”
Where is God?
Jesus says:
I Am Here….
I Am Here…
And then he hands it to them.
Take. Eat. Drink.
Participate.
Become part of this.
“Now, I Am… Here”
The Apostle Paul writes that in Christ,
God was reconciling the world to God’s self.
Not counting trespasses.
Not seeking revenge.
Reconciling… Healing… Restoring…
Reconciliation is not…
something accomplished by Christ for God,
nor something inflicted on Christ by God.
It is something forged by God in Christ.
Forged. Like metal in a fire.
Painful. Costly. Transforming.
The cross is not God’s rejection of the world.
It is God’s refusal to abandon it.
Christ did not save us from the world.
Christ saved us for it.
For its healing. For its reconciliation.
For its restoration.
And that is why this table matters.
Because every time we gather here,
we remember the story.
More than that.
We re-member it.
We become part of it again.
VI. Go
And then Matthew brings us to the mountain.
The risen Christ stands before the disciples.
They worshiped… and they doubted.
But Jesus sends them anyway.
Go. Make disciples. Go Baptize.
Immerse the world in the truth.
Become part of this Oneness
That Answers Jesus Prayer…
God Teach. Not simply:
Go explain a doctrine.
Go invite people into this story.
Go invite people into this communion.
Go invite people into this reconciliation
God is forging in the world.
And then comes the promise.
The promise behind the whole Gospel.
The promise behind the table.
The promise behind the font.
The promise behind the Trinity itself.
“I AM with you always.”
Federated, Where is God?
The God who created the stars.
The God revealed in Jesus.
That is the God that is still
present among us now.
One God. One communion.
One reconciliation. One love.
Still healing… Still gathering… Still sending… Still here.
And remember:
“I AM with you always. Even to the end of the age, I Am”
—Amen.