The Rest of the Sermon | Trinity Sunday | Matthew 28:16–20

There’s a detail in the Trinity Sunday text that’s easy to miss.

Verse 17. The resurrection has taken place. The disciples have gathered on the mountain where Jesus told them to go. They see him and they worship him.

And then Matthew adds this: “but some doubted.”

Some doubted.

These are not random bystanders. These are the eleven. The inner circle. The A-Team. The ones who had walked with Jesus for three years, watched him heal people, heard him teach, and now stand in presence of the resurrected Christ. And some of them are still not sure what to do with what they’re seeing.

Matthew doesn’t explain it. He doesn’t apologize for it. He doesn’t tell us who or why. He just…moves on. Jesus shows up, gives the Great Commission, and doesn’t stop to sort out who’s certain enough to receive it.

I find that deeply reassuring and a bit challenging. Because the church has spent a lot of energy over the last several decades doing exactly what Jesus didn’t do: deciding who belongs and who doesn’t.

The Doubters Received the Same Mission

Jesus gives the Great Commission to a group that includes people who are actively doubting him in that moment.

He doesn’t separate the believers and the doubters. He gives the mission to all of them.

It seems pretty clear: you don’t have to have everything figured out to follow Jesus. You don’t have to have all the answers or feel a warm spiritual certainty in your chest. You just have to show up and be willing to go.

What really matters is that the doubters showed up. They came to the mountain.

This is a great deal different from the version of Christianity that has taken root in much of American church culture, where certainty is the price of admission. Where questions are mistaken for weakness, and doubt is treated as a virus that might spread to the healthy people.

Meanwhile, Jesus handed his world-changing mission to people who were standing there unsure of what they were even seeing.

What The Trinity Is

Trinity Sunday has a reputation for producing bad illustrations. Shamrocks. Fidget spinners. Water in three states. It’s the Sunday where we explain what we don’t understand by using things we also don’t understand.

But the thing is the doctrine of the Trinity wasn’t invented to confuse people. It emerged because the early church kept having experiences of God that refused to fit in a single box.

They knew God as Creator; the God of Abraham, the God who spoke through the prophets, the God who brought Israel out of Egypt.

Then they spent three years with Jesus, who kept doing things only God was supposed to do. He forgave sins. He calmed storms. He said things like “Before Abraham was, I am.”

Then came Pentecost, when the Spirit showed up and turned a group of terrified people hiding behind locked doors into a movement that turned the world upside down.

Father. Son. Spirit. The Trinity isn’t a neat theological formula. It’s the church’s honest attempt to describe an experience of a God that kept exceeding their vocabulary.

That’s actually a pretty good model for faith: being honest when your experience of God is bigger than your language for it, rather than pretending you’ve got it all mapped out.

The American church, particularly its loudest, most politically ambitious version, has largely abandoned that honesty. It has traded the mystery of a God who exceeds our description for a God who conveniently fits inside it. A God who votes a certain way, hates the right people, and can be wielded like a weapon in a culture war.

That’s not the Trinity. That’s using God as a weapon.

“God With Us” Is Not the Same as “God Is Ours”

“And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” — Matthew 28:20

Matthew begins and ends with the same idea. In chapter 1, the angel tells Joseph that the child will be called Immanuel — “God with us.” At the end of chapter 28, the risen Christ says: “I am with you always.”

That’s the heartbeat of the whole Gospel.

But “God with us” does not mean “God is always on our side.” It does not mean God is a team mascot for our particular political party, our particular nation, or our particular cultural preferences.

“With us” in the biblical sense means present, accompanying, sustaining, not domesticated, deployed, and co-opted.

The God who is with us is also the God who sent the disciples to “all nations.” Not to America. Not to people who look and think and vote like us. All nations. The Greek word is “ethne”, every ethnic group, every people, every culture.

Christian nationalism, the growing movement that conflates American identity with Christian identity, has inverted this entirely. Instead of a God who sends his people outward to all nations, it offers a God who endorses this particular nation above others. Instead of the Great Commission, it offers a Great Consolidation: gather the right people, secure political power, and protect “our” way of life.

That’s not the Great Commission. That’s the Roman Empire with an American flag.

The People Outside

The cultural moment we’re living in has made it acceptable to treat outsiders with contempt. People who are different, who think differently, who come from different places or hold different beliefs are increasingly framed as threats to be defeated rather than neighbors to be loved.

And a significant portion of the American church has not only gone along with this, it has provided the theological justification for it.

I’m not talking about policy disagreements, which are legitimate and complicated. I’m talking about the basic posture of the church toward people who are not yet part of it.

Jesus, in Matthew 28, tells his disciples to go make disciples of all nations, baptizing, teaching, being present with people. The model is engagement, not defense. The model is going to people, not retreating from them.

The early church in Acts didn’t have political power. It didn’t have tax exemptions, cultural prestige, or friendly Supreme Court justices. It had the Spirit, a mission, and a willingness to show up in places where they weren’t always welcome. And somehow that ragtag group of doubters and fishermen and former tax collectors turned the world upside down.

We’ve got considerably more resources than they did. What we seem to have lost is the willingness to actually go; to sit with people unlike us, to listen more than we talk, to lead with love rather than with a list of things we’re against.

The Doubt That’s Still on the Mountain

I want to come back to those doubters for a moment, because I think they might be the most important people in this story for the church right now.

Not because doubt is the destination. But because the church desperately needs to recover a posture toward honest questioning that isn’t defensive or hostile.

There are a lot of people right now, inside the church and outside it, who are genuinely trying to figure out what they believe. Who grew up Christian and have serious questions. Who are watching the American church align itself with power and cruelty and are wondering if the Jesus they learned about as children is even recognizable in what they’re seeing.

Those people are standing on the mountain too.

They came. They showed up. Maybe hesitantly. Maybe with significant skepticism. Maybe with years of church hurt behind them.

Jesus didn’t turn them away. He commissioned them.

A church that treats doubt as disqualifying will lose exactly the people it most needs to keep. And more importantly, it will misrepresent the Jesus it claims to follow.

What “God With Us” Demands

If God is truly “with us”, what does that presence demand of us in return?

It demands that we extend the same welcome to others that we’ve received. That we go to people who are different from us rather than circling the wagons. That we hold our certainties a little more loosely and our neighbors a little more gently.

It demands that we stop using Jesus as a brand for political power and start actually doing the things Jesus told us to do: love our enemies, serve the poor, welcome the stranger, tell the truth.

It demands that we make room on the mountain for the doubters, not because we’re soft on truth, but because Jesus apparently was fine with them being there.

The Trinity is not a theological puzzle to be solved. It’s a testimony to a God who keeps showing up: in creation, in the incarnation, in the ongoing presence of the Spirit.

A God that is still showing up today.

The question is whether the church is showing up with him, or whether we’re too busy fighting over who deserves to be there.

Reflection Question:

Is there someone in your life that you’ve quietly decided doesn’t belong on the mountain? What would it look like to revisit that decision in light of who Jesus actually commissioned?

Closing Prayer:

Lord, you are bigger than our description.

You are Creator, and this world you made is full of those you love.

You are Redeemer, and you came for all of us.

You are Sustainer, and you promised to be with us; in the doubt, in the confusion, in the going out.

Forgive us for the ways we have made you small. Forgive us for the ways we have used your name to exclude, to harm, to grasp for power.

Give us the courage to go, to all nations, to all kinds of people, with all our questions still in tow.

Remind us that the doubters were on the mountain too.

And remind us, especially when it’s difficult, that you are with us. Always.

Amen.