The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



Trinity Sunday, June 19, 2011, Trinity Church Clarksville

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing 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” (Matt. 28:19-20).

I’ve had some great teachers over the years, not only in academic institutions but also in my professional life as a priest and bishop, and for that I give thanks. My debts to my teachers are too many to name, but one formative influence came while I was a student through a fairly brief exposure both inside and outside the classroom to Dr. Henry Chadwick, an English priest and distinguished scholar and professor of divinity who taught for a few months at my seminary. Dr. Chadwick’s forte was the period in which the Church’s doctrine of God as Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and its teaching about the divine and human natures of Christ, came to be articulated in authoritative fashion: doctrines that bear on the feast we celebrate today.

I learned quite a bit from Dr. Chadwick about this period, its disputes and disagreements, but I think it’s true that the most important thing I learned from him was his regard for his subject, and my own desire to be shaped and formed in the same pattern of attention and concern, the same pattern of life. In other words, the gift of the teacher was not in what he knew but in who he was.

Jesus says in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, “A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master” (Matt. 10:24-25). We can learn facts from our teachers (and we’ll be ignorant if we don’t) but it’s the example that we pick up that is often the most effective thing in shaping our lives. To be “like the teacher” or “like the master” is enough for us.

To learn from the example of a particular person that particular lesson that we need to learn is what education is all about. “Education” literally refers to the process by which one person leads another. A wise friend of mine says that this process of one person leading another is at the heart of ministry, because this is how ministry is taught, how it is passed on from one to another: a painstaking process which cannot be short-circuited. Surely Jesus knew all about this painstaking process as he shaped and formed the Twelve.

Our Gospel reading brings teaching to the forefront today. Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, in that same tenth chapter, Jesus had told the disciples that they were to preach and heal, both aspects of his own ministry; but it is only in this final chapter of today’s Gospel that Jesus charges them with teaching, the third part of his own ministry. Matthew’s Gospel puts a high premium on teaching, which we see in the so-called “Sermon on the Mount”, where Jesus teaches the crowd like a new Moses giving the Law from Mount Sinai. In teaching, they are to make disciples, forming them in the Faith; that teaching is a function of Jesus’ own authority, for all authority in heaven and earth is given to him. He charges them with teaching only at this point, after his death and resurrection, because it is only now that they have learned his example, the way that he himself has travelled. Only now have they themselves been taught, only now do they know the way of life, the way that they need to walk. They have learned it from the Teacher; they have seen it themselves in the Master, and it is enough that they should be like him. In knowing him, they will know the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and will be able to baptize in that name.

Today on this Trinity Sunday we celebrate the confirmation and reception of a number of people into the Episcopal Church. In some sense it has taken the whole of Trinity Church to bring these folks to this point. God has raised up many teachers here, and not just those who have taught the classes. Well done, Trinity Church. Our Gospel indicates that the role of teaching is a function of the whole community, which provides the examples that we all need in being formed in a community of faith.

Though it is a significant moment it is just one marker of many in the way of discipleship. Teaching and formation in the Faith will continue because that is a never ending process for disciples. None of us is ever fully formed in this life. The third century bishop Irenaeus once wrote, “God will always have to teach us, and we shall always have to be instructed about the things of God; the divine riches are ‘never-ending’, just as the kingdom of God is without end” (Adv. Haer. II.28.3). You see, we never graduate from this course. We will have to remain open to those things that we still need to be taught.

What is taught in the Church is a pattern of life, a web of example, and the possibilities of the Kingdom that we see in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who himself is our great example and the one by whom we are taught.

- The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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