When God Says Goodbye
Sermon — May 31, 2026 (Trinity Sunday)
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” Amen. (2 Cor. 13:13)
This time of year is a season of goodbyes. At colleges around the country, graduating students are saying goodbye to their campuses and professors, to roommates and friends, and maybe even to education itself—although hopefully not to learning. In local schools, teachers are getting ready to say goodbye to this year’s class of students, and students are saying goodbye to friends as they scatter to camps and vacations for the summer.
In our own church community, we say goodbye to our dear friend Maureen Lavely, who passed away unexpectedly this week. Some of you know that Maureen had just celebrated her 91st birthday a few weeks ago. I know that many of you spent time with her over the last few weeks, at church or over lunch. What an incredible gift it was for her to be surrounded by so much love, and to be able to live so well in what would turn out to be the last weeks of her life. So I give thanks for Maureen today, and I’ll be praying—and I know you’ll be praying, too—for her family and for all those who loved her, as we all say goodbye.
Our readings this morning are also full of goodbyes, as Paul says goodbye to the Corinthians at the end of his second letter to them, and as Jesus says goodbye to his disciples at the end of his time with them after the Resurrection, in the very last words of the Gospel of Matthew.
These concluding words introduce one of the great paradoxes of Christian life: We practice a religion built on the idea that God has said goodbye to this world.
That’s a somewhat startling idea. To say that “God has said goodbye” sounds like a kind of Deism, a theology in which God is nothing but a “divine clockmaker,” who may have created the universe, long ago, and set it in motion, but then lets it tick along on its own. To say that God has said goodbye sounds quite grim. On the one hand, it calls into question everything we’re doing here—as if our prayers are a one-sided conversation when the person on the end has already hung up the phone.
But it’s even more disturbing when we leave this room. If God has said goodbye, then are we left here by ourselves, without God’s comfort and help and strength, to face the struggles and the grief of life alone?
Part of the problem is the word “goodbye,” I think. It sounds so final, it puts such an abrupt end on things. It would be nice if we had a way to say farewell that was more like adios, which means “to God,” originally an abbreviation of the phrase a Dios te encomiendo, “I commend you to God.” It’s the same derivation as the French goodbye adieu. In Farsi, you say Khoda hafez, which means, “May God be your Guardian.” Beautiful. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a word like that in English?
Well, we do. That word is “goodbye.” We’ve just forgotten what it means. “Goodbye” was once godbwye, which is nothing but a contraction for “God be with you.” “God be with you.” That’s what we’re saying when we say “goodbye.” And I like that more than any of the rest. Because it doesn’t just remind you that God is, in some sense, your protector. And it doesn’t just commend you a Dios, who’s up there en el cielo, in heaven. It offers a prayer for the here and now: “God be with you” today.
And that’s exactly what I mean when I say that it’s a paradox that we live in a world to which God has said, “Goodbye.” Think about what Jesus says to his disciples. Just as his ministry began with the Sermon on the Mount, here it ends on another mountainside. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” he says—and here you can see why the powers that be appoint this reading for Trinity Sunday—“baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:18-19) And then he concludes, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” And that’s the last thing we ever hear from Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, before he ascends into heaven to sit at the right hand of God.
What a pile of paradoxes. All authority has been given to me; so here’s some work for you to do. I am going away now, and you’ll never hear my voice again; and remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age. How can it be that Jesus is going away and that Jesus will be with them always? I suspect it has to do with the fact that Jesus is the only person in the world who can say “goodbye” without really saying “goodbye.” Jesus is the only person in the world for whom “God be with you” and “I will be with you” are the same.
And in a way, the whole doctrine of the Trinity is about trying to make sense of the disciples’ overwhelming sense that what Jesus said was true. Because while Jesus really did go away, they continued to encounter him among them still. Even in his absence, Jesus seemed to be present. And just as Jesus had brought them into the presence of God in a way they had never experienced before, the Holy Spirit seemed to make the risen Jesus present to them once more, in a way they couldn’t quite explain. Jesus had gone away and was nowhere to be found, and yet they found him everywhere.
Where Jesus was, God the Father had been. Where the Holy Spirit, they found Jesus, too. And this had always been the case. You can see it in those words from the very first verses of the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” (Gen. 1:1-3) At the very beginning of all things, we find God, Elohim, whom Christians came to call God the Father, the First Person of the Trinity. And we find the ruach Elohim, which you could translate “a wind from God” or you could translate “the Spirit of God”—there’s no difference in Hebrew between the two. And we find that when the first act of creation occurs—“Let there be light”—it comes through the Word of God. And as St. John would later say, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:1, 1:14) In the life of Jesus, that Word of God becomes tangible: a real person, who people can see and hear and feel as clearly as they can see anyone else. And when he says goodbye, he becomes less visible to any one person anywhere—but through the Holy Spirit he is more accessible to everyone, everywhere.
But we’re not Jesus. When we say goodbye, we’re more like Paul. We entrust the people we care about to God. Sometimes that involves a level of foolish optimism about what they’ll do in our absence, as when teachers give some helpful advice on how to keep your math skills up over the summer; or as when Paul writes, “Put things in order. Listen to my appeal. Agree with one another. Live in peace.” (2 Cor. 13:11) If only it were so simple to get along with one another, Paul, you wouldn’t have to write so many letters.
But Paul’s goodbye also comes with something much better than optimism, which is hope: the sure and certain faith that “the God of love and peace will be with you.” That doesn’t mean life will be perfect. God knows that the Holy Spirit hasn’t manage to put things in order in the Church to date, let along to get us to agree with one another and live in peace. But it does mean exactly what it says: that among our struggles and sorrows, and amid our joys and celebrations, God will be with us. Andover some two thousand years, millions of people all around the world have found that—however mysterious the workings of the Trinity may be—this turns out to be true; that through “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit,” they have grown ever closer to the people they were meant to be: that while Paul has said goodbye, and their mentors have said goodbye, and their beloved family members and friends have said goodbye, God has been with them always, until the end of the age.
