Everyone loves an ending. When the homily or speech seems to go on for too long, what is the speaker’s phrase that we captive listeners long to hear?—“Finally, in conclusion . . . .” Right? That is the signal to reach for the car keys, slip back on the shoes, straighten up and listen up for the big finish.
Endings are important. They linger in the memory after earlier bits of discourse fade. That is why writers and speakers work so hard at endings. We know that those final words may be the only ones to remain “face-up” in the minds of our hearers or readers, like the top magazine on a stack beside the bedside. So it is common for communicators to imbed their most important messages within those closing words, knowing that this may be their last and best hope for getting their point across.
Some of our best communicators honed their conclusions down to an art form. Who will forget the way long-time CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite closed his nightly newscast? “And that’s the way it was, June 15th, 2014.” Or comedienne Carol Burnette, closing each show blowing a kiss to the audience? Whatever we might think of these communicators or their medium, they knew the power of a conclusion.
But this power is not limited to celebrities and television personalities. Even the simplest communication vehicles employ the possibility of power in a conclusion. Consider the personal letter. Even in this age of emails and instant messaging, there are some letters that beg to be done by hand in the old fashioned way. It may be written on only a single sheet of paper or stationery. It may be typed or handwritten. But consider the message conveyed in just the way that letter signs off. What a difference it makes whether the letter ends with the word Love, or Sincerely Yours, or Respectfully! All of these are appropriate endings for a letter, depending on the occasion of the letter and the relationship between the sender and the receiver. Ending a letter to your boss or to the IRS with Respectfully is fine, but how different that word would sound between a mother and her son? Or worse yet, imagine fifty consecutive letters between a sailor and his wife who are separated by a war, all of which ending warmly with All my love, forever. How abrasive would the conclusion ‘Sincerely’ sound to the confused recipient at the end of the fifty-first letter?
Endings matter. With just a few words conclusions can carry a heavy load of communication. No wonder we do well to pay attention to endings! The great apostle, Saint Paul, certainly knew this. Our epistle lesson today is the conclusion to his correspondence to the Church at Corinth. Notice, after he writes the word Finally, how he ends with a set of staccato phrases designed to reinforce the great themes from his letters to this church—aim for perfection, be of one mind, live in peace . . . . Like beads of a rosary, each phrase is a sound-byte of a sermon that can be handled over and over in the mind.
And then Paul ends the letter with a great Trinitarian benediction. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. What a powerful conclusion! Is Paul trying to introduce or explain the mystery of the Trinity here? Hardly. Had that been the case, he would not have waited for the closing sentence to introduce such an important theological concept. And he probably would have used a different order, listing God the Father first. But Paul is not writing a creed here. He is simply expressing a closing wish for his church to continue to experience the fullness of God’s presence and power. Could there be a more potent wish?
When we speak of the doctrine of the Trinity, we do so with hushed tones like those who walk in a great cathedral or stand before an awe-inspiring vista of nature. To speak of God at all requires some humility, an awareness that human language and the human mind is not able to contain completely the mystery and majesty of the Divine. How exactly the One God of Old Testament faith is also the Three-in-One God of the Church is not easy to describe, no matter how many theological degrees one holds. But one way of explaining the rise of this doctrine may be seen in this brief conclusion to Paul’s letter. Though far from a developed doctrinal explanation, Paul is giving voice to the experience of God by the Church of all ages. The fact is, we have experienced the incredible forgiving grace of God, as lived out in the teaching and life of Jesus Christ, and we have experienced the love of God from the act of creation forward, as God has continually found ways to reach out to us and redeem us with a love more powerful than hate and death. And finally, we have experienced the unique fellowship of the Christian community that can only be explained as the presence of God’s Spirit among us, uniting and empowering us to be more than we would ever become on our own. Three gods? No. But three ways in which we have experienced the One God’s presence and power.
Grace that welcomes and redeems those who are broken, love that transforms those lives into a blessing for the world, and a unique fellowship that creates community out of those who were once lost, last, and least—these are the characteristics that define the Church when she is at her best. And Paul is simply reminding the Corinthian church, as he reminds our church, that these qualities do not come from within us, but from beyond us, from the very heart of God Himself.
Everyone loves an ending. It is then that words are compressed to their most dense meanings. Final words, from a pen on paper or from the lips of one who is dying, make us draw close, listen, and remember. When General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, drew his last breath, he uttered this final word, the word which summed up his entire life of service, the word which serves still as the commission for officers in his army of Christian servants among the world’s poor and downtrodden. What was that final word? William Booth drew that last breath and whispered this word: “Others.” I think the apostle Paul would have been proud, don’t you?