Collaborators in Creation

Sermon for the First Sunday after Pentecost:Trinity Sunday, Year A

Church of the Epiphany | Washington, DC

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Matthew 28: 16-20

An ancient Indian parable tells of three blind men meeting an elephant for the first time…

None of them have encountered this magnificent being before. So, like others, they’re curious. When they’re led over to touch the elephant, each one begins to describe what it is like... 

One feels the long trunk and says, “an elephant is like a snake that slides along the ground.”

Another wraps his arms around one of the massive legs and says, “an elephant is like a tree-trunk that stands firmly planted in the earth.”

And finally the third touches an ear and says, “an elephant is like a bird with large flapping wings that soar through the air.”

None of them are necessarily wrong; each has accurately described something true from their own experience and then what they imagine an elephant might be like. But of course we wouldn’t really say any one of them is completely right, either. 

An elephant is made of all of its different parts. And the whole of this great creature cannot possibly be fully understood looking at only a tusk or tail or trunk isolated from others parts.

Now, on this Trinity Sunday, hear me on this: what I’m not saying is that the Holy Trinity is like an elephant… Any metaphors we might use for the Trinity inevitably fall short. But rather than telling us what God is like, I think this parable suggests instead something of what we are like: searching and grasping, getting some of it right, and getting a lot of it far less than right. 

Any attempt to put words to the mysterious wonder of God perhaps captures something that is true—but there is far more left beyond the realm of our limited comprehension. 

Maybe the doctrine of the Trinity feels inaccessible or irrelevant—and it leaves you scratching your head, wondering how to make sense of it or what difference any of it really makes. All of which, I think, would be fair. 

With our readings this morning, I’d like to make this one central suggestion: the Holy Trinity— through each of its three persons—is the life-giving source of all creation, of new life. 

A few moments ago we heard the creation story from Genesis…

In the beginning, before all things came to be, there was a “formless void.” This is one of my favorite images in all of scripture. Imagine a vast ocean—or if you grew up in the Midwest like myself, you might instead picture Lake Erie. Picture that vast body at night with the waters dark and agitated—and as they tumble and churn they teem with energy and possibility. Then with a rushing wind and great banging sounds, creation begins to burst forth.  

One interpretation imagines this movement of wind being like a majestic bird, which we often use as a description for the Holy Spirit. This bird soars across the face of open waters and when it dips a wing into the depths, it draws forth creation. Eventually, as the story continues to unfold, creation is fruitful and it multiplies—filling the whole earth with the creativity of God.  

Genesis tells the first way God is revealed to us. And throughout history the Church has called this person of the Trinity “God the Father”—though along with Julian of Norwich we might also use the language of “Mother God” or “God our Mother.” 

The story of creation doesn’t end there, though… Because God then chooses to enter into human history.

The Word which was present even at the beginning becomes flesh—and not just any flesh. God enters into this story as a historic being not in some generic or universal way but with particularity: during a time of oppression, within a body that is subjected to violence, a time when possibility is suppressed and controlled.  

Now, one way of describing a state of despair is the absence of possibility—when life no longer holds anything new or promise of change. When a person or people begin to believe tomorrow will be no different than today, hope slowly erodes, and they slip into the depths of despair.  

All of that energy that animates life inside each of us doesn’t depart though: it remains churning and tumbling away inside one’s chest, teeming with stifled creativity; which truthfully can be agonizing.

And it is precisely into these seemingly hopeless depths that Jesus shows up. 

He is born under the rule of “Pax Romana:” a time when all things and people have been put into order under the Peace of Rome. And once the Empire has successfully secured peace and stability, what use does anyone have for hope or creativity? Unless of course, that is, that one doesn’t find themselves at the top of the sociopolitical hierarchy—for which that order was designed to benefit…

It is often the case under the power of Empire’s that creativity becomes suspect. For evidence we need look no further than contemporary examples of cancelled artists, banned books, and controlled centers for the arts. Artists are dangerous because they imagine and bring forth new realities. 

Even still, Jesus enters into that despair—into the void of possibility—and his ministry begins disrupting assumptions. Everything about his life, death, resurrection, and ascension infuses creativity where it is believed no alternative options remain and hope for change has run dry.

And through Jesus, God is revealed. The divine is born into a refugee family and is made known in the body of a marginalized, brown skinned, working class day laborer who refuses to bow down to the dehumanizing demands of Empire. And this is tremendously consequential.

Finally, as we celebrated in the feast of Pentecost just last week, God is revealed yet even more. When the disciples gather together, a sound like a rush of violent wind yet again comes from heaven and sweeps over the Upper Room—and they become filled with the Holy Spirit. 

And this life-giving Spirit of God begins to move in and through people, and the Church is born. The story of God’s creativity continues. And this story is far from over; it continually unfolds even in our lives today as the living Body of Christ. Genesis merely sets the stage for us.

We know God’s purpose, action, and presence in the world and in our lives through the creative activity of each person of the Trinity:

God is creator, the one in whom all things were made, and life-giver. God is lover, liberator, and life-sustainer.

God the Holy Trinity creates, and God then invites us to participate in creation’s unfolding. To delight in it, to care and preserve it, and to contribute to it.

Now, the purpose of Christian doctrine—and of all the potential head scratching that goes along with it—is not for us to most accurately dissect how the early Church lived or what they believed two-thousand years ago, or even Jesus for that matter. The point is about what it means for our lives today: to discern how God’s creativity is leading us into tomorrow.  

“Our duty,” as the body of Christ then—as the mystic Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says—“is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.”  

So, on this feast of the Holy Trinity I invite you to wonder with me: 

Where are the places in your life over which the presence of God is hovering? What open waters exist within you that tumble and churn with possibility? What is the new thing God seeks to do in your life, and in our collective life together?

Depending on whatever circumstances you face, or whatever circumstances of these times are especially poignant for you, all of this may be difficult to imagine. It may feel uncomfortable.  

de Chardin offers the following:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

God who created in the beginning is the same God of eternity—creating then, and creating now. Wherever the place of open waters may be for you, remember, as Jesus reminds us: God is and will be with you always, to the end of the age. 

Amen