{to join our email batch to be in conversation about preaching topics, email me}I am fond of the fact that the texts for Trinity Sunday, year A, are not blatantly Trinitarian. The Baptism of Jesus would have served so well! These texts ask about the action, the life of our Trinitarian God. Even my favorite hymn, “Holy, holy, holy,” isn’t an abstract analysis of threeness in oneness, but praise, adulation, an awe in God’s being and doing. I will ponder these texts with the Rublev Trinity icon as my computer wallpaper; I love this idea that God invites us into the eternal fellowship of love that is the Trinity.
Our first text –
obviously and always – is creation, Genesis 1:1-2:4a. Creation happened because the inner
relationships of Father, Son and Holy Spirit were so profound, so pregnant with
divine love, that an outburst, an overflow made the universe happen; its
goodness mirrors the love in God’s eternal triune heart. Verse 26 says “Let us…” but we know the
writer of Genesis didn’t intend Trinity.
It’s that plural of deliberation, or the heavenly court is being
envisioned – or it’s as simple as that the Hebrew word for God is elohim, plural in form! No Trinity in this text – but the Trinity was
there; ponder John 1 and Colossians 1.
The beauty of creation matters maybe now more than ever, and why this is so is well-captured in a reflection written by Malcolm Guite (which I would commend to you) about his experience walking across London Bridge just minutes before the terrorist attack - and trying to hold that together with the beauty he'd seen in Herefordshire earlier the same day.
The beauty of creation matters maybe now more than ever, and why this is so is well-captured in a reflection written by Malcolm Guite (which I would commend to you) about his experience walking across London Bridge just minutes before the terrorist attack - and trying to hold that together with the beauty he'd seen in Herefordshire earlier the same day.
Or we have C.S.
Lewis: “For long centuries, God perfected the animal form which was to become
the vehicle of humanity and the image of
Himself. In the fulness of time, God
caused to descend upon this organism a new kind of consciousness which could
say ‘I’ and ‘me,’ which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God,
which could make judgments of truth, beauty and goodness, and which was so far
above time that it could perceive time flowing past... Sooner or later, they wanted some corner in
the universe of which they could say to God, ‘This is our business, not yours.’ But there is no such corner.”
My personal
favorite thought about creation and science dawned on me when Stephen Hawking
published The
Grand Design, which was hailed as the definitive proof that we can
explain the existence of the universe without resorting to God. People asked me to respond, but I agree with
him entirely. God would not crush us
with a definitive argument; it is not the case that you simply must
believe. You really don’t have to. Jesus didn’t implant belief/holiness devices
in his followers; they could follow, or not.
Love is always like that. I loved
Lisa; but she could have said No.
The preacher’s
best theological counsel on Genesis is to advise people to watch Cosmos – or just get outside and let
your jaw drop. Annie Dillard’s A
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek continues to move me, as she takes us on a
guided tour of the amazements out there, and asks that we simply pay attention.
I think that’s
how we came to have Psalm 8. Someone
was dazed at the wonder of creation – without the benefit of all we known about
galaxies and parallel universes! – and felt simultaneously tiny and yet
enormously important.
There is a statue
of St. Francis in Assisi that I love – of Francis lying on his back. Francis extolled God for creation like no one
else – and I think he’d ask us to begin our course in praising by joining him on
the ground, gazing at things up high.
The image of God
is endlessly fascinating, and less than clear – which again is good. You are a mystery to yourself, and so are the
other people. This image is what it is
to be human, and yet that humanity is somehow an image of the holy
Trinity. R.R. Reno, in his fabulous
Brazos commentary on Genesis,
captures things: “The image of God
imprinted on human nature provides the basis for our supernatural vocation, the
life in Christ that is greater than any possibility resident in our natural
powers, but which is nonetheless a genuine exercise of our natural powers.”
In our tawdry,
misinformation, fake news culture, the preacher needs to be careful with words,
and to remind our church families, repeatedly, that words matter. How did God create? God simply spoke. Words call worlds into being – and you know
this in your own small existence, and can illustrate this easily. Watch the world turn on its axis when someone
says “I love you” or “I’m proud of you” or “I never loved you” or “It’s
malignant” or “I’m coming home.”
Parenthetically, there is a powerful word at the heart of the Trinity. In our culture, we are wise to lean into Jürgen Moltmann's perspective in The Trinity & the Kingdom. Some excerpts: "The triune God reveals himself as love in the fellowship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. His freedom lies in the friendship which he offers; his freedom is his vulnerable love, his openness, the encountering kindness through which he suffers with those he loves." If we reduce God to a single, absolute personality, we wind up with "justification for the world's cultivation of the individual" - an individualism God grieves and counters. And there are political/social implications as well: "It is only when the doctrine of the Trinity vanquishes the monotheistic notion of the great universal monarch in heaven that earthly rulers, dictators and tyrants cease to find any justifying religious archetypes any more." Wow.
Back to Genesis: the preacher has
too many avenues to walk with Genesis 1.
Pick one or two – or try my “dropping” technique. I don’t allow myself, for instance, enough
time to talk about “Dominion,” so I just mention it: “Gee, we don’t have time
to talk about dominion, but I love the way Walter Brueggemann suggested (in his
Interpretation Genesis commentary) that
we are asked to take care of God’s world, not take over God’s world.” Done.
Sixteen seconds tops – but somebody will pick up that stray idea and
ruminate on it.
How interesting
is it that sex is in there from the beginning!
Without dabbling in controversies, Genesis thinks of sex as existing for
procreation – which incites Reno to recall that the Old Testament constantly
compares idolatry to misdirected sex: “The
idolater is like the man who visits prostitutes. He wants to discharge his need for worship
while reserving power to live as he pleases.
The silence of idols is no disappointment… Idols are charming in their
convenient emptiness.” That’s good.
For me, Genesis
1 exposes this weird ambivalence about the world. It’s good, even “very good,” and yet we find
fault with it at every turn, and there is a desperately need, theologically,
for sanctification. Thomas Aquinas
pointed the way: “Grace perfects rather than destroys nature.” We play a huge role in this perfecting of
nature, this spreading grace around in the world, a task articulated in the
day’s Gospel lesson. Like Moses on the
mountain, Jesus commissions his people to go into the land and teach, and
baptize.
We’ve done this
so badly through history: just read Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood
Bible, about a fool preacher dragging his family to the Congo,
determined to baptize the local heathen in the river – which they won’t go near
since there are crocodiles. Tracts don’t
work, street preachers are mocked, and old timey evangelism programs have grown
mold all over themselves. The only way
has to be the way Jesus showed us in the beginning: to go into the world and
love it, to find people and love them, to walk alongside them, to be with them,
just as Jesus was with us, and promised always to be with us.
Sam Wells’s A
Nazareth Manifesto is indispensable reading for clergy, and maybe even
lay people; he shows us how to be with God’s world and people, not fixing them,
not even helping them, but sharing in the journey together with them.
The purpose of
creation is the same as what is at the heart of life in creation: Sabbath.
The preacher could profitably speak on the importance of Sabbath – so alien
to our busy, frantic, connected, gadgety, productive, anxious culture.
Of many stellar books that explore the beauty
of the Sabbath, most adore Abraham Heschel – as do I. But two others are rivals. Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath
as Resistence: Saying No to the Culture of Now (which might just be his
best book ever…) is profound and provocative, deftly moving from sabbath as
devotional practice to social, political and economic implications; a short,
holy, prophetic wonder. Some nuggets: “Multitasking
is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our
power and our effectiveness. Such
practice yields a divided self.” “It was
the deities of Egypt for whom work was never done.” “God isn’t a workaholic, God isn’t anxious,
creation not dependent upon endless work.”
His verbal and visual capture of Scripture itself can be
breathtaking: “It is not accidental that
the best graphic portray of this arrangement is a pyramid, the supreme
construction of Pharaoh’s system.” But
then who is the most anxious person of all?
The one at the top of the pyramid!
If
you think he’s making too much about “Keep the Sabbath,” Brueggemann points out
that this commandment gets the “longest airtime” of then ten, and does explore property
and economics. Claiming the Sabbath as
the “linchpin” of all the commandments, he suggests it is no different from the
first (“No other gods!”) and the second (“No images,” life is not about objects
and commodities). Coining the
felicitous, memorable phrase, Brueggemann avers that “YHWH is about restfulness
not restlessness.” Sabbath breaks all
the interlocking cycles. Parents don’t
have to rush their kids into ballet, you don’t have to buy the newest gadget,
you aren’t compelled to get prettier.
And then I have
savored Christopher Ringwald’s riveting A
Day Apart, a rich, personal exploration of Jewish, Christian and Muslim
habits and joys derived from a sacred day: “The Sabbath remains the dessert most people leave on the table.” What are we missing?
Ringwald’s Jewish friends, the Kligermans, do not drive
on the Sabbath, since making a fire was prohibited by God on Mt. Sinai, and an
automobile engine requires a spark. So
the Kligermans stay home, or they walk, kids gambol, the adults visit. “It’s a joy derived from a restriction.” After listening to the Kligermans describe
their Sabbath, Ringwald hung up the phone, and told his wife their observance
of Sunday had gone awry; so they turned the TV off, played with the children,
and had dinner with neighbors. His
clinching remark? “Thus the Jews save
another Gentile family.”
“A God of love invites us into the day. We are admitted by our humanity, not our
perfection. The day calls us to a
banquet of time, not a prison of gestures and abstinence. An omnipotent God needs not our perfection.”
A Day
Apart is replete with history, from Pompey’s invasion of
Palestine to Sandy Koufax refusing to pitch in the World Series. “We fight for the Sabbath: against ourselves,
perhaps against other believers, and certainly against the claims of the
world. The day apart pits the believer
against all his or her worldly intentions.”
“I now see the unfolding opposites of the day. We do less and are more, we stop earning and
grabbing and have more, we cease from making and make more, we let Creation be
and in our repose we see it to be more than we ever knew.”
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** My newest book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, is available. My forthcoming book, Weak Enough to Lead: What the Bible Tells Us About Powerful Leadership, will appear before too long.
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