Triple Play
Genesis 1:1-2:4a

May 22, 2005

People who suspiciously gather together on Sunday mornings are known and reviled for their wordiness. We are obsessed and possessed by words in a way few other elements of society are. Thank goodness there are people like Rex Murphy and Lorne Elliott who still delight in playing with words, from different perspectives, of course. Why, they’re almost religious in their humourous and political liturgy of words. We are a people driven by the Word, and that has its delights and its problems.

Our problem is that our words may not make sense. To all too many, when Christians speak their faith, it sounds like last week’s Pentecost preaching - a string of garbled gibberish, sounds that make no sense.

It follows well that the usual readings for this first Sunday after Pentecost pursue this whispered question, can anything religious make sense? The conception of God as Trinity, Three Persons in One, and then the epic recital of the Creation are two of the most difficult ideas in Christian thought and preaching.

It is not that the Trinity and Creation are difficult, intellectually demanding, nor that they are senseless, but that to try to think of either one is ultimately impenetrable and insolvable.

The Trinity rings truer in a story more than a creed or theological discourse. Explaining the Trinity is always one step beyond us, beyond the facility of our tongues and of our minds, elusive from our attempts to pin it down in a formula or creed.

Creation, we think is easier, but after all, we weren’t there in the beginning and is even less simple. Scientists have theorized the Big Bang, but there seems to be always a piece missing. If the universe began with a Bang, where did the matter come from that went Bang!?

Conservative Christians have strained, on the other hand, to create an imposter of science called “creationism” and as a consequence have de-scripturalized Genesis 1. That is, in order to provide a Biblical counter-version to Darwinian theory of evolution, they have thrown out the Bible along with baby Darwin.

The real purpose of Creation is to halt chaos, random, senseless acts of violence and impersonality. In the beginning, the earth was without form and void, tohu w’ bohu as the Hebrew writer put it, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. There was water everywhere, but continually throughout the Old Testament the ocean is the living icon of chaos. The ocean or sea stretches out beyond our vision, one part the same as the other, brutal in its force and ability to swallow up everything without distinction. Likewise, that soupy matter that somehow was drifting around when it all went bang had no shape and identity. It was simply there.

The Creation of the universe is not creation out of nothing. It is God bringing order to chaos. Order just isn’t rigid characterizing or bureaucratizing, assigning everything a number, but the act of giving meaning and sense to something previously meaningless, or chaotic. Bringing order to chaos allows our minds to be free, and being free, we are offered salvation and life. The physicists of the Big Bang have difficulty saying that, even if they come to believe that, for that is not scientific.

Finally comes the poet. The poet is not a fictionalizer, but someone who realizes that the truth cannot be stated with plain words, that plain words here have no meaning. Plain old scientific words are chaotic to the truth.

James Weldon Johnson, a key member of the black Harlem Renaissance, wrote a series of poems or sermons in verse called God’s Trombones, and he begins “The Creation” this way.

And God stepped out on space,

And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely --
I'll make me a world.

And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That's good!

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,
And God rolled the light around in his hands
Until he made the sun;
And he set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said: That's good!

God has fun putting it together, ordering everything into its place, but it’s not quite enough.

Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that he had made.
He looked at his sun,
And he looked at his moon,
And he looked at his little stars;
He looked on his world
With all its living things,
And God said: I'm lonely still.

Then God sat down --
On the side of a hill where he could think;
By a deep, wide river he sat down;
With his head in his hands,
God thought and thought,
Till he thought: I'll make me a man!

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in his own image;
Then into it he blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.

The Trinity works to bring order and meaning to our chaotic thoughts about God. We often accuse one another of making “our God too small,” but the real human intellectual dilemma is that our God is too big. An ocean of oceans, as the Biblical writers might have called God, infinitely too immense to comprehend, overloading any brains we have left, and thus chaotic.

Not that the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God, is a simple statement. A mathematical equation it definitely is not.

In the last generation there have been arguments galore about the patriarchal names and characters of the Three Persons. The movement to replace them with the titles Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, have raged throughout the mainline church. Our hymnal Voices United is one result of the movement with the inclusive language now required.

The United Church has reaffirmed that baptisms are still to be performed in the traditional formula of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that is good and appropriate, not for sentimental reasons, but because God is not a corporate office with managers, and CEOs and vice-presidents. God is family - Father, Son and Spirit - demonstrating by its intricate relationships the way human beings should live with one another. Three Persons, but one mind. Three different kinds of activities, but a single will and soul.

Did you ever get a chance to watch a good teacher teach? He or she is everywhere in the classroom, helping one individual, praising another, setting up materials for the next lesson, directing students towards another activity, counseling and admonishing, and always, always talking. One person, but so many “persons” coming and going, flowing seamlessly from one role to another. That is God in a way, in God’s trinitarian persons - ceaseless activity, infinite tasks and roles, always a little too much for us to take in, always talking to us as one kind of person or the other.

The creation is not finished. God is not finished either as Father, Son, Holy Spirit, or Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. You and I are never finished.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan