Sermon at The Church of
the Holy Apostles, New York City
May 18, 2008, The First Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell, Associate Rector
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20
In the name of God, the One in Three:
The Three who are over me,
The Three who are below me,
The Three who are above me here,
The Three who are above me yonder,
The Three who are in the earth,
The Three who are in the air,
The Three who are in heaven,
The Three who are in the great pouring sea:
The Trinity
B
One, and undivided.
This invocation with which I began is in
the same spirit as that great hymn,
ASt
Patrick=s
Breastplate,@
which we will sing later on. They speak of God as Trinity,
not abstract, but intimately present in everything,
everywhere. This feast day, which is about a doctrine
B a
theology B
rather than telling part of a story, requires that we look for
ways to bring what can often feel abstract down to earth, as
it were. It calls us to look for connections, images,
resonances.
And so, I was intrigued with the
lectionary choice for our first lesson this morning, which was
of course Genesis 1: the myth of the creation of the world and
humankind. What, I wondered, has this to do with the
Trinity? I have an intuition, though, that there are some
very important themes here, in the deepest ecological sense.
The word Aecological@
comes from the Greek
Aekos,@
the word for house or home. It has the same root as
Aecumenical.@
In this context, it asks how we are called to be at home in
the triune God and how we are called to be at home on this
earth, which Genesis celebrates as
Avery
good@-
how we are to be at home on our wondrous and grievously
wounded blue planet.
The first theme that emerges for me out
of the feast of the Trinity and the reading from Genesis is
the theme of unity in diversity: interrelatedness,
interdependence,
Ainter-being,@
as one has said. The Trinity is One in Three and Three in One
B a
pluralism in the profound unity that is God, God=s
self. The Trinity is first of all an attempt to speak of our
experience of God. The early Christians struggled to express
the relationship between the God of the Torah and the prophets
who was also the God of Jesus and their experience of God in
Jesus, and then their experience that the God who was in
Christ was also an ongoing presence in believers and in the
community, indwelling them and empowering them to carry out
Christ=s
work. The notion of Trinity as they worked it out logically
in Greek philosophical categories can feel somewhat static to
us. But actually, the Trinity is full of movement. One of
the old images for the Triune God is a dance.
Most of all, the notion of Trinity
conveys a profound relatedness among the persons. Following
the ancient traditions, we at Holy Apostles say
AFather,
Son, and Holy Spirit@
to speak of the Trinity, to speak of this relatedness. And
then, attempting to expand our imaginations beyond the
patriarchal language, we add:
AMother
of All.@
It=s a
little ambiguous whether we mean the Holy Spirit, who=s
often spoken of often as feminine, is the mother of all, or
that God in God=s
entire self is the mother of all. Of course, God is beyond
gender, but holds all the possibilities of gendering, all
diversity within herself, in deepest harmony.
There are some other ways of naming the
Trinity that have gained commerce in recent times:
Asource,
word, and inspiration.@
That was in David=s
hymn that we sang last week.
AGod
unbegotten, God incarnate, and God among us.@
From the New Zealand prayer book:
Aearth
maker, pain bearer, life giver,@
and one of my very favorites, from Saint Augustine:
Athe
lover, the beloved, and the love between.@
This last image of the Trinity emphasizes that God is in God=s
self relational, diverse but a deep unity, loving and beloved,
and yearning, seeking and inviting us into that relationship
of love, drawing us into the dance.
While Genesis 1 is most assuredly not
speaking of the Trinity, that divine dance and movement are
discernable in the beginning. God starts to create, and the
rustling restless spirit/ breath/ wind hovers and moves over
the deep dark waters. God speaks and life bursts into being.
Order comes out of chaos; it=s
wildly diverse and it all springs from the One. It=s
summoned up by the Word: the stars and the great sea monsters,
fruit trees and fruit bats and fruit flies, rocks and rivers,
microorganisms and mountains, giraffes and jellyfish, and red
tail hawks and human kind.
God declares it all very good, or as one
translator says,
AGod
saw how good it was.@
Genesis is poetry; it=s
not science. But science as we understand it in our day
actually takes us deeper into the mystery of unity, diversity,
and interdependence. We understand that all of the universe
came from a single explosion that we call the Big Bang, some
15 billion years ago. We come from a common origin. As the
poet sang, AWe
are stardust.@
Some 4 billion years ago earth emerged as
the planet that can sustain life, and from the simplest cells,
life evolved as an intricate web of relationships, entwined in
food, in habitat, and adapting one being to another. The more
complex forms on our planet are far more vulnerable than and
utterly dependent upon the simpler ones. Our impacts on one
another are so profound that as famously has been said:
AThe
flutter of a butterfly=s
wings in the Amazon may cause a storm in the arctic.@
Theologically, we are invited also into
the dance of creation, into a profound understanding of our
kinship with all life, of awareness that ecologically we are
at home together on this planet, intertwined and needing each
other in ways that we don=t
comprehend. We are different, all we species, and wildly so,
but we must claim kinship not only with other humans
B
challenging as that diversity is
B but
with other species, with the animals and plants, and even with
the soil in which our food is grown and the water on which all
life depends. We are diverse and we are inextricably bound
together in one whole.
The second theme that emerges for me in
reading Genesis 1 on Trinity Sunday is a cosmological context,
Aour
place in the family of things,@
as Mary Oliver says. We need to learn to see ourselves in a
more than human world
B God=s
world B
and one that we share with more than human others. In St.
Patrick=s
Breastplate, we sing an invocation of the Trinity, binding
ourselves to the great One in Three. And then we proceed to
bind ourselves to the work of Christ, and to the saints
throughout time and space, and then to the powers of the
natural world:
Athe
flashing of the lightning free, the whirling wind=s
tempestuous shocks, the stable earth, the deep salt sea,
around the old eternal rocks.@
Imagine binding yourself to the
lightning, to the wind. Imagine learning from those great
teachers. The message of Genesis is that the earth is the
Lord=s,
God=s
creation, not ours. And it means to decentralize our
insidious self-preoccupied anthropocentric perspective. Even
in the creation myth, humankind is a relatively late arrival,
but to really get how infinitesimally brief our presence has
been in the unfolding of the universe, I recommend that
winding walk in the Museum of Natural History that shows us
showing up at less than one minute to midnight.
We marvel on the one hand that we belong
here on this planet that has evolved to sustain us in life
just as we need, for which we are suited along with all the
others. And, we are challenged to realize that this story of
creation, this story of God in the world, is not all about
us. Now Genesis has a very mixed legacy of interpretation in
this regard. We are told that the human being is created in
the divine image and given dominion over the other creatures.
Are we really the only species that bears the divine image? I
have to say I simply don=t
believe it. Elephants with their prodigious memories and
loyalty, the birds who shelter their young under their wings,
the mysterious canyons and the majestic oceanYsurely
the divine is expressed through them and broods in them, and
surely we are all
B all-
in the love that is the image of the Trinity, both indwelling
and transcendent.
But perhaps we might ponder how the
divine image is uniquely in humans. Is it reason? Language?
Relatedness? It seems that the more we learn about them, the
more we find that other species share some of these
characteristics and have their own unique intelligences.
Certainly they have unique instincts, abilities that we can
only dream of sharing. Surely many of them have a deep
capacity for feeling.
I think that the vocation of the human
may have to do with consciousness, with self-awareness, with
knowledge that we will die, and with our imaginations. And we
need these capacities in dealing with the other issue raised
by Genesis 1, in which humankind is given dominion over all
creation. The legacy of this is disastrous, particularly as
our technological capacities have grown, for we have treated
the earth and the other species as if they exist solely for
our use and entertainment
B as
if they are an
Ait@
rather than a
Athou.@
We can no longer avoid the consequences of this self-centered
greed and myopia. But what we really need is a shift in
consciousness. We need our imaginations to understand that if
we are to exercise anything like dominion over others and the
planet, it is as loving caretakers with humility and devotion
B with
recognition that God=s
good creation exists in its own right and not solely for human
consumption.
We need our imaginations to envision how
this might be different and how we might change, because we
don=t
have dominion in the sense of the right to take everything for
ourselves. But we do have responsibility to use our unique
and prodigious capacities for the good of the whole. We need
to join in the dance of love that is at the heart of the
Triune God.
Theologian Sally McFague, to whom I am
indebted for many of my thoughts about these matters, in her
book The Body of God, quotes the novelist Iris Murdoch
who says, ALove
is the extremely difficult realization that something other
than one=s
self is real.@
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something
other than one=s
self is real. The anguish of reading the headlines of the
last two weeks challenges me prfoundly in this regard: first,
the cyclone is Myanmar, then the earthquake in China, then the
details of the food crisis unfolding all over the world and
famine in sub-Saharan Africa. All these crises are both human
and ecological and the fact that we feel anguish is good news,
a sign of our connectedness. But we must ask how we can be
responsible citizens of the Earth, lovers not only of our
nearest human kin but of all our relations in this crisis time
on our planet.
Surely the answer must include our
capacity for discovering and loving the reality of the other
which is so easy to lose in sound bites, so easy to forget
when the headlines go on to something else. This extremely
difficult realization that something other than ourselves is
real has to be metabolized into a radically different way of
seeing and being in the world. Something other than ourselves
is real.
This brings me to the final theme that
emerges for me from the juxtaposition of Genesis 1 with
Trinity Sunday, and that theme is wonder. This feast invites
us to contemplate the inexhaustible mysteries of the Triune
God. It reminds us that all our formulations about God, all
our images for God are provisional. As the mystic Meister
Eckhart said,
ANot this, nor this, nor this, nor this art Thou, yet
also this and this and this.@
This day invites our investigation of our
own images for God, as those who were in Andrea=s
class earlier this spring did. Perhaps especially invited are
the weird and even unsettling ones, our meditation on our own
peculiar experiences of God. Part of the divine image that we
bear as humans is creativity in knowing, perceiving, imagining
God- the creativity of an exuberantly passionate Creator, who
continues to create and calls us into partnership in that
creation for our flowering and for the desperate need of the
whole.
In that creativity, an essential
nourishment for me is contemplation of the natural world. We
might remember to bind unto ourselves the powers of the sun,
the winds and the waters, and also perhaps the undefended
beauty of a blossom, the homing instinct of migrating birds,
the rootedness of trees, the deliberateness of a tortoise,
even the persistence of a mosquito. Not only in the grandeur
of wilderness but also in paying attention, really paying
attention to a plant, a bird, a goldfish, and yes, another
human being B
in allowing fascination, the disorientation of discovery that
they are real and different from us and also bone of our
bone, irreplaceably interdependent with us, part of one great
whole B
we find what we need to do the work we are called to do.
I want to close with another poem that
speaks with contemplative love about God and creation. It=s
not particularly trinitarian, but it does invite us into
imagining anew our experience of the divine. It=s
a goodnight prayer written by a child named Danu Baxter, age
four and a half. It goes like this:
Goodnight, God
I hope that you are having
a good time being the world.
I like the world very much.
I=m
glad you made the plants
and trees survive with the
rain and summers.
When summer is nearly near
the leaves begin to fall.
I hope you have a good time
being the world.
I like how God feels around
everyone in the world.
God, I am very happy that
I live on you.
Your arms clasp around the world.
I like you and your friends.
Every time I open my eyes
I see the gleaming sun.
I like the animals, the deer,
and us creatures of the world,
the mammals.
I love my dear friends.
Perhaps that is the question that we must
ask this Trinity Sunday: How shall we be loving friends of God
and of Creation?
Amen.
.
