Sermon: Trinity, a name to live in

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20

It’s Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday comes in the church calendar after Pentecost each year. It’s the day the church sets aside to reflect on the nature of God. Sometimes our sermons and our worship move fairly directly to what God wants us to do. Trinity Sunday stops us  before we rush into ‘takeaway Christianity’ and makes us pause with the identity of God.

 In honour of this focus, the readings set for today are iconic passages from the bible. They are the big imagination shapers: The creation story from Genesis; the Grace (as we call it) from Corinthians; and finally, the Great Commission from Matthew’s Gospel

Let’s begin with the creation story. The idea that there is a singular mystery behind all things, we could call it monotheism. Genesis is the classic creation story about a single divine source of all things, all order and all life. Another way of putting it is that there is a creativity that gives meaning to all things – and it is good. The creative source that gives responsibility to humanity – responsibility for the welfare of the good creation. Humanity is part of the rich tapestry of divine creativity but also responsible to God in a way that no other creatures appear to be. As the Hebrew bible puts it… humans are the image of God. They reflect God’s creative power in their pro-creative life as a binary of ‘male and female’ (as well as in other forms of creativity of course). They reflect God’s creativity in their authority to care for other creatures and the flourishing of those creatures. God’s creatures are good. God wants them to flourish and (as we would say) the ecosystem as a whole to flourish.

So the text for us to think about on Trinity Sunday (Genesis 1) is a riotous celebration of the rich diversity of the created world, it’s a celebration of human dignity and responsibility within this glorious creation.

Sometimes we are struck by the rich glory or creation when we stand back and look at big things this week I was struck when I read from a microbiologist about the mystery of creation in what we think of as the small things – the intelligence of cells.

Everywhere we can observe this proclivity for ingenuity. When a surgical suture is secured with staples, the resulting repair is conspicuous and crude. Within weeks the scar is healed, smooth, and scarcely visible. The cells at the site of the incision have identified the nature of the surgical trauma and have initiated manoeuvres to restore it. Capillaries re-form so that the microcirculation is restored, innervation is reinstated, and the many epidermal layers are properly reconstituted. None of this we understand. These complex processes are invisible to the brain, and are not controlled by cerebral activity, neither are they subject to regulatory intervention by circulating hormones. The cells are the decision-makers … No computer model comes close to emulating the mechanisms manifested by an amoeba, as it seeks its way ahead, selects which food substances are suitable in ingestion, modifies its cell membrane to accommodate the situation and moves on in a direction it has motivationally selected. A team based at Sapporo, Japan, have even shown that amoebae have memory for events. This takes us deeper in to the realities of living cells than current conceptions of memory as the propensity only of cell aggregates. Single cells can take decision, single cells can plan responses; single cells contain memories. [Brian Ford, 2017]

The Genesis story is a distinctive creation story… distinctive in relation to the creation story of Newtonian physics – the story of a dead universe composed of a random collection of dead particles separate objects (atoms) that remain still until moved and come together for no reason and to no purpose whatsoever. In the imagination of Newtonian physics any purpose we imagine, is simply what we read into it. Genesis 1 is a very different imagination shaper it reminds us that we do not live in a universe constructed like a machine out of dead things (building blocks). It is alive all the way down and destined to flourish in rich complexity. Genesis 1 is also distinctive among the creation stories of the ancient world. It’s distinctive compared to the Babylonian stories from the same era, it’s also distinctive compared to Māori creation stories. It’s a totally peaceful image, God is not fighting with creation, the world flows out of God’s goodness and is itself good. There are not multiple gods fighting to attain dominance. It is an image of a peace that underlies everything, underlies the evil and tragedy and pain, a peace that gives meaning to it.

This image of a primal peace ‘in the beginning’ of God’s creating provides a contrast to the hard things in our life… and is the source of a sense of hope. If, in spite of what we are experiencing now, the greater reality is God, past or future or present, then cynicism and despair are not real options for us. We live in the grace of creation.

If we move to the gospel reading for today (another iconic text we call ‘the great commission’) we see the authority that humanity has been given (in Genesis) for the welfare of creation taken up again in Jesus words… all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me… he says. The suggestion here is that where humanity is failing to fulfil its proper role in the world, Jesus is taking up the baton. Jesus has been raised from death to bring creation to its proper life and so he’s gathering people from all nations around him and with him.

At first glance, depending on your life experience, you might see this as a kind of colonial tract – a mandate for domination. Go into all the world to all those people with different coloured skin from you, conquer them, and indoctrinate them so they become like you. Brand them with the name of your God.

You might read it like that… in fact given the history of Christianity, especially if you have been on wrong side of colonisation, it would be surprising if you didn’t read it like that. The onus is surely on those of us who are Christians to demonstrate that it is not like that. Regardless of all the good intentions of Christians and missionaries down the ages, our role is not to defend our previous alliances with imperial power and violence. Our role is to make our repentance good by living another mission and by demonstrating a seriously different Great Commission.

‘Go to all nations’ says there is something beyond local political arrangements (nations is quite a modern western word but the translation is not important) there is something beyond blood and soil we might say. These things matter. But … but the Christian vision shares with Genesis 1 a kind of transnational calling trans iwi calling. (God may be calling Israel, but God is not, in any narrow sense Israel’s God – any more than the mountain is my maunga) … God is the good source of all things and is reflected in the good in all things. So we cannot, must not stop at the boundaries of our local political arrangements. We cannot look at them from a distance as ‘other’. Go to all nations. Don’t stay at home.

According to this vision, people from all nations, including our own nation, are to be apprenticed (discipled is something like a university of practice) in this life of Jesus, this divine calling. As we live together, we instruct one another in the life of God. Much of our life is formed in ways that distort us traumatise us, recycle the violence. We all need to learn a new way, to be instructed and to instruct one another in the life of God.

And baptised… washed…  in the life of the peaceable God. There is something new for all of us here… Baptism is the cleansing that signifies this newness… whatever our roots, whatever our blood and soil.

When we name the peaceable God of Genesis 1 as Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) we are not naming another local warrior deity.

Nor is this a label that refers to God far away in God’s heaven (beyond our real world, so to speak).

The Trinity is the name that holds together the peaceable creator of Genesis 1 and the ongoing peacemaking of God in creation (sometimes we call that redemption).

The Trinity is a name that launches us (like little boats) into God’s active life in the world. The name is the name of God-in-the-world. We identify the mystery of God by indicating God’s immersion in the created world. Father, Son and Holy Spirit is God with us. This is not the name that launches us into heaven, it is the name that launches us towards other people and other peoples.

Trinity Sunday… to call God trinity is to name the life of God for the peace of the world. The God of Genesis 1, the giver of life, the one Jesus called Abba (Father), the Son who lives God’s peace among us, suffers our violence and takes on the forces of death-dealing that control our life, who leads and includes us in a new way of being, and the Spirit who moves both Jesus and us to not be controlled by fear but to take the everyday path of love.

To believe in this God is to be part of God’s mission in the world. We go to the places of suffering and violence in our neighbourhood because God goes there, and God sends us there.

We live in this name… and our hope… our commission is to enable all people to live in this name… so we go in obedience to this peaceful name, calling others to this obedience until the age (as Matthew’s gospel puts it) is consummated (a cool old-fashioned word).

So, Creation, the Great Commission and finally The Grace… a word that defines us as a people of peace as we gather this morning. Paul says, ‘live in peace’ (kia tau in Māori) and the God of love and peace will be with you (kia tau, ki a tātou katoa).

And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the community (lit) of the Holy Spirit be with you.

In short, the God who washes us, who launches on a voyage towards others who are different, is also the God who forms us in community. This is the Trinity of God in whom we live and move, this is the singular mystery behind all things.