June 4, 2023

Trinity Sunday - Year A

Epiphany, Winnipeg

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

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

First, a Hebrew lesson. Repeat after me: Tohu. Webohu. The words are right, but my pronunciation’s a little off, I’m sure, but do it again. Tohu. Webohu. Tohu Webohu. You know what that means? Our reading from Genesis translates it “a formless void.” In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth the earth was tohu webohu. It was chaos. Pointless. In vain. Desolate. There was something there, but it was chaos.

Hebrew lesson part two: Repeat after me: Tehoma. This means something like “watery chaos”. Our reading from Genesis goes on and says that darkness covered the face of the deep, or to put our newfound Hebrew knowledge to good use we could say that darkness covered the face of tehoma. Darkness covered the watery chaos. So repeat after me again: Tohu webohu. Tehoma. In the beginning the earth was Tohu Webohu, and darkness covered the face of Tehoma. It has a kind of poetic bounce to it, doesn’t it?

When you read this creation story from Genesis remember this: It’s not a history lesson or a biology class, it’s poetry. It’s beautiful language about a God who takes chaos and emptiness and desolation and makes something of it.

Hebrew lesson number three: Repeat after me. Tov. That’s the word that gets translated “Good.” God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very Tov. Very good. Beautiful. This creation story isn’t about a God who makes everything out of nothing. This is about a God who makes goodness and beauty out of chaos.

If we were the first people to hear this story, say twenty six or twenty seven hundred years ago, we would be looking back on the last seventy or so years of our life as years of chaos. The Babylonians had taken over our land, and taken so many of us away to live in exile far away from home, and left our cities and our temple and our hopes and our home in ruins. And now we might soon be heading home again, but we’re going home to rubble and not much left and chaos.

Then some writers and poets would tell us this story about God who takes chaos and desolation and makes beauty out of it, and we would be assured once more that we don’t need to be afraid of the chaos because God makes beauty out of chaos.

If we were the most recent people to hear this story, we would be hearing it about ten minutes ago in a church in Winnipeg on Dalhousie Drive just east of Pembina. Our lives might seem all orderly and together, but we know something about chaos too. Each of us knows what just doesn’t fit together in our own lives, or what’s changing too much too soon, or what’s just too painful or worrying. What is there going on in you that’s empty, or that feels kind of desolate, or chaotic? We know chaos or emptiness ourselves….and God takes chaos and makes beauty.

We look beyond ourselves too and we see what’s going on around us, and we see chaos and emptimess there. In politics or in librairies or school board meetings, or in wildfires and climate and political climates that just seem to be getting nastier all the time. Sometimes it’s like there are just these two sides, and between us is an empty gap. Like in Genesis. The earth is a formless void.

And then a wind from God moves over the face of the deep, and we hear this story again about our God who takes chaos and makes beauty and says, “This is good.”

Notice that God doesn’t look at what has been made at the end of the days and say, “Well, we got that straightened out, didn’t we?” Tamed it and made it manageable. No - in this creation story God does not make order and predictability. God makes something good. Beautiful. Pleasant. Full. Instead, God makes meadows with wildflowers that don’t just follow a pattern but they explode into riots of colour and smell for a few weeks every year. God makes a world where Johny Jumpups keep showing up on my lawn and don’t they look great? Clover too. And dandelions that are not orderly but are beautiful if only we could stop calling them weeds. God makes that wild variety and we make lawns. Green. Only grass. But God keeps on stubbornly making beauty, even when we maybe just want to create order.

It happens in all kinds of ways. Right about now people are starting to gather downtown for the Pride Parade. I’m guessing that we in this room are of a variety of minds about Pride Parades. I know people and maybe you do and maybe it’s you who are supportive and all but who just don’t like the idea of a pride parade. It’s too weird and can’t everybody just be OK but keep quiet too?

I know people who are just flat out against anything having to with L, G, B, T, or Q in any form at all, and I have old friends, or maybe more honestly former friends who are just like that and we don’t talk to each other any more. We can’t stand the chaos of our disagreement. I know people and maybe you do too and maybe it’s you who think that a Pride Parade is a great thing, because when there’s a Pride Parade you or your grandkid or your mom or dad or uncle or niece or best friend can feel like they belong and it’s OK and the streets will be lined with people waving flags and cheering and saying that it’s OK that they’re the way they are; that you’re the way you are.

Then this story of creation tells of a God who takes chaos – even the chaos of our disagreeing or our conflict or our fears – and makes beauty instead. Not necessarily order. Maybe not even agreement. But beauty. Something God will look at and say, “This is good.” This is good, what I made out of their disagreement and their chaos and their strained relationships.

God takes chaos and makes something beautiful of it. It’s just what God does. God makes beauty out of chaos all through the story of our faith: When the waters of the flood dry up, when the people of Israel are set free from slavery, when the exiles get to come home. It happens when God beathes over the empty abyss of the tomb and raises Jesus from the dead; it happens when the Spirit is poured out on the disciples at Pentecost, when all those varieties of language remain, but people can understand one another in new ways.

It happens when Jesus meets his disciples on a mountainside, like we heard today. They themselves are kind of a mixed up bunch. They come from a variety of backgrounds; some are honest hard workers and some are kind of shady characters. They show very little evidence of ever understanding what Jesus was up to. They argued with each other about which of them was greatest and they didn’t like kids and they were scared and most of them ran away when Jesus was crucified. And now they’re probably just still confused and lost because you don’t just make sense of someone being raised from the dead overnight.

But Jesus takes this bunch, God takes this bunch, and makes something of them, even if they still don’t really know what’s going on. And he says, “Go and make disciples, OK? Baptize them. That’s how you make disciples. Teach them everything I taught you even if you didn’t get it at the time or still don’t. Teach them to be generous, to respond to violence with peace, to pray, to enjoy having kids around, to love God and love their neighbours, to eat together, to share bread and wine, to know that God is with them.” That’s how you make disciples.

And so they made disciples. And here we are. They made us. Baptized us, taught us all that stuff that Jesus taught. A weird bunch. Even chaotic? We come from all kinds of backgrounds, some reputable and some …shady Maybe? I won’t tell. We don’t agree on everything and sometimes we argue about it all, we do seem to like eating together so that’s good, and we share bread and wine together. We don’t always understand what’s going on in our lives, or in the world, or even in the church. We don’t always understand each other, we don’t always understand much. But God makes beauty out of us. God looks at the whole church – and we’re caught up in that too – and God says, “You know, that’s good. It’s Tov! They might have thought it’s tohu webohu and tehoma, but I say it’s Tov! It’s good. It’s very good.” And then God calls us to make disciples too. Maybe not to knock on doors or holler on street corners, but to do things like baptize and teach, or just to live as though it’s true that God takes what seems like chaos, and God makes beauty out of it. God makes “this is good.”

That’s the God we know on this Trinity Sunday. There’s the one who takes the formless void and that watery deep and makes the beauty we see all around us. There’s the one who takes flesh in the world, who comes into the world to be among us, even to enter our chaos and death and to be raised up to life, to be beauty rising from chaos. There’s the one whose breath breathes over us and makes a people of us, makes something beautiful, good, Tov, of us together. That’s who God is. The one who takes chaos and makes beauty. AMEN