Genesis 1:1-2:4a; (Matthew 28:16-20)
Trinity and Creation: Unflattening God
James Sledge June 19, 2011, Trinity Sunday
On Trinity Sunday I’m reminded of something my favorite Theology professor, Doug Ottati said a number of times. “Functionally, most of us are Unitarians.” He wasn’t talking about what we “believe,” but how we actually conceive of God. We may sing “God in three persons, blessed Trinity,” we tend to reduce God to one of those persons.
Since it’s a trinity, there are at least three possibilities. Some folks become Unitarians of the Spirit. Quakers tend in this direction. For such folks, God is conceived as Spirit.
Others go with a Unitarianism of the Son. For them, God is Jesus. Their prayers are addressed to Jesus, and his name is invoked repeatedly in these prayers.
But among Presbyterians, and probably most mainline Protestants, the hands-down favorite is Unitarianism of the Father. God is Father. Some pray to “ Father God.” It isn’t that Jesus or the Spirit are discounted. They are important, but they are junior partners. The Father is God and, Jesus and the Spirit are derivative in some way.
This Unitarian tendency is understandable. The Trinity is profoundly unpictureable. But I think this is the Trinity’s true genius.
It insists on a God beyond our ability to fully picture or understand, a God who will not easily be manipulated or managed for our own purposes.One of the fundamental problems with religion is that it wants to manage God and God’s blessings. Religion tells you what you need to do or believe in order to get on God’s good side, to be saved, to get rich, to go to heaven, and so on. But this attempt to manage God requires flattening God into something manageable. It requires reducing God to something more like us, who conforms to our ideas and ways of seeing the world.
This flattening, managing tendency impacts how people handle passages such as the Creation account we heard this morning. Some hear straightforward history and science. Others hear a mythic description of the grand ordering of the cosmos. But in both cases, the story is often slotted into preconceived notions about God and flattened so that it fits whatever religious management strategies we prefer. Rarely is the story allowed to do its deep, theological work of opening us to a God who is, finally, beyond our conception.
The opening of Genesis is epic poetry, liturgy and praise, having more in common with the Psalms than with history, science, myth or philosophy. And contrary to religious management tendencies that imagine it written for our use, it is addressed to Hebrew exiles in Babylon, at a moment of extreme crisis. The promises of Yahweh their God seem to have failed. The Babylonian gods have proved mightier. Jerusalem and God’s Temple lay in ruins; God’s chosen people are captives. Their very survival as a people is threatened, and their understandings of their God and their relationship to that God have been shattered.
In the midst of this crisis, the Israelites care nothing of how long it took for the world to be created, how old it is, or how it is ordered or structured. What they need is a new and expanded understanding of God, of God’s relationship to Creation and to them.
The poem seeks to provide that. And while it shares elements common to the creation myths of Babylon and other Near Eastern peoples, those elements are dramatically recast to give a remarkable, new picture of God. This God looks vastly different from typical, Near Eastern gods resembling human rulers and potentates. This God does not need Creation or feed on its produce. This God is no local deity, but a God who speaks into being the vast cosmos that is the object of God’s care and delight. Over and over the poem repeats the refrain, And God saw that it was good. The “good” here is not a utilitarian good. This is an aesthetic good. God saw that it was grand, glorious, wonderful, beautiful. This wonderful creation abounds with the blessing and fertility God speaks as creation joyfully responds to its Creator.
Finally God creates humans. They are spoken into existence just like the rest of creation, but there is something different here. Humanity bears the image of God. The language is odd, and it gets mangled in translation. Humanity is spoken of in the singular. So God created the human in his image. In the image of God he created him (her, it). But then the poem shifts to the plural. Male and female God created them. Whatever this image of God is about it isn’t about maleness or femaleness. God’s image applies to the human creature. But sexual diversity exists within the creatures.
Over the centuries there has been much debate about where in humanity the image of God resides; reason, language, and self-awareness are all suggested. But the poem speaks of none of these, only of dominion over the earth, authority over all God has spoken into being.
And here those religious management tendencies kick in. People imagine creation as ours to do with what we will, to bend to our will, to exploit, little more than a resource at our disposal. But this requires flattening God back into a human looking ruler who exercises dominion and authority as we humans do. But the God pictured in the poem does not coerce or exploit. This God only speaks, calls, and blesses.
And on this Trinity Sunday, we also hear Jesus, God the Son, say, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” But consider the way Jesus exercises authority; a gentle grace that beckons the hungry and thirsty to come to him; a patient grace that invites us to discover our true humanity in the ways he lives and teaches. Here truly is the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Here is the Old Testament image for God and for Israel’s kings. God’s exercises dominion and authority as a caring shepherd.
But if God’s understanding of authority is surprising, perhaps the most striking and radical element of the Creation poem is Sabbath. Sabbath evolved into a day of worship and a rule to follow, but here Sabbath is simply about rest. God rests – not because God is tired or worn out, but because things are complete. This God who rules by gracious invitation exhibits no anxieties that creation will spiral out of control. Which would seem to say to us made in God’s image that the world will not come apart if we do not exert maximum effort 24/7. Creation is safely in God’s hands and we are free truly to rest.[1]
Sabbath is a radical idea in our anxious world where endless striving is the preferred way. Sabbath blurs the distinctions between rich and poor, powerful and powerless. In the true rest of Sabbath, no one lords over another; no one competes with another; no one seeks advantage over another. All are at peace because all are at rest.
“Not possible,” we say. And we flatten God back into a manageable deity who fits into our image of how the world should work, a god who plays by the world’s rules, a god who blesses our plans and schemes rather than inviting the world into the wonderful, new possibilities of God’s dominion and authority.
Trinity. God is Spirit. God is Son. God is Father. God is all of these which means that God cannot be reduced to any of these, nor flattened into a generic go we carry around in our pockets to use as we see fit. God is too big, too beyond our grasp, too wonderful; too grand, beautiful, and glorious for us to do anything other than stand in awe, to lose ourselves in worship and praise. And finally, to give thanks that Jesus invites us, and the Spirit fits us, to enter into this unpictureable relationship that is the Trinity.
Thanks be to the Triune God!
[1] See Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982) pp. 35-36.
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