|
First
Reading
|
Psalm |
Epistle |
Gospel |
| Genesis 1:1–2:4a |
|
2 Corinthians 13:11–13
|
Matthew 28:16–20 |
The ancient sagas about creation are all about relationships. The plant world is related to the animal world. The animal world is related to the human world. The human world is not only related to both the animal and plant world, but also to God. Indeed, humanity is called by God to be a faithful guardian of all living things and creatures of earth. The Genesis accounts are different from some other creation stories that suggest creation was a result of conflict and dissention, and the mess that we are in now is pretty much our fate. The Genesis accounts say that God's intent was out of love and that right relationships would produce harmony and growth. God intended the relationships of creation to be good.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus approves the response of a scholar who repeats the words of the rabbi Gamaliel who claimed that he could sum up all of the Law of the Bible by standing on one foot: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, and all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus was emphasizing that the Law is built on relationships, both inwardly and outwardly. If we let God into only one part of our life and no other, we don't have a full relationship with God. If we exclude others from the offer of God's grace and from our lives, our relationship with both God and our neighbors is incomplete and suffers.
It should not be surprising that the church has named a Sunday "Trinity Sunday" so that we will never forget that God is really understood (as much as we are able to understand God) in terms of a broad spectrum of diverse relationships. We get into serious problems when we emphasize the attribute of one aspect of God to the detriment or neglect of others. That is why the ways other cultures express their revelations of God can truly enrich and expand the revelations we receive and learn from God. God expects ever broader and greater things from us because God is a great and ever expansive God who is always beyond the bounds of our imagination.
We live in an age when the nature of families is being re-defined. History tells us this has happened before, though not in this way and not as rapidly. People of faith can be of real help in this process. This change is not something to fear or ignore, but rather to ask how can new family structures encourage and nurture healthy and non-exploitive living.
The Bible makes it quite clear. In the relationship among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or God the creator, God the redeemer, and God the sustainer, or any other way of expressing the Trinity, there is no jealousy or in-fighting, of blaming the others. All three help and compliment the others, and at different times and in different ways, testify to the depth and astuteness of God's grace. The nature of the relationship that we call the Trinity is always healing, self-correcting and balancing. It seeks not to split, fracture, or aggrandize, but to unify and integrate. It is not selfish. It calls forth a harvest of goodness and kindness. Aren't these the qualities we want for our own families?
The nature of the Trinity helps protects the basic definition of the church. The church is universal not because its members are expected to express things exactly the same way and always to think as a homogenous family, it is universal because it understands itself as one related family encompassing all its differences and strangeness. Hence the risen Jesus does not say, "Stay here and make disciples just like yourselves," but "go and make disciples of all nations, and wherever you travel in new territory, you will discover that I am there with you, too."
And
I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
