Trinity Sunday Genesis 1:1 – 2: 4a

Sunday, May 18, 2008 2 Corinthians 13: 11 – 13

The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 28: 16 – 20

“God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”

Genesis 2:31

One of the many delights I discovered traveling through Italy some years ago, was watching the street artists paint. Amidst the tourists and shops, these artists seemed oblivious to the hustle and bustle around them, intent on re-creating the façade of a building replete with window boxes bursting with geraniums or narrow canals moving slowly beneath bridges dripping with wisteria. With palate in hand, they would paint a bit and then look over the canvass to the scene beyond, bringing forth onto the canvass what they were seeing. As I stood behind one artist and looked out at what he was seeing and then what he was painting, I saw newness, not an exact duplication of the scene, like a camera might capture, but a unique creation that looked like and also unlike the scene he was painting. His painting was unique and no other artist would capture the same scene in exactly the same way.

God’s work of creation, which we just heard from Genesis, is like the work of an artist. God speaks and creation is brought forth, from God and by God because God simply wanted to create. So God creates abundantly and generously. God creates light and dark, the sun and the moon, the earth and the seas, plants, fruit tress and all manner of vegetation, and “swarms” of living creatures – birds and buffalo and guinea pigs and black ants and scorpions and kangaroos and hyenas and orangutans – an unimaginable cacophony of life. And then God creates us, perhaps the oddest of all of God’s creations. Finally, God rests. The apex of creation, we learn today, is not the creation of human being, but the final Sabbath rest of God on the seventh day, when God is, as all artists are wont to do, simply enjoying that which God has made.

The story of creation is a story about God who brings forth newness simply because God wants to. Creation, in the words of some theologians, is better called, not a work of God, but the “play” of God. God simply wants to be with that which is not God, and so God “creates.” God did not create because God needed to or had to; God created because God wanted to. God creates that which is not God because God desires to be with rather than without. God does not want to be alone.

Today is Trinity Sunday, a day when we ponder the mystery of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is our affirmation that how God acts mirrors who God is by nature. God acts by bringing forth creation, newness, that which is not God. This act of creation mirrors God’s own being; God exists as a relationship between God as Father and God as Son, bound together by the Holy Spirit, a communion of love in which God as Father is forever “bringing forth” the Son, “begetting” the Son in the words of the Nicene Creed. And like the work of an artist, the Son is the perfect expression of the Father but, like a painter and his painting, we affirm a distinction between Father and Son within God’s own being. God is a relationship of love, like that of an artist and the artist’s creation, an intimate relationship of mutual delight.

“Just as the love of God is freely expressed and shared in intertrinitarian community,” writes theologian Daniel Migliore, “so in the act of creation God brings forth in love a world of free creatures that bear the mark of divine activity.” God freely creates a world of free creatures, bringing forth like an artist, Migliore notes, “something really different from themselves yet with their own image stamped upon it.”

The story of creation speaks to us of a God who desires communion with what is other than God, different from God. God’s way of being God, God as Trinity, received renewed attention early in the twentieth century when Protestant theologian Karl Barth made the doctrine of the Trinity the ground of his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics – six million words written over thirty-five years. For Barth, God’s way of being God tells us, among other things, the way to be human.

Being human means knowing ourselves not only as free agents, but beings that want to be one-of-a-kind particular persons and not just one human being among many. I do not want to live my life believing I am just a random cosmic combination of DNA or worse, perhaps, a clone of someone else who could just take my place and I would never be missed! To be human means we can and do recognize that yes, indeed, we are human, but no, thank you very much, I am not like every other human being.

What Barth knew and what we so often forget, is that none of us is anything special all by ourselves. All by ourselves, we are no different from any other human being. We all are made of flesh and blood, have a heart and a brain, and walk upright if we are able. Alone among the rest of God’s creatures, that’s about all we can say about ourselves.

What makes us the unique characters we so long to be is others. Only when we are in relationship with someone who is not like us do we come to know ourselves as particular persons, joined to one another because we all look like human beings but unlike one another because God created us that way. Remember, God just did not stop with gold fish but brought forth tiger sharks and anteaters and laughing hyenas and you and me. If nothing else, God has a sense of humor!

We discover our irreplaceabiliy, our uniqueness, our one-of-a-kindness in relationship, in relationships of mutuality, in which the more you become what God created you to be, the more I do, too. Most of the time, we only experience this kind of mutual delight in being with someone who is not like us and we are glad for it, in our most intimate relationships, relationships of love in which, no one could ever take the place of our beloved. God wishes we might expand our horizons.

For Barth, in order for there to be an “I” there must be a “you.” Relationship presumes difference, creating the opportunity to be an “I” within the vast sea of humanity. “I” am not “you” and “you” are not “me” and all of this is what God intends. Loving you ought to make you more “you.” Loving you ought not to make “you” more like “me.”

And therein is the rub. Because I love myself first and probably best. And I wish you could become like me. Because then you would be easy to love because you would be me.

But the world would be a dreary place indeed if the world was peopled with all “me’s.” At a minimum, as most of you know, the world, if I shared this world with people just like me, would never know a thing about music or singing, and probably would never be able to build anything like a car or a train track. And the world would not eat as well as the world does, because I have not a clue how to tend a vegetable garden nor what to do with the vegetables once they appear. And the world probably would never know the thrill of riding on a roller coaster, because, yup, you got it, I hate roller coasters.

On the other hand, the world would be a place of beauty with flowers growing everywhere and little kids laughing up a storm. Everybody would have a surprise party to celebrate their birthday and no one would die alone. And everyone, simply everyone, would have a passion for this God we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.