Sunday, June 15, 2014 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

Trinity Sunday Sermon

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 146
John 1:1–5, 14
Genesis 1 (selected verses)

In mystery and grandeur
we see the face of God.

In earthiness and the ordinary
we know the love of Christ.

In heights and depths and life and death
the Spirit of God is moving among us.

Michael Shaw and Paul Indwood
“Litany of the Spirit”

It was on Wednesday afternoon when I most recently decided I had lost my preaching mind. A few weeks ago, when I arrived for the first time in May, preaching this poetry of God’s creative activity in Genesis 1 seemed like such a grand idea. And then I came back to Chicago for good on Sunday night and on Tuesday, I made myself lift my head above the busyness of reentry to pay attention to the world.

Here is a sampling of what I found:

Tuesday: Another school shooting in Oregon, increasing the total number of school shootings to seventy-four since Sandy Hook in 2012.

Also on Tuesday: News breaks that according to US Customs and Border Protection, in the past eight months, agents have apprehended about 47,000 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the border from Mexico into Texas. They do not run from authorities but rather walk up to them due to the desperation to get away from the violence in their own countries.

Then on Wednesday: Headline from the Washington Post: “5 Reasons Why Iraq May Get Worse.” We all now know that was an understatement.

And I also knew that on Thursday morning, Sam Evans, John Vest, Joyce Shin, and I would be meeting with representatives from the American Jewish Council because they are concerned about the debate and votes about divestment that will be taking place this coming week at our denomination’s General Assembly meeting. Even before the gavel sounded yesterday afternoon to begin the meeting, the dissension was already setting people on edge—people who hold a variety of perspectives about the issue of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict—on edge, nonetheless.

So yes, it was Wednesday afternoon when I decided that I had lost my preaching mind. Why on earth would I choose to preach the poetry of God’s good creative activity in the face of what so often feels like destructive or despairing chaos? Why on earth would we want to hear again and again “Let it be, and it was so, and God saw that it was good” when as soon as we lift our heads, everything around us seems to shout otherwise.

Let it be . . . and it was so . . . and God saw that it was good.
Shootings, violence, crisis, dissension, chaos.

When we look at these seemingly incongruent portraits of creation and creatureliness, other than assuming we have lost our preaching minds, what are we to do? How are we to live in this tension?

We could take the approach that tends to get broadcast as the approach of faith: “It is all God’s will,” we can say. God created the world good and we have royally messed it up and this is what we get in return. God, our cosmic scorekeeper, is up there with a big red pen taking notes and taking names. When you get too many checks in the “Unfaithful” column, God lets all hell break loose and we deserve it. Global warming, increasing war, senseless violence—it is all God’s punishment for our unfaithfulness.

But lest I paint this response too broadly with the bawdy shades of caricature, we do have this portrait of God in some of our scripture. Throughout the books of Deuteronomy and Judges, as well as in some of the prophets, we do indeed see our spiritual ancestors interpreting their history of either being the winners or the losers as God’s firsthand orchestrated plan. When our spiritual ancestors are faithful and do not worship other gods, then God the Creator delivers them and leads them into victory. But when they are unfaithful and forget who and whose they are, then God lets the Babylonians have at them, or the Assyrians, or any of the other enemies that surrounded their tender tradition.

But it is not just the ancient Israelites who assumed God works this way. I clearly remember that when my own father was diagnosed with cancer, I immediately took God to court and demanded to know why it had happened to him: he was faithful, he was good, he did not deserve the chaos of cancer (as if anyone ever does). And though you and I are still getting to know each other, I imagine some of you have wrestled with similar questions and perhaps have reached similar conclusions. It must be God’s will, we say. It must be. Some of us cannot make sense of it any other way.

After all, God is all powerful, right? The sovereignty of God is a bedrock understanding of our Reformed theological tradition. God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient: all powerful, present in every place, and all knowing. You see this picture of our Powerful Creative God in our text from Genesis. God is so powerful that God creates by speaking. God speaks a word, and it is so. That, my friends, is power.

And so, when we look at the seemingly incongruent pictures of the world as drawn by Genesis 1 alongside the world as drawn by the front pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, we can certainly conclude that everything that seems to contradict creation’s goodness must be God’s judgment on our unfaithfulness. We can make that conclusion. We can back it up with some scripture. We even might back it up with our own experience.

But what if this creation story reveals for us something else? What if this creation story, held up alongside our Gospel passage from John, has a different sermon to preach for us this day? Listen: “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.” Did you hear it? Did you hear when and where God’s creative activity first started to take shape? Right smack dab in the middle of the chaos.

In the beginning, God took the formless void, the watery abyss, the stuff of chaos, and created the heavens and the earth. In the middle of chaos, in the middle of the void, in the middle of that deep darkness and abyss, God began to create and make something new. Notice, God did not first destroy the chaos, blowing it to smithereens. Instead, precisely in the middle of the chaos, God started to create, calling it all good, good, good, good, good, good, very good. It is a strange use of power, if you ask me. Instead of destroying chaos, instead of banishing it forever, God works with and creates something new out of it.

Now, keep listening. “Then God said ‘Let there be light.’” And God said “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters.” And God said “Let the waters be gathered together and let dry land appear.” I could keep going, but I imagine you hear the repetition. Let, Let, Let. Each time God creates, God uses this strangely invitational language. I mean, it is odd, isn’t it?

God could have just simply worked independently and in a way that is domineering. That is how some of the powerful get things done, right? But that is not how God seems to work with creation. The way the text reads, you get this picture of a Creator who chooses both to initiate the creative process and also to invite into the creative process. You get this picture of a Creator who chooses to invite that which is created into the ongoing work of creation (Terrence E. Fretheim, “Creation in Community: Faith and the Environment,” published in Creation on the Cross). “Let the earth put forth vegetation. Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures.” There is this interesting partnership going on. But our all-powerful, sovereign God could have done it very differently. God could have worked on and over creation. Yet according to the poetry of this scripture, God chose to work with and in.

From just these two closer treatments of our text, we start to get a picture of a Creator God who uses power very differently than we might first assume, don’t we? From just these two closer readings of the poetry of our creation story, we see a God who chooses to use power to invite rather than to coerce. A God who chooses to work within the chaos, within the created world, rather than on and without (Fretheim, “Creation Community”). It is an odd display of power and control, don’t you think? Genesis 1 offers us a picture of God as a creator who purposefully chooses not to act alone but only in relationship—even in relationship with us. The text gives us this strange glimpse of a God who chooses divine vulnerability by involving those who are finite, those who are creature, into the whole process.

But honestly, it fits! For “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word was in the beginning with God. . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” As people who follow Christ, we know it intuitively, don’t we, that God’s definition and use of power has always differed drastically from our own? A mentor of mine puts it this way: “In Jesus, God looks like a struggling underachiever. Jesus’ contemporaries were hoping for a more triumphant messiah. . . . They were waiting for a messiah who would show off God’s stuff. Yet Jesus turns out to be a crucified disappointment. The first century, like the twenty-first century, expected deity to triumph through power not vulnerability” (Jimmie D. Johnson, “All Are Chosen,” First Presbyterian Church in Waco, Texas; see “Notes” below). Indeed, in the twenty-first century, perhaps like the first century, we expect our God to destroy the chaos, not work within it.

But looking at both Genesis 1 and John 1, we begin to see our God does not work that way. In Genesis 1, we see a God who freely loves so much that God is willing to limit God’s own power over creation in order to invite active participation from that which has been created. And in John 1, we first start to hear the proclamation that the Word becoming flesh, fully revealed in a manger and on a cross, is the central revelation of who God is and how God chooses to be our God. In both Genesis 1 and John 1, we see a God who freely loves so much that God is willing to be vulnerable and risk suffering.

Perhaps the sermon that Genesis 1 and John 1 preach to us this day is that indeed our God is all-powerful. One who can bring about creation with a word and it is so. One who can heal and transform and raise from the dead. One who is both the Alpha and the Omega. But Genesis 1 and John 1 also preach to us that our God is a God who chose from before the beginning to become weak in power in order to show us the strength of love. A God who, in both the poetry of the creation story and most fully in Jesus Christ, subverted the image of an all-powerful God—a God above and beyond creation and human suffering—revealing instead a God who invites and works with and even suffers and dies in order to show us, fallible creatures, the overwhelming love God has for us and for all of creation, perhaps hoping that one day we might lean into it and trust and participate in God’s work of making things new, even on the days when it seems like we have lost our preaching minds and cannot make sense of anything anymore.

And sisters and brothers, I know that even the sermons that Genesis 1 and John 1 preach to us this day do not clean up the mess of suffering. Genesis 1 and John 1 do not take the violence and the outbreak of war and the suffering of children and the cancer and make any of it OK. Because it is not OK. And I certainly cannot do that either.

But I do believe God is as good as Jesus said and that the creation God made and is still making is good too. And I do believe God will never tire of suffering with and through us until that day when there is no more suffering and all is well, when all tears are wiped away, including the tears of our all-powerful Creative Triune God, whose heart is always the first to break.

But until that day comes and we finally see clearly, Genesis 1 and John 1 can remind us that in the middle of the chaos, God is still at work. In the middle of the suffering, God is still at work. In the middle of our world’s craziness, God is still at work. And perhaps for those of us who walk through life holding scripture in one hand and the newspaper in the other, on this day perhaps that proclamation shall be enough. Knowing that God is still actively at work creating and recreating and inviting us into it all shall be enough . . . at least for now.

Notes
For the quote on expecting deity to triumph through power not vulnerability, thanks, Dad! The quote is found in “All Are Chosen,” by the Reverend Dr. Jimmie D. Johnson of First Presbyterian Church in Waco, Texas. He is the one who first introduced me to the theological concept of divine vulnerability and opened up for me the theological work of William Placher and Narratives of a Vulnerable God. Happy Father’s Day, Dad!