Before the Beginning - June 3, 2007
Trinity SundayProverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31
Today, all around the globe, preachers will step up to a microphone, or climb into a pulpit, or simply stand in the center of a circle of listeners and try to solve a puzzle that can’t be solved. It can’t be done, you see. And yet…today we will try to do it.
Some of us will do it because the calendar says we will. Some of us will do it because we just love puzzles. Some of us will do it just because it is part of the job, and some of us will do it because we love a good mystery. All of us will try, and fail.
So don’t feel bad if on the way home you say to whomever is riding in the car with you, “She really didn’t explain it very well. I still don’t get it.” It’s okay, really.
Some will bring water into the pulpit, some will bring an apple, some will even crack an egg—crack an egg, right in church! They will do those things to try to demonstrate to those they love and care for how the different physical properties of those substances are how we can remember the mystery of the trinity. I will not try those things, because I don’t really think the Bible usually needs props. Which leads me to another thing: this puzzle we are all trying to solve, isn’t even in the Bible! There are lots of puzzles in the Bible, if you don’t believe me, read some parables and see for yourself. But 1+1+1=3 isn’t one of them.
Since I know that I’m going to fail to solve that puzzle today to anyone’s satisfaction, I’m going all in and even using as my text a book of the Bible I’ve never even preached on before. What I learned about the book of Proverbs in preparing for this sermon is this: it is a book of what we refer to as wisdom literature. In fact, the main character, the one from whom all of the knowledge emanates in this book is a character named Wisdom.
Wisdom’s job is to pass down teachings fit for a Jewish parent to pass along to child about to go off on his own in the world. It is a sort of WWMD: “What Would Moses Do?”
Wisdom is uniquely qualified to pass along this truth you see because according to Proverbs wisdom has been around forever. Longer than forever, actually. Wisdom has seen it all—been there, done that, invented the t-shirt.
One of my favorite memories of seminary—the one that still makes this Bible geek laugh—is a memory of my first day of Old Testament Exegesis. (If I’ve told you this story before, please be patient in hearing it again.)
To take OT Exegesis, you must first have some basic understanding of Hebrew, so when I took it, I had about two semester’s worth of beginning Hebrew under my belt, which is not very much, but about the same amount that my classmates had.
The professor took it easy on us, starting us with a very familiar verse: Genesis 1:1. We had all translated Genesis 1:1 in Hebrew class before, so we thought we understood it pretty well. We all read out loud:
The professor looked up. “Who would like to translate? Twenty hands shot into the air. Those of us sitting nearest the professor were instantly transported back to fourth grade, when showing off for the teacher was very important. “Pick me, pick me!” we mouthed, hoping to get the easy one, therefore being relieved of the burden of having to translate later that morning when the verses would get harder.
My friend Mike got chosen. “Brown noser.” I thought to myself. Mike started out confidently… “Let’s see, ‘In the beginning…God created the heavens and the earth.’”
Nice. The rest of us just sat there, envious that he had taken the one easy verse in the Hebrew Scriptures. The professor took a long, studious look at my friend Mike, then opened his mouth. “I don’t think so.” Was all he said.
The room exploded in nervous chuckles. “Um, excuse me, Bob, what do you mean?”
The professor went on to explain that a more faithful translation of the word bereshith (the word often translated as “in the beginning”) would be something like this, “While all of this was going on…”
The students just sat there scratching our heads for a moment. While what, exactly, was going on? Nobody wanted to really ask Bob, our trusted professor, what he meant. We were all still pondering the idea that something was going on before the beginning. If the beginning of creation was not the point, what was?
I’ve been having an e-mail conversation this week with my Old Testament professor, because I needed to be reminded of the point of that word bere’shith. The meaning of the phrase that we translate “In the beginning” might faithfully be considered dependant on what happens next: God speaks.
Okay. Deep breath. What does this have to do with the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost that we praise in our Doxology? (Stay with me, I’m getting to that.) The way that we express the trinity actually came out of discussions—church councils—hundreds of years ago. It was very important in the ancient church for there to be some kind of understanding of the relationship of the three persons of the God head. Tradition hung on that understanding. Religion was at stake. Entire branches of the church were poised to split—and did—over a consensus understanding of the Trinity, or lack of one.
As you know, I was at the general assembly last year, and a report titled “The Trinity: God’s Love Overflowing” was presented and approved. To me that sounds like a fairly non-threatening title for a paper which discusses something that Christians have been discussing for over a thousand years. The Trinity work group met over a five-year period and wrote up a paper exploring the understanding of the Presbyterian church of the Trinity, based on our theology, our polity, and rooted in Scripture.
Some people found the paper to be extremely disturbing in its inclusion of images for the Trinity other than Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The way some people have reacted, you would think that the paper endorses Larry, Moe and Curly as the appropriate metaphor. To me that kind of reaction misses the point entirely.
What is the point? God’s love overflowing. We have choices. We can worry about the three legs of the triangle, or we can concentrate on what happens between the lines, in the center of it all. We can try to pinpoint the moment of creation, counting back generations until we get to Adam and Eve (which some museum curators in Kentucky have done, but that’s a different sermon) or we can focus on what was going on before the beginning. We can try to make reality fit into what we can sense for ourselves, what we can see, touch taste, smell, or remember, or we can marvel in awe and wonder at the mystery of a loving God in overflowing relationship that touches every aspect of our very lives, and has since before creation. God spoke.
I’ve been thinking this week about the Zen koan that goes something like this: “What did your face look like before your parents were born?” In my very limited understand of Zen, I believe that this unanswerable question serves to cause the person considering it to pause and remember their place in the grand scheme of things. For the Christian, imagining a never-ending God of three in one with no beginning and no end also causes us to pause and wonder. For us the Psalm helps us remember. Someone said it like this:
“We are nothing in comparison with the grandeur and longevity of it all. We are specks in the context of time and history and creation
At the same time, we are of absolute importance to God. The same God that stitched the iridescent feathers onto the littlest hummingbird fashioned a pair of eyelashes for each human baby. The God that painted stripes on the zebra decorated human beings in a wide assortment of shades. The God that spoke the universe into existence breathed life into a clump of dirt. That same God gave us language and emotions and a soul, crowning us with glory and honor. And, as if none of that was enough, God stooped down onto the earth and clothed himself with flesh and bones. As Hildegard of Bingen reminds us, the earth "forms not only the basic raw material for humankind, but also the substance of the incarnation of God's son." We have been created just a little lower than God.”
God spoke; everything else that happened was dependent on that. God is in relationship. The Trinity reminds us of that. God, the three in one—whether we refer to God as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Earthbearer, Midwife and Womb, or the favorite of many irreverent clergy: Old Guy, Junior, and Spook—that God who created us a little lower that Godself, calls into relationship, longs for us to embrace the mystery of the divine—even the parts we can’t quite understand. And invites us to this table to see, taste and touch and know that God is good today, tomorrow, and from before the beginning.
Trinity will happen again, in about another year. I won’t be able to fully explain it then, either. But I hope we’ll all be here in this place where we explore the divine together. I know God will.
Thanks be to God!
