The Holy Trinity

May 18, 2008

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The reading is from the book of Genesis, chapter one and to chapter two, verse four. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…”

The Book of Genesis tells us that God is imaginative. “In the beginning when God created . . .” does not refer to some point in time. The beginning is before time. Everything exists only in potential, but nothing has been given shape or distinction yet. Light and dark have not yet been divided. Everything is perfectly one, without division or distinction, without diversity, or individuality, or uniqueness. Everything is without form and is void. It is everything and nothing at the same time, for everything all at once looks an awful lot like nothing. And nothing, just as white is all the colors of the spectrum at once, nothing is everything, in potentiality. So it is in the beginning, just before time, just before creation.

Then something happens. What is it? God begins to imagine. God begins to imagine a cosmos, and as God imagines a cosmos things appear. Light appears. Then space is made by separating things: water from water, water from land, light from dark, sun from moon and other stars. Life is given in the sea and then on land. Then finally, late in the process, God creates the human. Male and female, God makes the human. Male and female together, it says, are the image of God.

Christians have argued over what it means to be in God’s image. So if I were to ask you, “What is it about you that is God’s image?” what would you say, really? What is it about you that is God’s image? Is it free will? That has been taught. Could it be the color of one’s skin? That’s been suggested. Is it our rationality? That’s been suggested, too. Is it one’s gender? That’s a popular answer, historically.

But all attempts to understand what it is about us that is a reflection of God miss, I believe, the entire point. More than that, decisions people have made about what aspects of humanity are more spiritual than others have yielded ideas of superiority and inferiority that hurt people to this day—that the mind is superior to the body, that men are superior to women, that the intellect is superior to the emotion, and so forth.

That we are made in the image of God is not said so that we go off trying to figure out what part of ourselves is closer to divinity than others. When you think about it just for half a second, that notion is absurd. God did not make us with some aspects that are God‑like and some that are not. We are one hundred percent sprung from the imagination of God. That is what it is to be God’s image. God is imaginative, and we are God’s imagination. We are God’s imagination. We are the image God imagined. We are the result of God’s imagination. We are God’s imagination. That means all of us, all of us, in every way. We are all God’s imaginative handiwork, every one of us, every sort of us--every single and sort of human person on face of the planet.

But God’s image, in this sense, is not restricted to the human family. The whole creation, with its every creature, form of life, and entity, is God’s imagination, also. Everything bears God’s image because everything is born of God’s imagination.

All of us are God’s imagination, not just every one of us, but all of each of us. This perhaps is harder to accept. The creation of humans as male and female in nakedness is God’s imagination. The freedom to choose the good and the ill is God’s imagination. Veins, odor, toes, toenails, armpits, hair, intestines, blood, plaque, that which is considered beautiful and that which is not considered beautiful, all of it is God’s imagination. It’s impossible to get outside of God’s imagination. It is impossible to be in any way outside God’s imagination, for God’s imagination is what we are.

God is imaginative, playfully so. Charlie and I last week went to Como Zoo and there we looked at the giraffe, and the giraffe looked at us; and we both thought the other was strange. And we looked at the zebra, and the primates, and the snakes, and the multitude of fish; and they looked back at us, too. In the Psalms it says God made the sea monsters to play with. There is a marvelous, playful quality to the almost infinite diversity in the creation.

But there is also suffering. And what about that? What about a cyclone that kills tens if not hundreds of thousands of people and a government that refuses aid? What about enemies who deny the right of each other to exist? What about a young man that hurls himself into a wood chipper? What about schools poorly built that collapse, killing thousands of children? What about the cost of greed and selfishness? What about the absurd disparity of wealth in our country, not to mention around the world? What about starvation in a world with plenty of food? What about addiction, violence, theft, hatred, bigotry, and every other reason we have to deny our fellow being the same treatment we ourselves would want?

In Genesis, suffering enters the world almost at the very moment of creation. There is the suffering of temptation, the suffering of broken relationships, of fear and mistrust, of cursing, of blaming, and exile—and all in just the first three chapters. Quite early on in the story, Cain kills Abel, and so we have murder, too.

By Chapter 6 in Genesis, God becomes very, very upset. Clearly, this is not turning out the way God had wanted. Genesis tells us that the wickedness among humans had become wide spread, and it says God regretted having made them, and God decides to unmake them. That’s right; to unmake them, all of them—that is, except for Noah and his family. And you know the story. God makes a flood, preserving one family with the hope that they will do better, along with a remnant of animals. But, of course, it doesn’t work out that way; it doesn’t turn out the way God hopes. Noah gets drunk, his sons misbehave, and the same old problems break out in this newly cleansed world.

What is amazing, truly amazing, about this account is that after it all occurs, God repents. That’s right. God repents. Those are the words in Genesis. God repents. God is now sorry that he made the flood and vows never to do it again. God has learned that human existence cannot be cleansed, cannot be perfected, and God stops trying.

Now, this thought might strike us as scandalous, that God repents. God learns from experience that God doesn’t necessarily know everything. But let’s be careful not to read this in search for doctrines about God. Instead, just think about that place you have sometimes come to when you realized that something you are trying to do, something you are trying to get to happen, is either impossible or wrong-headed. Do you know what I mean? You finally realize it is futile to try to change someone you think needs to change, but they won’t, and you stop. You wake up one morning and you realize the good life you have consumed your time and energy pursuing is hollow, and you stop. You come to see that trying to fill and numb your senses addictively to address your pain is futile and harmful, and you seek help. You finally see that your kids are not better off because you work such long hours, and you change. You begin to understand that controlling your environment compulsively is not the path to peace, and you let go a bit.

We are God’s imagination; and we, too, are beings who imagine. What Genesis gives us is a picture of both the comedy and the tragedy of creative imagination. From God’s imagination springs forth all that is in marvelous and wondrous plurality and beauty. When things go wrong is when God’s creative power outruns God’s wisdom. Wisdom comes in time and through experience. Genesis tells us a story about a God who is powerfully imaginative and creative, but who, even more importantly, learns wisdom, and the essence of that wisdom is repentance. We tend to think of repentance as weakness, a failure; but Genesis makes it a strength, even a divine attribute. Repentance is the gate to wisdom. I don’t like to repent, and I’ll bet you don’t either. I know people who will not repent, who will explain, ignore, deny, anything but admit, they might have been wrong. But repentance is not just human. It is divine. It is part of the divine imagination.

The very first preaching of the Christian Gospel—first with John the Baptist and then with Jesus—began with the command to “repent.” Here in Genesis, we find repentance right at the beginning of creation, and it’s not just God’s command. It’s God’s own response to the complexities of an imaginative and creative existence in relationship with others. Perfection is not an option, ever.

The spiritual life is not righteousness. You are, we are, the imagination of God, even when we are wrong. But when we are wrong and can admit it, then wisdom has caught up to our creative powers, and we are very much like God.

Amen.