Trinity Sunday: In the Beginning Is the Word

A dozen youth had the task of leading congregational worship from start to finish on Trinity Sunday, 2017. Themes of the day (aside from the obvious) were mystery, mish-mash, dialogue, creation, and creativity. One child served as a visual pastorist, i.e. pastor-artist, painting on a 20"x36" canvas we'd hung on the wall, and another as a vocal pastorist, singing a solo version of Holy, Holy, Holy. Everyone else was eager to read, pray, and speak. The kids delighted in their different ways of contributing.

Our opening and closing hymns were by Ruth Duck: Sacred the Body and Colorful Creator, while our hymn following the sermon was Thomas Troeger's Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud.

We also involved the congregation in a bit of music that tested our abilities of timing and communication: For a short Song of Praise, we sang the first verse of This Is the Day as a call-and-response, and for a song to prepare us to hear the scriptures, we sang Listen to the Word That God Has Spoken as a round - I think it's one of my new favorites. The lyrics were especially poignant for the day:

Listen to the Word that God has spoken;

Listen to the One who is close at hand;

Listen to the voice that began creation;

Listen even if you don't understand.

And the mish-mash of everyone's voices overlapping, singing the same parts at different times, had exactly the order-within-cacophony effect I was going for!

We had five readers share the whole of Genesis 1, which was in our lectionary for the morning - two alternating narrators, and three alternating voices of God. We also read the Psalm and Gospel, but focused most of the day on the Hebrew text.

Later, two youth shared a short sermon I prepared with them in mind. It's based largely on letters and conversations we shared together, and what we learned during our January Gender Series about always honoring someone's self-identification. The full text is below, and you can also hear them deliver the message here (5 min).

In the Beginning Is the Word

A: Tohu va bohu!

B: It sounds like a spell from Harry Potter –

A: -- or a sneeze --

B: -- but it’s actually a phrase used in the first Creation story in Genesis, and nowhere else in the Bible. Since it’s only used once, it’s hard to say exactly what this ancient Hebrew phrase means.

A: In this morning’s passage, it’s translated to “formless void,” as in, “…when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void.” And in some modern languages like German and Hungarian, it means “confusion or commotion.”

B: But judging by the sound of it, it’s a nonsense word. It just sounds funny. So another way of saying tohu va bohu in English is “mish-mash.” Imagine how much less formal Genesis would sound if it began with, “In the beginning… y’know, back when the world was just a mish-mash…”

A: We can easily imagine people gathering around a fire under a deep night sky, telling each other how they believed the world came to be.

B: Their words likely gave ancient communities a sense of shared history and peace about things that were unknown and mysterious to them.

A: Speaking of divine mysterious things: Today is Trinity Sunday, a day when we remember a core mystery of our faith.

B: If our church year were a novel, days like Easter and Pentecost would be plot points. They’re events when we celebrate certain things the Triune God does.

A: Trinity Sunday is more like a chance for a character study on who God is – who God has been revealed to be, all throughout the Story we’ve been telling and re-telling.

B: The Companion to the Book of Worship tells us that Trinity Sunday “celebrates the unfathomable mystery of God’s being as Holy Trinity. It is a day of adoration and praise of the one, eternal, incomprehensible God.”

A: It’s a day to remember that even what we cannot fathom is worth celebrating, and even what we cannot understand is worth receiving.

B: There are biblical passages like this morning’s Gospel text which directly name the three persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or similar names. But, for more reasons than we could discuss in a year, let alone in a morning, Genesis chapter 1 is a surprisingly good narrative to help us reflect on this mystery of faith.

A: The simplest reason being – because Creation doesn’t end with tohu va bohu.

B: And neither does God.

A: We can acknowledge that the fullness of God confuses us and is beyond our human understanding, while still recognizing the numerous ways that the Divine is revealed to us – through words or in spite of them.

B: It is both our responsibility and our pleasure to take great care to use language that is based on God’s self-revelation to us and to the keepers of Scripture, and not something we or our ancestors have forced without holy collaboration. The challenge is knowing the difference.

And as any cat owner can tell you – there’s a big difference between being put into a box and choosing to get in one yourself.

A: Though if the Trinity is as much God’s self-identity as we say it is, it figures that God would climb into a box as un-boxlike as the Trinity.

B: We’re about to sing a hymn written by Thomas Troeger, a graduate of Yale University ordained in both the Presbyterian Church USA and the Episcopal Church.

A: The hymn is called “Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud” and explores an impressive collection of 40 names or images for God, every one of them in some way biblically based. You may also notice that the structure of the verses reminds you of the Trinity. Each group of images focuses on the various roles associated with one of the three.

B: It’s our hope that this hymn will express just how much possibility exists in co-creating with God in the midst of what may feel to us like mish-mash.

A: And we also hope that the refrain does justice to the Holy One who – forgive us for saying this so un-biblically – has out-catted the cats.

B: It seems that whenever we humans name something, we are either taming the unknown, or claiming it as newly familiar.

A: One suggests an act of control, the other an act of intimacy. But both intimacy and control are capable of misunderstanding the heart of whatever we name.

B: May this hymn, and all of today’s worship, help us to center ourselves in religious language that is creative and never coercive, intimate and never assuming, and rejoices in the ability to know something of the unknown.

Both: Amen.