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
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.
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.
