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.

Children's Ministry Moment for MLK

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As the kids lined up at the Communion table, I introduced our Children's Ministry Moment to the congregation:

"I believe how we tell history, especially to children, is important. This weekend, as we celebrate our nation's hero, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it may be tempting to condense the breadth of his life and work to the famous words, "I have a dream." But when we reduce this great man to a dreamer, we neglect to remember all he did and said for the here and now.  We forget what he challenged not just the nation but the Church to be and do.  Today we'll share part of his Letter from Birmingham Jail -- words that are difficult to hear, but that I hope we will hear with an open mind and a ready spirit."

Then the children presented this speech I adapted from The Year They Walked by Beatrice Siegel and Letter from Birmingham Jail by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I've shortened just a few sentences from MLK's excerpts; mainly the punctuation has been simplified for the children's ease of reading (fewer quotation marks and no ellipses). In our preparations the previous week, we talked about any vocabulary that was unfamiliar to them and they tackled it all with grace and persistence.

R: As a young minister, Reverend King was patient and cared for the needs of his church. His deep passion for social issues had not yet been tapped, but he knew some things for certain.

A: He wanted freedom and justice for all African-Americans.

M: He also knew that violence was not an answer to their problems.  Violence was not the way of God.

L: But Reverend King’s nonviolence was not passive.  He was patient, but also persistent.  He did not believe in waiting for justice and equality to come in their own time.

I: Some ministers and rabbis said they believed in justice and equality, too, but that Reverend King was going about it the wrong way.  They wanted to wait until a more “convenient” time.  Reverend King wrote a letter to them from jail.

M: You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergy would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist.  But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist.

L: Was not Jesus an extremist in love? “Love your enemies.  Bless them that curse you.  Pray for them that despitefully use you.”

A: Was not Amos an extremist for justice? “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I: So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be.  Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love?  Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?

R: There was a time when the church was very powerful.  Early Christians suffered and sacrificed for what they believed.  The power structure convicted them for being “disturbers of the peace.”  But they went on with the conviction that they had to obey God.  They were small in number but big in commitment.

L: Things are different now.  The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound.  It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo.

M: Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s often vocal sanction of things as they are.

I: If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for [this] century.  I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust.

A: I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour.

Children in Worship

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Children remaining in the sanctuary. I have long respected, even preferred, that way of involving children in worship.

Once upon the 1980s, I was one of those church babies passed around between churchgoers. I'm told infant-me spent many a hymn entertained by shiny keys.

As I grew in everything but attention span, I brought crayons and dolls and figurines and God knows what else to play with in the pews. I knelt there on the floor and poked my head up to sing and, only with time and curiosity did I learn, prayer by prayer, sermon by sermon, what else people "do" at church.

For children's sermons, all the kids were called up to the front where we learned that the answer was almost always "Jesus" except when it definitely wasn't. As I recall, we didn't leave the sanctuary. We returned to our families in the pews, to dolls and figurines, to crayons and markers that were not modern-magical and could have made marks on non-paper surfaces like nineteenth century wood.

How did you learn church? That's how I learned church.

I marveled at the operatic voice of the woman who sat in the pew in front of us. I grew to have a favorite hymn to request when requests were requested (even though the deciding powers ruled that Go Tell It on the Mountain was not a hymn meant for summer, which is true but dumb).

I learned to say prayers I didn't write and to say prayers no one else would ever know but God. I came to enjoy the fellowship of the people around me without the company of miniature figurines and homemade paper dolls.

Having said all that, this is not the style I've adopted in leadership. I've found something that works for me and the community I've been serving as a lay staff member as of August.

My approach is what First Pres has done before my time here, adapted slightly to suit my current understanding of children's ministry. We have what we (they) call Children in Worship -- yep, a designated gathering of a child horde. So here's how it goes.

No children's sermon in the sanctuary. Just a mid-service invitation (read: exuberant parade) for kids to come together in the next room, where we can still hear the murmur of laughter and music but also each other's quietest voices, a place where we have direct access to the outdoors if we want fresh air and sunlight as well as a wide-open warmth inside if that's all we need.

One of the co-pastors (a husband and wife team who alternate their preaching and other responsibilities) joins us to get to know the kids better and share the gospel. Sometimes we hear the same illustrations that the adults are hearing at that very moment, just in a different way, like that one Sunday that multigenerational families went home and discovered they'd all heard a biblical application of Finding Nemo.

Here in our own little un-pewed space, the adult worshippers are not spectating, so the kids have just as much time as the adults' sermon experience to ask as many questions as their hearts desire (without a roomful of grownups' unabashed giggling, because hey, some kids do fully intend to be funny, but some of them just want to know, you know?). They voice their own prayers, sharing joys and concerns that range from announcements to profound expressions of sorrow and excitement. We listen to as many as we can.

We pray with our mouths and our bodies. We invite bowed heads and clasped hands and raised heads and hands open to receiving and meditative poses and peeking eyes and closed eyes and lying on our backs with our eyes focused on origami birds. We say the Lord's Prayer by rote, letting the rhythm of the words soak into our bones, but even this same prayer looks different in each body's language.

And we stretch our bodies often to remind us that it's good and right to move around, that there is a time to "be still and know" and there's a time for dancing and wiggling, and they're both sacred.

On Communion Sundays, the kids teach each other about Communion (!) -- what it means, what it looks like, and how we'll celebrate it when we return to the sanctuary.

Then we help the kids to develop something to share with the congregation during a later worship service, encouraging them to be inter-generational teachers. The children experience the sanctuary as a place where they not only sing and listen but also lead on a regular basis.

I have, at this stage in my ministry, no use for in-sanctuary children's sermons where the adult speaks to the children and the rest of the adults spectate or participate peripherally. If adult parishioners "get more out of" the in-sanctuary children's sermons (as some universal parishioners say, fairly enough), maybe the adult sermons aren't doing quite what they're supposed to do.

If the messages aren't just for the children, why are the children so often the only ones called up front and quizzed (yes, okay, even in a friendly sort of way)? Why not let everyone stay where they are and let the leader say something so interesting and clear that it makes little heads pop up from the pews or wander forward on their own to get a better look? And if the messages are just for the children, why isn't there nearly enough time to let them ask questions and share more insights and responses than those that are prompted directly?

I've known some excellent pastors who speak beautifully with the children, who manage their limited resource of time with both wisdom and grace. But I've also seen a lot of shy kids who'd rather fall through a hole in the floor than be put on the spot in front of strangers and friends, a lot of good questions shut down too soon, a lot of potentially serious answers drawing ripples of laughter from mentors and role models, a lot of lost opportunities for meaningful conversations that were right there within reach.

No, I like this sacred space, away from grown spectators. I like this sacred time when a worship agenda doesn't get priority over curiosity and necessary time for processing and application. I like worshipping God in the spontaneous, childlike movements of the Holy Spirit.

And, when they feel good and ready, after they've had some time to ponder and practice, I like to hear the children speaking in the sanctuary, teaching their elders like the little boy Jesus in the temple.

If they are truly respected as people, not trained like circus animals or even just constantly called on for answers like grade school students, I think many children will grow -- in knowledge, in confidence, and in faith -- more from teaching others and being heard and known than they ever will from being talked at.

Even if we're good at it.