Year A, Trinity Sunday: In the Beginning

Trinity Sunday, Year A
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20

Preaching with St. Mary's House Episcopal Center
Greensboro, NC

In the beginning
There was a pit
Deep inside each one of their stomachs
Where all the deep darkness
They thought they had lost somewhere on the trail
Had simply gathered
Into a canker of a stone;
Where the stone then turned
As it does upon visiting a new doctor
Or perhaps more accurately
As it does on a first date.
Dread, anticipation, hope
Grand nebulous images of tomorrow
With sure points readied for deflation:

The disciples
in THIS story
had an appointment to keep.

The disciples in this story were not afforded
the luxury of shock
At a half-risen Jesus appearing through walls
In the midst of their supper
Neither did they perceive their beloved companion
As a phantom on the shore
Nor were they brought along into slow recognition
While he kept their company on some long road
To a not-so-important destination.
THESE were disciples whom Jesus had told:
When I rise, you’ll have to come find me again
in Galilee.
THESE were disciples to whom the Mary’s came
With the message of the angel:

The risen Lord will see you now.
He’ll be the one on the Mountain at 3, dressed in white.

Can you hear the collective gulp?

In the beginning
There was terror,
Wild guilt,
Misdirected leaps of faith from entropy
And the spring-loaded cringe of a child ready
for inevitable discipline.

The unique flavor of this Resurrection
Is in the disciples shared journey to see Christ resurrected.
In other stories after Easter Jesus often appears suddenly,
Sometimes to upbraid the disciples for their lack of faith.
Or, Jesus might appear to a few disciples at a time
Leaving them to weave a common portrait gradually
Nodding their heads as they halfway listen to each other;
Making silent corrections in their own minds
For what their friends must be leaving out.
No where else in the Gospels
Is the presence of the disciples so requested by God after Easter
As it is here in Matthew.
The presence
Of disciples who have not been seen in the narrative
Since each of them had abandoned Jesus at the cross.
The imagination can wander on from here
But we will stop at the suggestion
That the road
From Jerusalem to Galilee
Must have been a far different road
From the one to Emmaus.

It is the end of THIS journey
That brings the disciples into worship
And- for some, we are told- into doubt.

I am, of course,
projecting
Some of my own feelings onto the encounter of the disciples.
Namely the feelings that I have
About coming to Church
And listening to the first chapter of Genesis
After two weeks of natural disaster
Months of rampant political violence
And the willful starvation of our world’s poor
By the world’s better off.

In the beginning
when God created the Heavens and the Earth
The Earth was a formless void
And darkness covered the face of the deep
While a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

God said, “Let there be light” and there was light
And God saw that the light was good.

When I hear the words of Genesis, I melt.
My heart opens into a myriad of images:
The buds of trees unfurling a miraculous display of veins
That were somehow bound up in dead wood all along;
Seas teeming with intricately limbed creatures that stunt
my own limited imagination
Babies born and crying
Cells dividing
Stars falling into themselves before their own
annihilating expansion.
Something, appearing out of nothing.
When I hear Genesis,
my heart cannot help but worship
my knees cannot help but bend
And in my worship
There is
deep, deep doubt.

Good for whom? we may rightly ask at this juncture
And what, precisely, do we mean by good anyway.

Last weekend,
as a little more than two hundred of my many-aged peers and I
celebrated the commencement of lives newly informed
by undergraduate careers at Greensboro College,
One of the things that we heard reiterated
by the bevy of speakers prepared for us
was the goodness of this life:
An appeal to remember
to stop and reflect often
on the fact that life is good.

Newly graduated,
Mortarboard still fastened tightly to my head
Speeding down High Point Road
While shouting out the lyrics to the latest Madonna song
With my best friend, Devon, right beside me
I was probably the last person in the world
Who needed to be reminded
Of the goodness of my life
In that moment.

Goodness, as I understood it in these speeches
Is the innate God-given quality of life
That we are to remember in times
When other worldly aims threaten
To deter our perception of it.
Goodness, in this sense, is the FOUNDATION
We may return to at all times
When all else fails.

Surely it must have been what I returned to that day:
Coming home to a table full
of good food and good company:
Three loving and true friends
Two parents in good health and spirits
And one man that I fall more deeply in love with every day
I sat down to ALL THAT
And I SAW that it was good.
And we celebrated its goodness and gave thanks

But the foundation we celebrated on
Seemed much further off than any innate blessing guaranteed
by God.
The foundation seemed to lie in a much more
Hard to reach place than that.
Part of it rested on the shoulders of the Haitian woman
I had heard lamenting on the radio
That her days wages were barely enough
To buy a tin of rice
And that all the rice did anyway
Was scrub out her children’s stomachs like bleach.
The foundation seemed to rest more
On the Kenyan student
Who found herself homeless when the tides turned this year
Against her and her own
And could not protect herself against rape
By those in power.
The foundation seemed to rest more
On the Sichuan woman
Who railed in wild grief against a province
Secure enough to make the shoes on my feet
But not to build hospitals out of anything more
Than cheap steel and concrete that powdered at the touch
All of which crumbled on the sick and young
While the factories stood strong.

The steady numbing global expose of the information age
Does not offer a way around our responsibility
In this shared creation of ours
And Genesis does not offer a way
To know ourselves as originally good
Without first moving over the chaos we are raised from;
It is not history without also
Being the destination.
And the original blessing communicated by Our Creator
Is not a SENTIMENT meant to keep us comfortable
In an entitled happiness
But a rallying cry
And reminder
That this world is being MADE
TO MANIFEST THE CREATIVE PRESENCE OF GOD
and WILL NOT be itself until it does.


What were we supposed to do?
The disciples mumble, shifting their feet,
Resentment building at the assumed responsibility
Of their own failure.
Uproot our lives and move to Myanmar
Only to get shot down by the border?
Set up shop in Zimbabwe and be dead within a matter of days?
Starve ourselves and ship the food to Haiti
While the real problem bloats beyond control
and consumes us too?
Weren’t our prayers enough?
Wasn’t our moment of reverence appropriate?
Didn’t our donations contribute in their own small way?
The cross was bloody and unnecessary
Our lives were at stake
And we did everything but get up there on it ourselves!

The road from Jerusalem to Galilee
The road back to the home where we were first called
From the scene of our own crime and complicity
Is a road traveled with thoughts such as these.

In the beginning
They were the best we could come up with
To keep from falling apart all together
So sure we had been of our own goodness
And then
So suddenly aware
Of the deep darkness
We belonged to.

And then came the Wind
And then came the Light
And we fell to our knees in a mess
Of worship and doubt.

And Christ, Risen from the Grave, for his part
Spoke to neither of these things.

In the new creation rising from this void
Christ speaks instead to authority on earth and in heaven.
And the logic we have hidden behind for so long
The safe rationales that belong to the economies
Of the Earth that we fancy ourselves at having mastered
Wither beneath the compassion and the camaraderie
That we are being remade within.
Christ speaks instead of discipleship to all nations
Discipleship to all peoples
Discipleship in the fashion that he has reared us in
Incarnate and fully present to the ones we are to serve
Sitting the trouble of our world
Down at our own table to break bread.

In the beginning
We were unraveled and exposed
To the wholeness of this end:

As a flawed and willing people
Held within our Maker
Waiting for the making to begin.