Ordinary Trinity

Text: Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Other texts: Psalm 8

Yesterday a few folks came to work on the garden and grounds of the church. The sun shone. The air was perfect. Plants were growing. People walked by, happy and content. It was good. It was very good.

The story of creation in the first chapter of Genesis is rich in powerful themes. The extraction of order out of chaos. The power of making things by naming them into existence. The establishment of a sacred time of rest. The establishment of time itself as a byproduct of the separation of light and darkness. The creation of life. These are all themes of physics, of some sort. Substance, order, biology— they all could have existed without comment or meaning. A universe, as some say, set into motion and sent on its ways to see what might happen. But that is not this story. In this story, the creator has an opinion about creation. An opinion that grows stronger at each step. God’s opinion is clear: God thinks that creation is good.

Before even time is created, before day and night, dawn and dusk, light itself—the power behind life and revelation and discovery—light is good. The earth and the seas are good. The plants, the seeds, the notion of seeds and reproduction, fruit: all good. Sun and moon and stars: good. Fish and fowl, bugs and sea serpents: good. Animals, and creepy crawly things: good. Everything, including the humans who come last: everything is good. Very good. God made the world, and God saw how very good it was.

It is nice that our God is good. Not everyone worships a God who is good. One of the prisoners I used to work with was taught in his childhood that God was mean and nasty. Now, as an adult, he asked me “Why would anyone want to hang around with a God like that?”

Now, you yourselves might expect God to be good. That is great. What is greater is to worship a God who thinks that the world is good. That creation is good. Not only that it exists and chugs along, but that it is good. That you, just by being part of creation, are good. God thinks you are good. What you cannot miss in this story in Genesis is that God has a ton of affection for the world and all the things in it, from the fruit of the vine to the creepy things in the dirt. From living things to the very light that makes life possible, to the days that measure out our lives. God loves the amazing cosmos and the ordinary world.

Today is Trinity Sunday. It is also the beginning of the season of Pentecost. This time in the church is called Ordinary Time. The color is green, which I guess seems like an ordinary color. The word Ordinary doesn’t really mean plain. It means numbered. Like “in order.” But in fact during this time in the church things are more ordinary, meaning plain. No Christmas, no Easter, no Lent. Nothing out of the ordinary, as in those other, extraordinary seasons. In the ordinary church seasons we hear of the stories of Jesus that are more ordinary. More about the life of Jesus in the middle of his ministry and not about his birth, death, or resurrection. In one sense, these stories are easier to grasp, being about the stuff that happens to us all the time.

Maybe it strikes you odd, therefore, that we start this season with Trinity Sunday. The Trinity is not usually considered an ordinary sort of thing. Not something that is easy to grasp at all. In one sense, the idea of the Trinity came from a theological quandary. How can there be just one God—we are monotheists, after all—if Jesus the son of God is God? To say nothing of the Holy Spirit. But in another sense, the idea of the Trinity is about something else altogether. It is also about how God can love creation. It is not only about some theological mystery, it is about great big God having personal affection for this little tiny world. This ordinary world and our ordinary lives in it.

God is really big. And probably God is really strange, too. I’m sure that there is a lot about God that I cannot fathom at all. And never will. And do not have to, for which I am thankful. God has the whole universe to look after, and not much of it looks like Cambridge, I’m sure. But part of it looks like Cambridge.

The Trinity is a description of God that makes sense in this ordinary world. In a world where things are created, and loved, and comforted, and guided, God is our creator, and lover, and comforter, and guide. The Trinity is a way of describing a God that not only hangs around with dark matter and galaxies but that shows God’s self in the form of the ordinary forces of wind and fire. And in human form.

When I consider your heavens, says the psalm, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses—What is humankind that you are mindful of them, the human race that you care for them?

The writer of the psalm is flabbergasted. We have less power than we usually like to admit—we are unable to affect what’s happening in the world as a result of natural forces and even human violence. But we also are more powerful than we like to admit. Things we are doing are making a difference in the whole big world. We seem at least to have the power to bite off more than we can chew. Even so, we know that we are really not up there with angels on the power scale. We are small creatures on a small planet in a very very big universe. How can it be that God is mindful of us? Because the story of the Bible is that God is. Is mindful.

The Trinity is a way to talk about a God that can be with people without being foolish. Unlike, for example, Zeus or Apollo, who were competing with God for people’s attention at the time of Jesus. The Trinity is a way to talk about an awesome God who created the universe as vast as we modern types know it to be, who seems nearly unknowable, and who at the same time likes to hang around with us.

The God whom the Trinity describes is one who finds the world that we live in worthwhile, who finds our company at least entertaining and maybe even satisfying. A God who looks at the ordinary world, and finds it very good.