tradition stays alive by being reshaped, reimagined
Wonderings:
I wonder if there’s something that you feel strongly should be done “right.”
I wonder if there is something you love to do—or something really meaningful to you—that you can’t do anymore?
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for Trinity Sunday in Year A of our Lectionary.
Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8; Matthew 28:16-20
Let us speak, and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
Today is Trinity Sunday. In days of old when many parishes had a curate, an apprentice priest, it was traditional that this young apprentice would always be assigned to preach on this Sunday. They were supposed to reflect on the assigned readings in some novel way that would explain this mystery of our faith, that God can be three persons and yet one God. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—and yet one God. Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer—and yet one God.
It was a rite of passage to be given this impossible task, to then be critiqued by your superiors. Mild hazing among the clergy. I had to do this, and even though my boss was exceedingly kind, when I hear “Trinity Sunday,” my guts still clench a little bit. Because the task was to get the doctrine right. Maybe say something interesting and edifying and maybe creative, but get the doctrine right.
And that feeling, for me, is a cue to start somewhere else. Because I think the impulse to “get it right”—and that feeling of clenching—shuts down that porousness which allows grace to act on us, that allows surprise and transformation. And it pushes us away from our ancestors in the faith who wrote the stories we hear today.
Because they did not write these stories out as statements of fact for later generations to get right or wrong. They wrote these out in the midst of crisis and change they didn’t ask for; they wrote these out, trying to articulate new ways of understanding and relating to God—because the old ways were no longer working, or because they had become too narrow or rigid to make sense of what they had experienced.
Here’s the thing about doctrines, like the Trinity. Before they were doctrines that people defended or policed, they were brand new, sometimes scandalous imaginations and concepts. Before they became articles of orthodoxy, they were revolutionary.
Let’s go back to the beginning, to this majestic reading from Genesis 1. The seven-day creation story we heard today, even though it comes first in the Bible—it was actually written out only about 500 years before the time of Jesus. Much later than the Adam and Eve story that comes immediately after it. Later than many other books of the Bible.
It seems like the oldest, most orthodox thing we know: that God made the world in 6 days and rested on the seventh. But when this story was written out, it was news. It was a completely novel reimagination of who God is and how God acts. This story took shape in a time of profound crisis after the Babylonian Army had conquered Israel, desecrated the Temple, and burned the city of Jerusalem to the ground. Most biblical scholars understand this story to have been written in exile in Babylon, by priests who could not relate to God in the way they had—far from home, with no altars, and no animals to sacrifice. This story was written by priests who couldn’t do the thing they loved to do anymore. But more importantly, it was written for a whole society of people who couldn’t relate to God in the ways they knew.
This story testifies that some of those exiles begin to experience the presence and the promise of God in new ways. They begin to feel the chaos and confusion of their lives in exile begin to settle into an order—and they wonder, could that be God, still with us? They begin to craft new practices, new ways of aligning themselves with the divine, and those practices begin to shift their conception of who God could be. Not the god of just one nation, not just a superhuman warlord who will fight for you in battle if his ego is stroked in the right way. But maybe this God is above all other gods—the one who created the heavens and the earth.
As the great scholar and poet Robert Alter puts it in his translation:
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovered over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.
Alter translates the Hebrew phrase tohu va bohu as “welter and waste.” That old word “welter” means confusion, chaos. Despite the fact that many theologians have insisted that God created the world out of nothing, there’s something deep and dark and raw; something primal; pure potential. That old word “welter” means confusion, chaos.
And we see that God is not distant from this welter, or disturbed by this waste. God is intimate with it, so close to the turmoil that God’s very breath is felt rippling over it.
And as the story goes on, we see that God moves slowly, deliberately—six days, one thing at a time—patiently forming the conditions where life might flourish. God does not need order for its own sake—God wants LIFE. Light, land, sun, moon, and stars, plants and animals under the sea and on the land, and humankind in God’s own image: God forms a holistic, interdependent ecosystem in which all forms of life can grow, and be fed, and feed others. One form of life flourishes because all the other forms flourish.
How comforting and sustaining it must have been to these people in exile, to hear this new story—that God had made order and goodness out of chaos and rubble before. Maybe God would do that again, among them.
How revolutionary it must have been for those exiles to imagine that they could connect with God without altars, without sacrifice, but simply by participating in God’s rhythm of creation: tending to this interdependent system during the week, and joining God in rest on the seventh day. These people who had been driven far from the special place where they once knew God could now meet God anywhere in a special time: the Sabbath, which Abraham Joshua Heschel once described as “a palace in time.”
Again, nobody among the people of Israel, the people who struggle with God, had ever had this idea before the sixth century BCE. It was almost certainly controversial—which is probably why the editors and compilers of the Hebrew Bible also included the older, more familiar creation story about Adam and Eve, right after this new one.
I get frustrated when people talk about the Christian tradition as if “tradition” meant something unchanging, crystalline, eternal. Because when we actually look at what our ancestors in the faith were doing, we see that they were taking everything that had been handed down to them and reshaping it, reinterpreting it, remixing it into new— sometimes revolutionary forms. Into stories and practices that resonated in the lives they were living then and there.
And that’s one way of understanding the Trinity, too. In exile, our ancestors came to know God first as the bedrock of being, as the Creator, and to understand that Creator as the same God who liberated their ancestors from bondage in Egypt. And then, later, some of their descendents had profound, transformative experiences of God’s presence in the person of Jesus, even after his death on a Cross—and they couldn’t unknow what they’d seen and felt. After Jesus’ death and departure from this earth, these people and others had profound, transformative experiences of God’s presence in this dynamic spirit that goads them into places and relationships they would have never chosen— where they nonetheless experience liberation and joy…
And so our ancestors began to reshape and reinterpret the tradition they’d inherited with the conviction that Jesus must be part of God—and maybe had always been. And this Holy Spirit must also be a part of God—and maybe had been that breath that rippled over the dark waters in the beginning.
On this Trinity Sunday, we celebrate that we have inherited this expansive, multiform understanding of God’s being.
And we affirm our faith that we are still learning about God, like our ancestors; we are always reshaping and reinterpreting what our ancestors passed down to us, just as they reshaped what had been passed down to them.
And so I want to conclude this time of reflection with another period of wondering. I’m thinking about how creativity and adaptation are part of what keeps this tradition alive. And I’m thinking about what Jesus says to his disciples in our Gospel reading. Don’t go back to Jerusalem—go forward, go out.
I wonder if there’s something you’ve inherited that you need to creatively reshape, in order to move forward?
