Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 8
2Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen
When it comes to looking at scripture one of the things that I like to say is that all translation is interpretation. I’ve said it here and I’ve said it in other places. Of course there are other issues. Douglas Adams has commented on this in his work.
If you are not familiar with the work of Douglas Adams, you are missing some of the best comedy, science fiction, and comedic science fiction to come out of Britain in the latter half of the 20th Century. He worked in radio, television, computer games, film, and stage. He worked on Monty Python, Doctor Who, a detective novel series, and travel and endangered species documentaries; but these are not the greatest source of his fame. Douglas Adams is the creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
In the second of the five books that make up the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy (yes, Adams wrote five books in the Trilogy, that’s just a germ of his sense of humor) Adams says this about time travel and language:
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well adjusted family can’t cope with. There is also no problem about changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you for instance how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting a conversation whilst you are actually travelling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term ‘Future Perfect’ has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
The one thing I want us to take from this is that often, when we say or write things, others interpret them differently depending on time, place, experience, expectation, and so on. When we read things, often we read them differently from how they were intended by the writers.
Our first reading is not just an example of this, it’s a controversial example. The New Revised Standard Version gives us “God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…” The New International Version replaces “humankind” with “mankind.” The King James Version gives us “man” instead of either of these. This opens the “gender of God” controversy, is God a man because God created man?
Then again verse 27 gives us God’s simultaneous creation of male and female. With this, the whole human/man/humankind/humanity controversy falls flat. It will be milked forever, but in this piece of scripture, given women and men were created together, the controversy of Adam’s rib born in Genesis 2 is missing in Genesis 1. Of course it is present in Genesis 2, so fight the good fight.
No, the controversy I want us to consider is who the “us” and “our” are when God said “Let us make humankind in our image.”
Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday. Today we celebrate the three persons of God. We don’t celebrate three Gods. I like the way Karl Barth describes the Trinity describing God as “not three divine I’s, but thrice the one divine I.” One of America’s premier Barth scholars, the Reverend Doctor Cynthia Rigby reminds us that trying to describe the Trinity is almost as easy as trying to nail Jello to the wall. Describing the Trinity Patrick used the Shamrock, three leaves yet one plant. Naming the Trinity, the most common terms gleamed from scripture are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Mind you, scripture contains no mention of the Trinity, not even in our Genesis reading. When we talk about one God in three Persons, we talk about how God has been revealed in the total body of scripture, not somewhere specific. But since our God is one God not three, then who else is in that group of Gods who make up that first person plural in verse 26? Simply put, our controversy is that humanity is created in the image of Gods, but not in the image of the Triune God.
So who is our God talking about and who is our God talking to? This is where the controversy kicks into high gear. This may not be easy to hear in a Christian Church, Genesis was not written for us. I’m going to say it again because it’s shocking, Genesis was not written for us. Genesis was written as a way for the Hebrew people to remember who they are. The first eleven chapters are collectively known as the Hebrew Creation Narrative. It’s a story, a tale, a myth created to explain to a race of people who they are. It’s not a scientific tome. It’s a story for a people.
Now, just because this story isn’t burdened by facts does not mean it does not contain truth. One of the things Genesis does which no other faith had done before is introduce a benevolent God. A God who creates in love instead of needing to be tricked into creating was new. The Hebrews also introduced a new way to look at history; history as a linear expression. Up until that time people saw history as a cyclical expression of events. Linear history was just as new as a benevolent God.
What we don’t put together as Christians is the host of gods worshiped in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Marduk, Tiamat, Baal, and Asherah were just some of the ancient gods worshiped in the Middle East at the same time as the God we worship. There are the Egyptian Gods like Ra, Isis, and Osiris; the Roman gods including Jupiter, Mars, and Minerva; and the Greek gods like with Zeus, Poseidon, and Aphrodite. To the Hebrews, the heavenly host was a busy place and our God was master of them all. When people were created, it was in the image of all these gods that we were created.
So here’s a good question, do these gods still exist? Whatever happened to the other gods of the ancient world? The Hebrews “knew” they were “real,” as “real” as the God they worshipped. They didn’t worship Baal or Zeus or Jupiter or Ra; but they still knew they were “real.” Still, thousands of years later, when our God who was around since before the beginning began, these other gods were around too; yet you don’t hear about anybody worshipping them anymore do you?
One of the best ways to describe what became of these “gods” comes to us courtesy of a 1967 episode of “Star Trek.” In the second season episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?” our intrepid explorers find a planet whose sole inhabitant is the Greek god Apollo. One of the science officers comes to ask Apollo what happened to the other gods of the Pantheon. Apollo responds “They returned to the cosmos on the wings of the wind.” The officer asks if this means they died. This is when Apollo shows us what it means for a god to die, “We're immortal, we gods. But the Earth changed. Your fathers changed. They turned away until we were only memories. A god cannot survive as a memory. We need love, admiration, worship, as you need food.”
A god who is no longer worshipped is no longer a god. Baal, Zeus, Jupiter, Ra—they were gods when people believed they were gods. When they became planet names and plot devices on TV shows like Stargate and comics like Captain Marvel they died a little bit every day. We know the Pantheon is powerless even if it is not empty. Yes, we may have been created in their image, but the only god who has real power is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God whose name is The Lord.
This is controversial, this is disturbing, and this is true. On this Trinity Sunday the Trinity is not found in Genesis. The Triune God is not a part of Hebrew theology and Genesis is the foundation stone of Hebrew life. So where does that take us on this Trinity Sunday? It takes us in a very interesting place, the very beginning. The New Revised Standard Version of Holy Writ begins like this, “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.”
Let’s learn a little Hebrew, what do you say— The Hebrew word the NRSV translates as “a wind from God” is ruach. Everybody, please say it with me, ruach. Ruach—there you go, you’re speaking Hebrew. This word sounds like wind, doesn’t it, ruach, but as with so many words it has more than one definition. An alternate definition of ruach is spirit, as in the Holy Spirit. Now that sounds like ruach. Suddenly, two-thirds of the Trinity appear in the first two verses of scripture and we never realized it. It may not how the original listeners would have heard those words, but it should be how we hear them, and it is faithful to the text where seeing the Trinity in verse 26 is not.
In our readings today, we go from the first words of scripture to the last words of Jesus as Matthew records them. Please forgive my foray back into the text, this time general grammar. In any sentence, the most important verbs of any sentence are the action and being verbs. In the case of The Great Commission, it’s the verbs that tell tell the nouns what to do. The participles, the –ing verbs tell the nouns how to do it.
In the great commission, the meat and potatoes is “Go and make disciples;” but the controversies about baptizing or what should and should not be taught overshadow the basic command. When folks get tied up in the “how’s,” we neglect “go and make disciples.” When we get all tied up in the “how’s” sometimes we even chase our tails and it looks like the process becomes the outcome, and that must never be.
(If you want proof, catch the live internet feed from General Assembly this week. It’s more proof that anybody who respects church polity and enjoys sausage should never watch either one being made.)
During my formative years, Saturday morning cartoons were fabulous. Bugs Bunny and Road Runner, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (and I can go “Hey, Hey, Hey” with the best of them), even Shazaam—my introduction to Captain Marvel; these populated my Saturdays. That was until just a couple of minutes before the half-hour and the hour, then it was time for Schoolhouse Rock.
New York advertising agent David McCall wondered how his young son could remember every Beatles song, but not his multiplication tables. McCall and Bob Dorough went on to write the first Multiplication Rock songs and animator Tom Yohe created the first visuals. They were and still are a hit. As for me, I own the four CD set along with Schoolhouse Rock Rocks, a CD of Schoolhouse Rock recorded by artists from the ‘90’s including Blind Melon, Better Than Ezra, and Moby. I’ve used Schoolhouse Rock while doing public address at Community College Baseball games and as a teaching tool while tutoring Greek in seminary.
One of the sets of Schoolhouse Rock is Grammar Rock. The one of the most popular and most remembered of these set is Conjunction Junction. How many people remember the function of Conjunction Junction is to hook up words, phrases, and clauses because of this little ditty? How many remember the three main conjunctions at the junction are “and, but, and or.”
What makes grammar rock on this Trinity Sunday is that we worship God who has appeared to us as Father and Son and Holy Spirit. We worship the God of the “and.” We don’t worship the God of “but” nor do we worship the God of “or.” We worship the God who calls all people to the throne of grace and mercy. We worship the Lord Jesus who calls all of us to go and make disciples. We worship the Lord Jesus whose last words to his disciples were “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Let me leave you with these words from Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” Amen.
