Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Trinity Sunday, 4^th of June 2023

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Matthew 28:16-20

Once again the church year has reached Trinity Sunday, the one Sunday that is named not after an event, Easter, Pentecost, the Baptism of Jesus, but after a doctrine. It is important to begin this Reflection by saying that anything I say today about the Trinity will be a heresy. Our human minds cannot understand, cannot encompass, and most definitely cannot explain, God. The Trinity is one of those aspects of God that we are never going to comprehend. We believe in One God who is also Three, which is why over the centuries people have mocked Christians as worshipping multiple gods. It sounds as though we do not know our own minds, or as though we are trying to do some weird mathematics. I tend to think of the doctrine of the Trinity as something like the square root of a negative number. The doctrine of the Trinity is impossible, and yet Christians believe it.

As I have said before on this Sunday the doctrine of the Trinity is among my favourite things about Christianity. It reminds us that God is in God’s very self a community of love. The doctrine of the Trinity also asserts that in the human person Jesus, we see God. Over the last few weeks of Easter we heard Jesus talking about the unity of the Father and the Son in his Farewell Discourse, and I said then that he was reassuring his disciples that by knowing him they knew God. As I say so often, this means that when we see Jesus welcoming children and women and Gentiles and the poor we are seeing God’s welcome of everyone the world considers lesser. When Jesus tells us to love our enemies we know that that is what God wants. The doctrine of the Trinity also illuminates how it can be that the Holy Spirit, God within us and among us and around us, is the very same God who created the cosmos, and why in the Spirit Jesus is with us still, always, to the end of the age, despite ascending to heaven and being no longer physically present among us.

This Trinity Sunday the lectionary gives us the creation story from Genesis. I suspect it does so because in this story we have ‘a wind from God’ sweeping over the face of the waters, and Christians have long held that that ‘wind from God’ is the Holy Spirit. The Son is not mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures, but Christians read him into this story in the words of the prologue of the Gospel according to John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.’ (John 1:1-3) Later in the creation story we are shown something that the Church Fathers Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom described as a conference within the Trinity, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’. But this creation story has so much more in it than trinitarian hints.

Most biblical scholars agree that the creation story in Genesis 1 comes from the sixth century BC, from the time of the Babylonian Exile. The Hebrew Scriptures contain writings from much earlier in Israel’s history, but its final form is a product of and response to the Exile and this particular creation story, scholars believe, is one of the last parts of the Bible to be written. It was never meant to be a scientific treatise, and creationists and others who try to read it as science miss the point. This creation story is a theological exposition of who God is.

I have often talked about how appalling the Babylonian Exile was for the people of Israel. The Exile meant that their connection with God was severed: they were no longer living in the land God had given them; they were no longer ruled by God’s anointed king; they could no longer offer sacrifices to God in the Temple. God’s own people were slaves in a foreign land. Israel was estranged from God. They had to ask: were they still the people of God? Or had God deserted them? As I have said before, the question, ‘How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?’ is a literal one. (Psalm 137:4)

It is in that context that this story of creation was written. Its balance and pattern soothe and comfort and reassure. It is a tale of God overcoming the chaos that existed before creation, the chaos in which the Exile had left the people of God. God speaks, and what God commands comes to pass. There is evening and morning, as day follows day. God looks at everything and sees that it is good. At the end God rests from all the labour, and blesses and hallows the day of rest. Amid chaos, the people of Israel who tell this story are declaring that they worship the God who brought order. In the face of darkness, they tell of a God who speaks light and there is light. When their identity as the people of God is challenged, they give their faith to the God who said: ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ The creation story speaks of light and order and life not because it is ignoring the reality of darkness and chaos and death, but in response to that very darkness and chaos and death. It looks at chaos and says that greater than all this is the Creator. This is the affirmation that the people of Israel made in the middle of their Exile. It is the affirmation that we too can make when our lives are at their darkest and most chaotic – we worship a God who brings light out of darkness and order out of chaos.

This version of the creation story also creates what is sometimes called ‘sixth-day solidarity’ between animals and human beings. On the sixth day of creation, God creates living creatures of every kind, cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth, and God creates humankind in God’s own image. We are all God’s creatures together. Too often humanity has used the ‘dominion’ we have been given over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every living thing that moves upon the earth as an excuse to exploit and plunder the natural world. We know now that if we take the exploitation of the earth too far we harm only ourselves. We need the biodiversity that we have allowed to become extinct; we are putting ourselves at risk of future pandemics with increased urbanisation and over-industrialised agriculture. But even if caring for the rest of God’s creation was not good for us, it is required of us as created beings made in the image of God. If we believe that God created us out of love and describes us as good, then we must also believe that God created the non-human creation out of love and names it equally good. And as those made in the image of the Creator, we are called to imitate God in the love and care we show the rest of creation, because all creation has been made to be a source of rejoicing and delight.

‘God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’ In the Uniting Church we take it for granted that both women and men are made in the image of God, so we may not realise how radical this verse is. But compare the idea that both male and female are made in the image of God with the one-sex theory that came from Greek philosophers like Aristotle. Aristotle believed that there was only one type of human being, not two sexes, and that in its perfect form that human being was male. Females were deformed males, created by a lack of heat in the womb, although nature then made use of their deformity for further procreation.[1] This is why human females develop quicker than males, Aristotle argued, ‘on account of its weakness it quickly approaches its maturity and old age, since inferior things all reach their end more quickly’.[2] Compare that, written in the fourth century BC, with ‘male and female God created them,’ probably written in the sixth century BC, and you can see that the earlier Jewish description of creation is vastly superior to the later Greek version.

My Honours thesis was on a fifteenth-century French author, Christine de Pizan, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies in which she defended women against medieval misogyny using this very verse: ‘Indeed, how was [woman] formed? I don’t know if you have already noted this: she was created in the image of God. How can any mouth dare to slander the vessel which bears such a noble imprint?’[3] That book was written 618 years ago, but many of you will remember times when women and men were not treated as equal creations; when women could not be ordained, could not get bank loans or even chequebooks without male guarantors, had to resign from public service jobs upon marriage. Just this week a statue of Zelda D’Aprano was unveiled in front of Trades Hall, depicting her protest against unequal pay for women and men in 1969. Here at the very beginning of the Scriptures we have a statement of profound gender equality, and the world is still struggling to live up to it.[4]

We are all made in the image of the triune God, every single human being. Trinity Sunday reminds us that this means that we have been created to exist in community. I told you earlier that I love the doctrine of the Trinity because it reminds us that God is in God’s very self a community of love. That is how we are to live, too. There is no room for self-sufficient rugged individualists in the church. We are creatures created in the image of the God who is community, and we are called to live as members of a community that includes everyone. That is how we will gather around the Lord’s Table later in this service. As I say every month, ‘Everyone who wishes to eat and drink at this table is welcome, because Christ turns no one away’. Let us take our membership of God’s loving community from the Table out into the rest of our lives, always welcoming others. Amen.

[1] Maryanne Cline Horowitz, ‘Aristotle and Woman’, Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 183-213.

[2] Quoted in Alcuin Blamires (ed.), Women Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 41.

[3] Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies (New York: Persea Books, 1982), p. 23.

[4] This verse of gender equality has caused trouble recently, in debates about marriage equality and discussions about the existence of trans+, non-binary, and gender-diverse people. Jews and Christians have frequently read it as creating two exclusive categories labelled ‘male’ and ‘female’, to one of which all humans must belong. I said before that the creation story is not a scientific treatise and it does seem to ignore the one in every hundred babies born with an intersex condition. (United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, ‘Fact Sheet: Intersex’, https://unfe.org/system/unfe-65-Intersex_Factsheet_ENGLISH.pdf) There are approximately 1.7% of the population who do not fit into ‘male’ and ‘female’ boxes even before we think about trans+, non-binary, and gender-diverse people. Intersex Christians have lamented that the understanding that God created only male and female suggests that they are either a mistake in creation, or that they simply do not exist at all. (Megan K. DeFranza, Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female and Intersex in the Image of God, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015) I prefer an inclusive reading of Genesis 1:27 that sees everyone on the spectrum from completely male to completely female as created in the image of God, with room for intersex, trans+, gender-diverse and non-binary people in the middle.