The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scriptures: Genesis 1:1-2:4a
So much of the New Testament is essentially a sermon about so much of the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament. So much of it is Jewish folks who had decided that Jesus was the messiah revisiting all their scriptures to see Jesus in them. This constitutes a huge bulk of the apostle Paul’s writing. And that’s what the author of the gospel of John was doing when he wrote the first words of his first chapter. In fact, John 1 is probably one of the most direct in this work of recontextualizing.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
“In the beginning.” This writer immediately brings our recollection, our imagination to Genesis 1, to the formless void, to the darkness that covered the face of the deep. There we are in the primordial chaos, and into those waters of nothingness John drops the Word. Then later in this same chapter he writes, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
In the beginning was the Word. Thus, John places Jesus at the very start of everything and, not only that, he tells us that Jesus was with God and was God. So begins the delicate dance of a God who is one but also more than one.
Today, we ourselves enter that tradition of recontextualizing the Old Testament that extends from the apostle Paul in the first century all the way to today to those who use the prophecy of Ezekiel to justify a war that they hope will speed the second coming of Jesus.
Which is to say: we need to be careful when we read the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus. This practice can be holy and life-giving, and it can be distorted and self-serving and even harmful.
We need to remember that our Jewish siblings today obviously do not read Jesus into the Hebrew Bible, and that their understanding of the same scriptures is just as true. Because our God knows truth looks different when seen from different angles.
So let us proceed into our reading of Genesis 1 with care and intention.
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It’s Trinity Sunday, and I want to be honest with you: I could not initially figure out what the first creation story in the opening of Genesis has to do with the Trinity. When I first started digging into this, I found that the lectionary designers may have selected this reading because when God creates humans, it says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.”
Now in the rest of this passage, God is referred to in the third person singular: “God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas.” As you’ve probably noticed, I go out of my way not to gender God, as I believe that different ways of describing God impact different people in different ways. So I do my best to stay neutral and let you fill in the pronoun that is most life-giving to you. But here I don’t want to focus on the gender so much as the quantity. God, he, she are all singular nouns, whereas “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” employs the plural: us, our. Implying more than one.
Look! Christian theologians have said throughout the centuries: God refers to godself in the plural. God must be referring to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Trinity. And listen, that’s a perfectly valid way to recontextualize this passage through the Christian lens. It does not distort, it does not harm, it simply layers on additional meaning.
But for me it feels a little too obvious? A little facile? It just feels strange to me to include 35 verses of Genesis in today’s reading, all beautifully, poetically describing how God made our world come into being, just to focus on the first person plural of one verse.
So, instead, I return to John who, just as beautifully, just as poetically, brings Jesus into the creation story, along with the Creator, the entity that knocks over the first domino, and with them is a wind that sweeps over the face of the waters. Now there I can spot the delicate dance of the Trinity.
Most scholars believe that this part of Genesis was written much later than you would think: during the time when the people of Judah were exiled in Babylon. Now we’ve heard what a devastating, chaotic time that was. It’s always devastating and chaotic to be forcefully removed from your home and shipped off to a foreign land.
So this part of Genesis sought to give order to that devastation and chaos, to show that even out of the darkness God has a plan, and that plan is to build something beautiful.
There is a rhythm to this creation story. On one day, God creates one part of creation, then God pauses, looks it over, and declares it good—except on the day when God creates humankind and adds an extra beat—it is very good.
And God said, “Let there be” and it was. “And there was evening and there was morning” for six days. For six days, the song of creation moves to a steady rhythm. Maybe the exiled Judeans heard this story like a lullaby—yes, the darkness surrounds us for now, but God knows what to do with the darkness.
Through the spoken Word, through the wind that is breath, God calls life into the formless void. Rhythm, the repetition of verses, breath and words. This story of creation is a song, and God—God the Creator, God the Word, God the Breath—is our cosmic crooner.
Faith does not call us to analyze and understand our Trinitarian God intellectually. Faith does not call us to explain which part of the Trinity is greater or how each part works.
Faith calls us to hear the song and to dance, even in the darkness. Amen.
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