To the Holy Spirit that accompanies us, with the Father who created us, and the Son that showed us how to love, be given all honor and glory, world without end. Amen
Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd.
So God created humankind in God’s image,
in the image of God they were created;
male and female they were created.
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and care for it;”
Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd
And God saw everything that was made and called it very good.
The world is on fire. People by the thousands are taking to the street in a time of a great pandemic. People of every skin tone, ability, language, age, and religion are gathering in sadness and horror that once again our brothers and sisters are being murdered simply because in this country, certain people are not seen as having been created in God’s image. Rather than being able to see each and every child of God as beautiful and full of possibility, we have once again said that certain of us are to be feared and restrained and even extinguished without much pain at the cost that one life means to so many. People by the thousands are coming together to say “No more!” People across the world, are wearing masks, trying to stay safely apart while marching for the 11th day saying “Black Lives Matter” and “Silence is Complicity” and “We remember Ahmaud, Breonna, and George.”
As people of God who pray and worship and work to care for others, we know that the senseless murder of these people is an abomination. What are we allowing to continue? Our sisters and brother’s blood cries out to God from the earth.
Our scriptures speak over and over that we are to love, that we are be awake, that we are to be responsive to the needs of others, that we are to pay particular attention to care for those who suffer, those who are the most vulnerable. In them, we are told, we see Jesus. In this time of pandemic, the veil is being ripped off on the pervasiveness of the suffering of our neighbors. So many lives are undone by any disruption in our society—whether it be storms or floods or fires, whether it be financial maleficence, pandemics, or systems that place goods over lives. And they are the last to recover from this disruption.
In Genesis 1:27, when we hear “God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God they were created; male and female were created by God.”
What does this mean in this time? What are we to see in God’s image. What is the image in which each of us are created?
In talking with children about God, I have used books written by Rabbi Sandy Sasso. Rabbi Sasso through beautiful language and vivid pictures shares the many ways we can experience God as love, beauty, companion and friend.
One of her books is titled In God’s Name[1]. In it she tells how God gave every created being a name—every animal, every insect, every plant, every human. And yet when God was asked the name that would identify God, God says, “I am who I am.” Or “I will be who I will be.” While this certainly speaks to our total dependence on God’s willingness to be known to us. I also believe this allows us to imagine God everywhere and in everything. The farmer may see God as the Source of Life. The mother of small children may see God as the great Comforter. The doctor or nurse who works to care for very sick patients without a definable treatment may turn to God as the great Healer, not only for their patients, but for their exhausted and grieving selves. Those of us who wander in a world that seems to be being torn apart, may seek God as the way, the truth, and the life.
We experience God in so many ways. On this day of the celebration of Trinity Sunday, when Creator, Christ, Spirit is explored, we enter with fear and trembling into considering what we believe about the nature of God—in whose image we are created as our reading from Genesis affirms. How do we know who we are, what we were made for, and who we should be to each other, unless we seek to know something of God?
The truth of God will always exceed us. The truth of God will always confront, convict, and remake us, even as it soothes and affirms us. It is good and right to remember that we are made in God’s image. We are not to reshape God to fit ours. But if the desire and delight of God is that we live into the fullness of the Imago Dei, then we must commit ourselves to studying and experiencing God’s nature in all its fullness and complexity.
So where can we start on this Trinity Sunday?
One of the first things we see in the Trinity is God as relational. It is one thing to say that God values community. Or that God thinks community is good for us. It’s something else to say that God is communal. That God is relationship, intimacy, connection and communion. Throughout Scripture the relationship of God the Son, God the Father, and God the Spirit interweave in love and support and affirmation. If God is interactive at God’s very heart, then we witness the life-changing power of the communal. God is relationship, it is in relationship with God, ourselves, each other, and the world that we experience and embody God’s nature.
In the Trinity we see God is diverse. If God exists in three persons, each person has their own way of embodying and expressing goodness, beauty, love, and righteousness. As Richard Rohr says, the Trinity affirms that there is an intrinsic plurality to goodness. “Goodness isn’t sameness,” he writes in The Divine Dance. “Goodness, to be goodness, needs contrast and tension, not perfect uniformity.” Difference lies at the very heart of God’s nature.
God shares with us in the “Divine Dance” of being a part of God’s great plurality and diversity. God did not create one type of flower and call it a day. No! God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good.
God did not create one bird and stop. No, God created hundreds of species of finches as well as designing birds of every size, shape and color from the condor to the blue heron to the puffin to the hummingbird.
Life abundant and the magnificence of creation includes God’s joy in creating a platypus, a Siberian tiger, and a peacock spider.
God’s masterpiece in creating humans of every body shape and skin tone, hair texture, and eye color, voice pitch and variety of creative expression, intellectual breadth and endless manifestation of curiosity is certainly a glorious expression of God’s delight in an infinite display of diversity. As children of God, made in the image of God who is Creator, Christ, and Spirit, we are given the gift of beauty in an infinite range of possibilities—God’s diverse nature being realized in its fullness among us. And because God created and saw that creation was good, we can see the sacredness of everything and our connection with everything.
In the Trinity we see that God is sacrificial love. The Trinity at its heart is an expression of deep, unfaltering, and life-giving love between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The relationship between the persons of the Godhead is not a relationship of domination, power-mongering, manipulation, or jealousy. It is a relationship of overflowing self-giving love.
Archbishop Desmund Tutu describes this in ubuntu. Ubuntu, a word from the Nguni language in Africa, can be described as meaning “my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound, in yours…a person is a person through other persons.” “A person with ubuntu,” Tutu says, “is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole.”[2]
In the example of the Trinity, we are shown through God’s relationship of love that love is not a limited good. In reality, for me to achieve my full humanity you too must achieve your full humanity. There is dignity and mercy enough for all.
If God’s very being is relational. If God’s very being delights in diversity. If God’s very being is grounded in sacrificial love, then this is our image. This is the imprint we bear. This is the stamp on our origin—-relationship, diversity, and limitless love is the mold from which we are made.
In this time of pandemic, when the cancer of racism continues to ravage our humanity, why is the Trinity of any importance? Because when the world is reeling and desperate, we are reminded that we are made in the image of a mysterious, diverse, relational, and loving God who wants to guide us into the whole truth of who God is and who we are. The Trinity is important because its mystery has the power to transform our hearts, leading us toward unity and diversity, relationship and self-giving love.
God who has never had a low view of humanity invites us into the healing of our eyes, so that we may see as God does. God who loved each of us into existence, calls us to open our ears to the music that heals, celebrating the entanglement of differences so that even in our discord, we may hear that we ourselves are a part of a Three-Part Harmony.
God who is both beyond our grasp and lives deep within our hearts, leads us within the eternal life of Jesus, to celebrate the breadth of our humanity, the sanctity of each part of creation, and our participation in the relational, diverse, and sacrificial love of the Trinity.
Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd,
God created them in God’s image,
in the image of God they were created;
male and female they were created.
God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.
May we live as if it is so.
Amen
[1] Sandy Eisenberg Sasso. In God’s Name. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1994.
[2] Desmund Tutu. No future without forgiveness. New York: Doubleday, 1999.