Trinity Sunday 2020: a homily on Genesis 1-2, COVID-19, and George Floyd
Trinity Sunday 2020
Genesis 1.1-2.8
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13.11-13
Matthew 28.16-20
Prayer of Invocation
Father, set us free from the bondage of sin, and give us liberty-- the freedom to love and to want the things that you love and want-- as we participate in the abundant life which you have made known to us by Your Spirit in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen
Prayer of Illumination
Spirit of God, breathe life into our hearts, our minds, and our hands and feet--that we may receive your gift of life with joy, and bear witness to your goodness and the world as it truly is.
“I can’t breathe.” Black lives matter. All lives matter.
“Really semantics? That would be like if your wife came up to you and said ‘do you love me?’ and you were like ‘baby I love everybody, what are you talking about? I love all God’s children, what are you saying? You’re no different’”.[1]
Did you bring your face mask?
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
I can’t breathe. Black lives matter. You’re just virtue signaling!
Please wash your hands with soap for 20 seconds.
The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.
Please maintain six feet apart from one another.
8 minutes and 46 seconds. I can’t breathe.
“We can’t agree on anything these days. Black lives matter. That’s a controversial statement! Black lives matter. Not matters more than you. Just matters. Matters. That’s where we are starting the negotiations. We can’t agree on that? What is less than ‘matters’? Black lives exist? Can we say that? Is that controversial?”[2]
I can’t breathe. Let’s just wait until we know all the facts. Let’s not rush to judgment.
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see...that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’[3]
And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Happy Birthday, Breona Taylor. Say her name. All lives matter!
And God said let there be light...
And in plain light, ‘Hey, Ahmaud Arbery, stop, we want to talk to you’.[4] Let’s wait until we know all the facts.
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”...so God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
There is no such thing as White privilege. White fragility! “No one is born white. There is no white biology, but whiteness is real. Whiteness is an invitation to a form of agency...that imagines life progressing toward what is in fact a diseased understanding of maturity…”[5]
Liberal media! Fake news. COVID-19 is a hoax.
And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
I can’t breathe. “A riot is the voice of the unheard.”[6] “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is more dangerous than a bottle of whiskey in the hand of another.”[7]
And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done…
“We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights…I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not...the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”[8]
So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy…
I can’t breathe.
Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden...and there he put the man whom he had formed.
We have always had to read Genesis 1-2 in the midst of tension, in the midst of disorder, in the midst of incoherence and incongruency, in the midst of identity formation and identity distortion, in the midst of trials and testing, in the midst of oppression and calls for liberation; in the midst of waiting, sometimes breathless. And Genesis 1-2 has always presented us with a tension--between the world as we know it, and the world as it could be, as it should be--as it will be?
Genesis does not care to tell us who the author is, or when it was written; it does not care to tell us what the setting is for these words--though many have tried to help us know this! Everyone who has read this text, has read it with a sense of dissonance, with a deep sense that something is wrong with our world.
And yet, Genesis 1-2 is meant to encourage us--literally to give us the courage we need to picture the world as something other than what it seems. The opening chapters of Genesis are an invitation to see the world as God does, and to live accordingly.
And what is the world that is pictured here in Gen 1-2? It is a world that is formed and fashioned by a skilled craftsman who delights in the beauty of his handiwork. It is a world in which the Spirit of God hovers over darkness, emptiness, formlessness, disorder, and with a word God transforms, separates, distinguishes, enlivens, creates potentiality (fruit), enables discovery--and then stands back from it all and says, “very good”--not in a moral sense so much as in a sense of delight. This world, Gen 1-2 tell us, is the result of God’s work and is the object of His delight![9]
And at the culmination of all of that “very goodness” we find rest, peace, shalom: God at rest as he enjoys humans in the garden: fellowship; harmony; everything in its place. Shabbat. Shalom. God steps into darkness and disorder and by His word and His Spirit transforms it into an object of delight and a means of fellowship.
This vision of our world is in direct competition with other ways of imagining what is real and true for our lives. So how do we know that God’s perspective is true? How can Gen 1-2 be encouraging? What confidence do we have that this world narrated in Genesis is in fact the world as it will be?
Easter. Ascension. Pentecost. He is risen; He is at the right hand of the Father; He continues His work by the Spirit in and through His people.
The resurrection says that the world is still the object of God’s delight, that God is still seeking fellowship with humanity. The Ascension and Pentecost say to us that the Father through the Son is reconciling all things by the Spirit--transforming disorder into order, chaos into life. Do not give up hope. Be encouraged. Join in. Share in the “receiving-and-giving” life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And that is what baptism is all about. It clarifies and reminds us of how to picture the world rightly. For to be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is to displace all other allegiances, all other ways of describing what is really real, all other narratives, all other identity markers; for in baptism we say that our most foundational identity is to be united to the life of God and the people of God--water is thicker than blood; the water of baptism is more sacred than the flag. In baptism we acknowledge the world as it truly is--a world in which human beings have been created in the image of God; we say that our brothers and sisters, our family, are made up of disciples of Jesus from every nation, tongue, tribe, and people--from every shade of black and white. Our family has no borders. It is not marked by maps. It is not determined by passports or ideologies.
Since this is our vocation, our calling, we “aim for restoration” (2 Cor 13.11), which is to say we “set things right” or “put things in order”. For Jesus is working to reconcile all things, and since we are joined with him, since we participate in His mission, we will not rest until all things are put in order. We seek to live in peace--but we understand peace not as the absence of conflict (or stress), but as justice, as the absence of oppression, discrimination, violence, hatred, racism, and any other distortion of our humanity.
In one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews, Greeks, slaves, free, black, white, Republican, Democrat), so we greet one another with a holy kiss (in Roman culture [Corinth was a Roman colony], one only greeted family members with a kiss). And because we greet one another with a holy kiss, when one member suffers (our Black brothers and sisters), we all suffer. They are “we”. When we say “we”, we mean the whole body of Christ.
By the power of the Spirit, baptized racists overcome their prejudice and seek the good of the “other”; by the power of the Spirit, baptized nationalists love their country and have compassion on the sojourner, the foreigner, the alien and their children; By the power of the Spirit, baptized upwardly mobile seek to leverage their resources for the sake of others, emptying themselves in order to express God’s generosity and hospitality; by the power of the Spirit, baptized oppressed and discriminated fight for justice but do not avenge themselves—they overcome evil with good, just as Jesus did.
And in so doing, we who are baptized into the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit bear witness to the world that God pictures in Genesis 1-2, and in Jesus on the cross, and in Jesus seated at the right hand...a world that is inaugurated, but yet to come in its fullness, as the Eucharist reminds us.
Benediction
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
[1] From Michael Che, Civil Rights Update (Netflix is a Joke)/ Youtube.
[2] Ibid. Quote adapted for a church audience.
[3] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
[5] Willie Jennings, “Whiteness Isn’t Progress” (Christian Century, Nov 7, 2018).
[6] Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Other America”
[7] Miss Maudie, To Kill a Mockingbird.
[8] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
[9] Walter Moberly, “Genesis 1: Picturing the World” in The Theology of the Book of Genesis, 48.
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