As we celebrate today the feast of the Holy Trinity, the lectionary invites us to listen again to the story of creation, when God “fathered” the whole earth. You may remember that, during Lent, we already spent some time on the book of Genesis, and we talked about how this book was born during a difficult time for the Jews: defeated by the King of Babylon, they had been taken into exile after having lost their land, their city and their temple. In the midst of that, they somehow had lost their faith too, as it can happen when we experience too much suffering. And so, in an effort to find a sense of peace and hope for the future, the Jews started writing. They started writing to understand what had happened to them, and they also started writing to remember how it was like before, in the land of Canaan, and also, mostly, they started to write to remember their God. I guess that, in a certain way, this is what we are called to do today as well. Most Sundays at church, we listen to the Scriptures to ask ourselves what is God’s will for the world and for ourselves, and how is it that we are to respond to God’s call, today though we are more specifically invited to just contemplate who God is.
Now this can be tricky, of course. when we start talking about the Holy Trinity and how is it that God can be Father, Son and Holy Spirit, “three in one and one in three”. We quickly come to the conclusion that it is all a big mystery, that we cannot comprehend God and that actually, if we could comprehend God, it wouldn’t be God at all. I think we had a conversation like that recently in our class: A God that is comprehensible by a human mind wouldn’t be God. Fair enough. And yet there is a problem with that. First, because if we somehow admit that we can say basically anything that come to mind about God with no way to prove whether it’s true or not, it can become very risky to base our hope, our well being and our daily ethics on this God or even just to invest our money in that religion (Think about cults, spiritual abuse, fundamentalism etc.). So that’s a big problem. Then more deeply, assuming that God is just a big mystery, this is essentially the opposite of everything the Christian church teaches, especially when it comes to the Holy Trinity. Indeed, if there is one thing that this doctrine teaches us is that God, far from remaining hidden to human eyes, has stepped out into the world, created the world, inhabited the world and continues to sustain the world: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It does not mean of course that we can comprehend God in the sense that our minds could wrap themselves around God’s being, but what is unique to the monotheistic religion is to believe that God has revealed who God is (in a way we could understand): God has given the Scriptures and the Law through Moses, and the Prophets, and the Quran to Mohamed. Even more so with Christianity, we believe that God has shown us in Jesus who God is. So there we go: As Christians, there are things we believe we know for sure about God, not because we “hold the truth“ but because we believe that God has communicated these things through revelation in a way we human beings could understand. Believing in the Holy Trinity means that we believe that the nature of our God is to reveal God.
So who is this God?
Well, that’s when we go back to the story of Genesis because as surely as the Jews needed to be reminded of their God, we need to be reminded too. And the story does not keep us in suspense, does it? We’re right here, at the very beginning of the whole Bible and this is what we learn right away: God is good. God is good and God has created a good world. The God we come to encounter in the Bible dissipates the chaos, separates one thing from another, brings order, adorns with beauty, creates life, gives to each creature food that does not require killing (only plants), and God also gives freedom, responsibility, a future, and even rest! work and vacation, a holy day to be with God each week.
God gives God to God’s creation and God’s own likeness to human beings. God gives a good world to good creatures, a world of peace and harmony. Now we may have gotten used to this idea, but imagine how strange it was to tell that story at a time where all religions plus or less believed that the gods were in competition with each other, using human beings to their own ends and to their own service. But God decided to tell us who God is through the Scriptures and maybe it is urgent for us, as it was during the Exile, to be reminded too.
We need to be reminded that God is good at a time where we hear everything and anything about God, and this even in our own church: You may be aware that the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda has thanked the leaders of his nation for the new anti LGBTQ laws, laws that could enforce the penalty of death on those who practice homosexuality. We need to be reminded that God has created a good world when we seem to be so at war with nature, thinking it’s our own privilege to use up all the resources of the earth. God has given us responsibility for the creation, not a license to exploit it to satisfy our greed. We need to be reminded of the goodness of human beings, when we are tempted to replace our human interactions with machines, phones of course but as of recently, Artificial intelligence and robots. We need to be reminded that we are made for each other as Adam and Eve were made for each other. Indeed, it was a strange experience to me this week to re-read this old text from Genesis, a passage that so many people today would consider irrelevant because it’s not scientific enough, and to realize how much we actually all need to hear those words spoken to us again. Our God is not a God of power, of judgment, of domination, our God is a good God who gives life to all and create all there is out of God’s goodness and put God’s goodness inside of us.
And maybe that’s the most important thing we need to be reminded of today: That we can look at ourselves and be reminded that we are created good, too, and actually “very good”, according to the text of Bible. The meaning of the Holy Trinity is not just that God has made God known to us, in the way that God has shown us who God is in our eyes, rather the Holy Trinity means that God has come to include us into God’s being, to make sure that we participate in God’s life,as it was intended from the beginning. Maybe one of the main problems of our times is that we don’t believe anymore that we are meant for goodness, and we keep seeing each other as a potential danger, as an enemy, or even just as a rival ready to seize what we have. Maybe one of the main problems of our times is that we have become unable to find our own goodness inside of us, and our dissatisfaction with life comes from our own anger at ourselves for not being big enough, and our greed becomes a way to compensate for all the things we imagine would make us feel a little more complete. Or maybe we simply find ourselves not good enough, too much of a failure, too broken too weary. But God continues to look at us speaking God’s words of blessing, no matter what we think of ourselves, and no matter what we do. We just need to hear it.
So this is what I invite us to do today as a way to honor the Holy Trinity: to remember God’s goodness, the goodness of creation, the goodness of our partner or neighbor and maybe even more specifically, the goodness inside of ourselves. It’s not about giving credit to ourselves for all the great things we do, rather it is to become more aware of our ability to communicate a little bit of who God is, receiving God’s love and trust and giving back, spreading this love and this trust. Every Sunday we come to church to ask ourselves what is God’s will for the world and for ourselves, and how is it that we are to respond to God’s call, but no matter our age, condition, way of life, we can all make a huge difference in this world by just letting God being God inside of us, a good God indeed.