The Creative Love of our Triune God

Trinity Sunday, Year A
Sermon for May 31, 2026

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Happy Trinity Sunday, Church of the Epiphany. That’s the last time I’ll have a greeting other than “Good Morning” for many, many months. As I mentioned in the enotes this week, I’m looking forward to “Ordinary Time” this year, even if it lasts until Advent.

Today’s principal feast focuses on the Trinity, as you might expect. This is the Sunday many priests hand the sermon off if they can in hopes of avoiding heresy. I like preaching Trinity Sunday though. I think I avoided heresy in my sermon last year, talking about the Trinity as a dance, as a mystery-filled relationship at the heart of the image of God.

But this year, in Year A, as I’ll probably be stunned by again in three years’ time when the lectionary comes around again… this year, we are given 35 verses of the Old Testament to start our service. Karen did a great job reading these two and a half pages in our bulletins; it was a lot more OT than we’re used to reading. It’s a familiar story for us, probably, this Genesis 1 account of the creation of the world. One of two foundational creation stories found at the beginning of Jewish scripture for thousands of years now, our seven-day narrative covers the creation of light that separates day from night, the creation of a dome that separates the waters, the creation of dry land and vegetation, the creation of two great lights (the sun and the moon), the creation of living creatures in the waters and the sky, and the creation of land animals and humans, mentioned as created in God’s image. Then, of course, on the seventh day, we read, God rests. Nice and tidy, no Big Bang needed here. Seven 24-hour days, from before there was a sun… boom, done.

Let’s fast-forward a few millennia. On Memorial Day, May 28, 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Has anyone visited? Maybe you’ve visited the museum’s “Ark Encounter,” the theme park with a 510-foot “life-sized” reconstruction of Noah’s Ark, just down the road? No? Maybe a church field trip some time. Well, in 2007, the international organization “Answers in Genesis” opened their Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, a 75,000 square foot museum that cost $27 million. This museum focuses on “young Earth creationism,” on the idea that evolution is a harmful myth, that our world is around 6,000 years old, as traced through the Bible, that science has lost the plot, and that we can read exactly how the world was formed in our scripture text this morning, that God decided to be active over six 24-hour days in about 4,000 BC. Thank God for this “textbook” in our pews this morning! (/s) The museum and ark have boasted over 10 million visitors in their nearly 20 years of operation, visitors who have seen exhibits explaining that the flood was responsible for the end of the dinosaurs and all the fossils we find today, exhibits that, while appearing to be museum quality, argue that liberals and “secularist scientists” are actively trying to write religion out of existence.

You might be able to guess the Creation Museum is not one of my favorite places, that I believe it feeds off and feeds into the divides in our country, that it is one of the many places where a certain branch of American Christianity can hear that they are threatened and that they need to fight, fight all the powers, from liberal theologians to… geologists.

But I bring the Creation Museum up this morning not to simply lambast it, but to say that this view of the creation narrative – that it should be considered a literal description, like a science textbook – is far more popular and assumed to be correct than you want to believe. It is a dangerous, misinformed interpretation, not just a silly one. It feeds into the divisions in our world; it encourages Christians to fight fellow Americans and to fight science and reason. That interpretation is not ours in the Episcopal Church, for countless reasons: it is fundamentalist, it is a misunderstanding of the origins and purposes of scripture itself, it is illogical, and it is harmful. If you read this poetic, ancient narrative this morning and thought that all Christians are supposed to believe this is literal text, lest they be heathens, let’s talk. That’s not it. Please, for your sake and ours, don’t land there.

Instead, we know, from discussing Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass here as a parish this last month, that there are countless creation narratives, that each indigenous people (along with countless religions around the world across the ages) have their own stories as to how the world came into being. And we know that each story tells a little bit about how these communities view God and God’s interactions in and relationships with the world. Early in her book, Kimmerer tells the story of “Skywoman Falling,” a creation story of the Potawatomi people, where a matriarch living in the skyworld falls from the sky, grabbing on to the tree of life as she falls into an endless, dark ocean. She is then helped by water animals, she spreads mud on a turtle’s shell, she dances in thanksgiving, in relationship with the animals she finds, all willing to help her, spreading seeds as she goes… and the land grows. In this particular story, we see a creator in relationship with the world, and we see humans given a role of caretaker and “younger sibling of creation,” there to learn from the animals and life around them, just as the skywoman did. And, there are more stories like this one from which all of us can take inspiration while still believing in science and scientific inquiry into the age and origins of our planet.

So, what inspiration do we take from our biblical creation story this morning, from the poetic interpretation of the beginning of the world shared by Jews in Jesus’s time? This creation story in Genesis might be too familiar to us to be seen as beautiful; the Potawatami creation story has a lot to teach us in part because it is unfamiliar and new. But this story, what I would call our story, what do we learn here? I have a few thoughts.

First, the Jews tell of a God who sees “the earth in complete chaos,” and this God decides to do something. From the very beginning of our story, we as Christians profess that our God is not a watchmaker who made something and then stood aside to let it tick until it stops ticking. Ours is an active God, at play in the creation of the world, still active in our lives now, today. Second, I think we see something about God’s priorities, creating light, creating vegetation, creating animals. These creations are all worthy of our appreciation, light and life, and thus we should treat them as such, as gifts, creations, not just because we live with these gifts, but because they are God’s. Third, God likes rest. So… rest. And maybe last for us this morning, certainly last in the order of creation, God makes humans. We are made in God’s image here in this text, “male and female he created them,” it says in this centuries-old Jewish understanding of the world. But we are made and charged to care for and subdue (not subjugate) the wild parts of the world, we are made to eat of its bounty, every plant and fruit. This world is ours to tend. Thanks be to God for all of it.

On this Trinity Sunday, I need to point out too that God said, “Let us make humans in our image.” These are plural words, “us” and “our.” For centuries now, Christians have understood these plural words in our creation narrative to describe a Triune God, one that Jesus describes in today’s gospel as Father, Son, and Spirit. The Spirit may be the wind from God in the first verses of the creation narrative; many scholars like that idea, of the Spirit sweeping over the waters here, sweeping into the Red Sea to free the Israelites from Egypt, sweeping into the house where the disciples were sitting on Pentecost, wind sweeping through our pinwheels last Sunday. God, the Son, and this “windy” Spirit are present from the beginning of creation in the “us” and the “our.” And in today’s gospel, we read all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus, for us to trust and obey him. We know what this creator, Triune God looks like in our lives thanks to Jesus, born in a lowly manger, who lived, loved, suffered, and died, just as we all do and will.

Friends, this morning, the God of creation, the God of our narrative, is one who is active in our world and in our lives, who loves us enough to gift us life, to give us a bountiful creation to tend and care for and love. We see what love looks like in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; we have that love empowering us through the Holy Spirit.

Today and every day, may our understanding of the world be based in this story of love, not in fundamentalism nor fear nor in a need to fight, but in the love of our Triune God.

Amen.