This is the Pastor’s Blog for the Service on Sunday May 31st. This week is Trinity Sunday and the message is titled “From the Beginning”. Included here is the primary Scripture of this message and the Pastor’s notes.
Scripture: Genesis 1.1-5
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.
Pastor’s Message:
Some years ago, our family went to Alaska. We cruised the Inside Passage and spent several days on land, taking a train from Anchorage to Fairbanks. The highlight of that train trip was our time in Denali where we took a bus into the national park. The bus driver, who was also our tour guide, slowed to a stop and pointed to a bear with three cubs on a hillside. They were pretty far away – we needed binoculars to see them well. The tour guide said something that I’ve never forgotten: “It is very possible that these bears have never encountered a human before.”
Wow.
It’s difficult to articulate the sense of vastness this experience evokes. We are so accustomed to our human lives in our human communities with our human concerns. To consider that there is life that exists outside the realm of our human orbit is humbling. It is also a needed corrective in these days of human actions affecting life and the climate across the globe.
So let’s go back to the beginning and see what wisdom we might find.
There is a detail in the first chapter of Genesis that is easy to overlook because it’s in the very first sentence.
Before God creates anything, before land appears, before the stars and creatures and humanity are spoken into being, there is breath.
The writer of this book of beginnings tells us that the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. As we have mentioned before, the Hebrew word here is ruach, which can be interchangeably translated as spirit, wind, or breath. Before God speaks creation into existence, God breathes over chaos.
The first divine movement at the beginning of all things is not exerting control over chaos, it is breath.
And God’s breath changes everything. God’s breathing over the face of the waters sounds the first note of the great symphony that is creation.
The orderliness of the first chapter of Genesis describes God’s great artistic work that is creation. First there is the divine breath, then the light and dark are separated. The watery expanse of chaos is separated so that the sky and land can appear. Plants are breathed into being, and then the “great lights” of the sky – the sun, the moon, and the stars. Sea creatures begin to swim in the oceans, and birds fly through the sky. Land animals are spoken into being, And then humanity springs from God’s spoken word.
It’s all so very orderly that it can seem that God snaps the divine fingers a few times and produces the cosmos. But the writer of Genesis suggests something more gentle and relational. Some English translations use the word “swept” to talk about God’s Spirit-breath over the waters of chaos. Other translations use the word “hover,” as a mother bird hovers over her nest. God’s breath is nurturing the creation that is about to be born. Creation begins not with a show of God’s control, but with a breath that nurtures.
Today is Trinity Sunday on the church calendar. Last Sunday was Pentecost, which marks the giving of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church. It makes sense that we follow the celebration of Pentecost with a celebration of the Triune God.
I have a confession, though. Maybe some of you can relate. When I started seminary, I was not a Trinitarian. Understanding God to be three-in-one just did not make rational sense to me. But therein lies the problem. The Triune God can’t be limited to a “this-makes-perfect-sense” box, right? I recall one of my seminary professors telling the class not to trust anyone who says they can explain the Trinity!
God exists beyond our well-reasoned examples and answers. This is where faith and trust come in. We can’t explain how God exists as three-in-one, but our heart experience can understand this.
This leads me to a question: how have you experienced God?
[pause]Many of us experience the holy when we are awed by creation – like when I saw a bear family that not only didn’t see me, but likely had never seen a human.
Some of us experience God through the presence and kindness of another person. Some of us experience God in community, where we are buoyed up and supported by the love and compassion that exists in communities like this one.
This is a hallmark of the Triune God: relationship. Whether we experience God through other humans, or through an awe-filled experience of creation, the word that continually issues forth from the Triune God is you are not alone.
One of the most beautiful books on the Trinity I’ve ever read is “The Divine Dance” by Father Richard Rohr. Rohr describes God not as a far-off, disinterested ruler in the sky, but as relationship itself — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existing in eternal self-giving love and perfect communion. Each “person” of the Trinity relates perfectly with the other two “persons” without losing identity. Creation emerges from the overflow of this divine communion.
The Spirit hovering and breathing over the waters at the beginning is not merely ordering things on a “creation check list.” With a breath at the beginning, the Spirit invites all of creation into the dance of communion – the dance of the Triune God.
Here’s something else: chaos is present at the beginning. The writer of Genesis does not say the Spirit avoids the darkness or that the Spirit conquers it. The Spirit hovers over it.
It is all too human to want to have our bad habits corrected and our lives in order so that we can be worthy of God’s grace. But Genesis says the Holy Spirit moves directly over the deep — over confusion, emptiness, uncertainty.
The Spirit doesn’t harshly judge disorder. In fact, sometimes it feels like the Holy Spirit can be felt in chaos and disorder, maybe even leading us toward the margins so coax us out of the boxes in which we put ourselves..
That matters because many of us carry within us our own “formless voids.” Anxiety. Weariness. Questions about the future. Relationships that feel broken. Faith that feels unreliable.
Yet Genesis says the Spirit hovers there too, in the middle of it. Breathes into it.
And then God speaks: “Let there be light.”
Creation begins with divine speech carried on divine breath.
Throughout Scripture, breath is a sign of God’s life. After the resurrection, Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. At Pentecost, the Spirit arrives with rushing wind, giving birth to the Church.
From Genesis to resurrection, God keeps breathing life into creation, into frightened, fragile humanity. Perhaps salvation is learning to breathe with God again.
That is part of the vision behind Fr. Rohr’s “The Divine Dance” — that the Christian life is participation in the flow of divine love already moving through creation. The Spirit is not absent from the world waiting for permission to enter. The Spirit is already hovering, already breathing, already sustaining life.
Every breath we take is given by God. Every inhalation and exhalation is pure grace.
The Holy Spirit still hovers, inviting us into the dance of the Triune God: to breathe deeply of God’s presence; to trust that light and goodness can emerge from chaos; to believe that love is stronger than fear.
From the beginning this has been so, and it will always be so. God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God.
Closing prayer
