4 June 2023 – First Sunday after Pentecost; Trinity Sunday
by The Rev. Dr. Richard Burden
Sermon preached by The Rev. Dr. Richard Burden
Below is a DRAFT text of the homily. It may vary considerably from the recorded version. Please excuse typos and grammatical errors, and do not cite without permission.
It’s the beginning of our more relaxed season here, with no choir, and no church school…so let’s have a little fun. I’m going to read you two different translations of a lines of scripture and ask you to think about which one you prefer…or, to make it more interesting which one you would choose, if you were in charge of selecting a translation for the whole church. Ready?
“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth” [NRSV]…or “When God began to create heaven and earth” [Jewish Study Bible]…which would you choose?
A key question I hear in these different translations is: Is God finished with creation—“God created”? Or is creation dynamic and still ongoing—“When God began creating…”?
Here’s another, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”
Or, “When beginning he, God, created the heavens and the earth, the earth was shapeless and formless and bleakness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God, she, fluttered over the face of the waters.” (Gafney, Wil, A Woman’s Lectionary for the Whole Church).
Which of those speaks to you? Which would you pick to be read in every church in the land?
Translation is a tricky business because not only are verb tenses sometimes hard to figure out (has God finished with creation, or is God still working on it?), but Hebrew is a language in which gender is part of the construction (like a lot of other languages, French and German for example), but English is not. So when translating the Hebrew word God (which is grammatically male), translators over the centuries have very comfortably used the male pronoun “he” for God, but then when coming upon the Hebrew word for Spirit (or breath) which is grammatically feminine, these same translators have chosen to NOT insert “she” anywhere. Instead, as Rev. Wil Gafney has argued, “translators have historically avoided grammatical construction that would require a pronoun for the Spirit […] rather they repeat “the spirit” as the perpetual subject,” she says. We do get some sense of this in other parts of scripture, Wisdom/Sophia is portrayed as feminine in the Book of Proverbs, for example. Gafney further points out that, “In Greek, [so in the New Testament] the word for “spirit” is [grammatically neuter], meaning,” she says, “that in the breadth of scriptures the spirit is anything and everything but masculine.” [Gafney, Woman’s Lectionary. 201].
It’s good to look at other translations, and to hear a familiar text in a different voice, and to ponder: why did the translators made the choices they made, and to see what other possibilities there are.
I raise this today—on Trinity Sunday— in particular because we are constantly in danger of getting used to things…and having certain key terms and ideas become reified…calcified…ossified…stuck…in certain patterns.
Which is a real problem when we’re talking about the Trinity, because the Trinity is the antidote to stuck-ness…the Trinity is all about process…and change…and transformation…Wisdom teacher Cynthia Bourgeault calls the Trinity “the driveshaft” of Christianity…of all creation, really, it is “the compassionate expression of […] Uncreated Reality in creation. [Bourgeault, Holy Trinity and the Law of Three]. In fact, she traces the evolution of the Trinity from manifesting: the desire to create, and the unmanifested: the chaos of uncreation, combined with the reconciling force of the word spoken…which transforms the whole into the heart of God, Wisdom, and Logos/Word, which gives rise to the unity of God, the created world/Incarnation, and Spirit/Wisdom. Ok. I know…It’s the first week of summer…and I promised something lighter and now I’m trying to get you to think about the dynamic mystery of the Holy Trinity……and I get that it’s really hard to conceive of. And it’s made ever harder when our only language for it has become stuck in the this one triad of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It would be helpful to have other images to work with. So I started looking around for other ways people have described this dynamic reality.
Here are several that both Cynthia Bourgeault, and Wil Gafney propose—see which ones resonate with you:
Unmanifest/manifesting/manifested
Hidden ground of love/Wisdom/Word
God/Word/Word made flesh
Mother-Sophia/Jesus-Sophia/Spirit-Sophia
Sovereign, Savior, Shelter
Author, Word, Translator
Parent, Partner, Friend
Majesty, Mercy, Mystery
Creator, Christ, Compassion
Potter, Vessel, Holy Fire
Life, Liberation, Love
There’s nothing wrong with Father, Son, Holy Spirit…in fact there’s an awful lot right with it…but it’s not the only choice out there. Just like both, “In the beginning, God created” and “When God began to create” are faithful, honest, and true choices…but they are still choices. Remember that every time we encounter scripture…we are encountering someone’s choices about it…often many someones.
And that’s not a bad thing…actually it’s a good thing, because the choices that we are called to make as we encounter scripture…and engage with it…and struggle with it…over and over might actually reflect this dynamic, ever transforming Trinitarian God who tends to not shut down choices…but is forever opening up possibilities and enticing us towards deeper knowledge of ourselves, healthier relationships with our fellow created beings, and closer relationships with every person in this whole Holy Trinity.
Amen.