Genesis 1:1--2:4a
Matthew 28:16-20
June 19, 2011
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
The title of the sermon that I set out to preach was “Room for Every People.” It was going to be based on the Matthew text and it was going to be about the broad inclusiveness of the movement that Jesus founded. I set out to preach that sermon and I think it might have been a good one. I got sidetracked.
I got sidetracked by three things. The first two are the scripture lessons that we have heard. They don’t seem to have a great deal to do with each other. The first is one of two creation stories featured in Genesis. The second is the so-called Great Commission. The first tells the story of God speaking the universe, our world, the plants and animals that occupy it, and finally us into being. In the second, Jesus tells his disciples (and we are meant to overhear) to make disciples of Jesus Christ. What do the two have in common?
What an odd pair of texts for Trinity Sunday! And that’s the third thing that distracted me: the fact that today is the first Sunday after Pentecost, which in our liturgical calendar makes it Trinity Sunday. So my new sermon title (with apologies to Rogers and Hammerstein) is, “What Do You Do With a Problem Like the Trinity?”
The texts seem to have been chosen because they both refer to the Trinity. Matthew does it openly and clearly: Jesus tells us that as we make disciples we are to baptized them “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
The Genesis text is less clear, but the Christian tradition has read this passage in a way that makes a connection. In the very first verse there is God. In the second verse there is the Holy Spirit: the wind from God that “swept over the face of the waters.” In both Hebrew and Greek, there is only one word for breath, wind and spirit. So the wind is spirit and the spirit is from God and therefore it is the Holy Spirit. Okay, but where is the Son? The Christian tradition has found the Son in the third verse, where God speaks. God’s speech is God’s word. Christ is referred to in John’s gospel and in other places as well as God’s “word.” So there you have it: the Trinity at creation.
With all due respect to our tradition this sounds like a bit of a stretch to me. Then, while I was mowing my yard yesterday and ruminating on these things, something fell into place. It turns out that the two passages have more in common than direct and indirect mentions of the Trinity. They are both stories that were told while God’s people were dealing with an empire. In the first, God’s people were living in exile in the city of Babylon, the home city of the Babylonian empire. In the second, God’s people were dealing with the Roman empire. A good guess for where Matthew’s gospel was written puts it in Antioch of Syria, a very important city of the eastern empire, one that often served as a garrison for Roman legions.
What is even more important about our two stories is that they were both stories that were told against their respective empires. They are both resistance stories, stories of resistance to the empire in which they live.
Now that’s not immediately obvious, so it’s only fair that I tell you why I say that.
In the Genesis passage we have a creation story in which God makes all that is in a series of creative acts that are described as “good.” The Babylonians have a creation story, too. In that story, Marduk, the chief of the gods of Babylon, created the world by defeating the dragon Tiamat and using the halves of her carcass to fashion the heavens and the earth. Marduk then created humankind to work so that the gods wouldn’t have to.
Tiamat is hinted at in Genesis. The word for “the deep,” the formless waters that existed before God spoke, is tehôm, a word that is both related and close enough in sound to Tiamat that the hearers would have gotten the connection. But God subdues the tehôm with a simple word of command; there is no need for combat. Compared to our God, this Jewish text says, Marduk is not much of a god. This a bold assertion when we remember that the Jews were a people who had been conquered and taken into exile by the armies of Babylon. “We may be a subject people,” the text seems to say, “but we have the dignity of belonging to a God who makes yours look a swaggering blowhard.”
Perhaps even more subversive is the way in which the days of creation are arranged. The Babylonians also had a seven-day week and their creation story distributes creative acts to each day of the week like this story. But the Genesis story squeezes the work of creation into only six days, leaving the seventh day as a day of rest. The Jewish tradition has looked back on this story and said that the very crown of creation is not humanity, though that was pretty cool, “very good,” according to the story. The crown of creation is Shabbat, sabbath, rest.
But look a little closer: Marduk made human beings so that the gods wouldn’t have to do any work. People would do all the work. This then becomes the pattern for human life. Just as people exist to do the work so that the gods don’t have to, the lower classes exist to do the work so that royalty and nobility don’t have to. And other cities and peoples exist so that Babylon can live in luxury without having to work for it. As is true of all creation stories, this one serves as an explanation of the world.
The Jewish exiles by making Shabbat the crowning glory of its creation story, told a story that struck at the very heart of Babylon’s ideology. Human beings weren’t created so that God would have minions. When God made human beings, God put them in charge of creation! When God is done with creation, God rests. But the rest isn’t just for God; it’s for everybody and everything. On Shabbat, people rest, all people. Rich or poor, they rest. Slave or free, they rest. Young and old, they rest. Men and women rest. The animals rest. Even the land gets its rest one year out of seven.
The Babylonian story justifies the rule of the gods over people, the rule of kings over common folk, the rule of Babylon over its subject peoples. The world is arranged like a pyramid and everyone serves the one above them. The Babylonians imagined into being a world in which there is perpetual need. Even the gods can starve to death. They will unless someone serves them. Marduk solved the god’s problem by conquering Tiamat. The Babylonians look to solve theirs by conquering their neighbors. The strong are rich; the weak are poor.
The story of the Jewish exiles subverts all of that. Their story imagines into being a world in which the earth is good. The good earth supports our life so that we don’t have to labor all the time. In fact, we can do nothing at all one day each week and there will still be enough. We can give the land one year in seven to produce whatever it chooses to produce and there will still be enough. The story of Shabbat is a story of resistance to empire.
Matthew’s story is a story of resistance, too. Matthew’s empire is Rome, not Babylon, but the resemblances are still there. Remember how Matthew starts? He starts with a genealogy, like the stories that kinds and emperors tell about themselves. Then he has a story in which imperial counselors come from the east and ask to see the new-born king. Do you remember the reaction of the actual king? The empire strikes back at any threat, real or perceived. Anything is justified when it comes to defending its power, even the slaughter of innocents. I think we call them “collateral damage” nowadays. At the other end of the story, Jesus is killed because he threatened the political and religious arrangements in occupied Roman Palestine.
Matthew tells his story of Jesus in part as a story of Jesus’ and his followers’ resistance to the Empire. His favorite strategy is irony. Herod in his palace imagines himself safe from political threat. In the meantime the real king has been born and lives in a house so ordinary that it can’t be found without neon signs—or wandering stars, I can’t remember which. Jesus preaches a new reality that he calls “heaven’s empire.” The greatest irony is that one who died a despised death at the hands of the empire should be the one who carries imperial titles like the Son of God.
In our story today, Matthew uses imperial language ironically yet again. The Romans claimed to have brought all the world’s peoples into its empire. Shedding their blood and at the point of a sword, all the world’s people were brought into submission to Roman laws. In Matthew’s story, Jesus tells his disciples, just eleven of them in this account, to do what the Roman legions had done, only for them it will be different. They won’t make subjects; they will make disciples. They won’t spill blood; they will baptize with water. They won’t impose Roman law; they will teach people what Jesus told them: love your enemies, be peacemakers, seek justice above everything else so that you will have what you need.
Read in this way, these stories become powerful stories of resistance told against whatever the current empire happens to be.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that they can’t be told differently. They have been. The story of a world that is so good that we may live in it without scarcity, has been told as a story that gives us permission to do anything to creation that we want in our zeal to exercise dominion. Read in this way, the story becomes an excuse to act just like the Babylonians. The story of Jesus’ sending the disciples read in another way gives them permission to behave just like the Romans have: compelling everyone to submit to their way of life and faith and threatening them with (eternal) death if they don’t.
Both of these stories have been used as imperial narratives, but I’m asking us to let them resistance stories instead. I’m asking us to do this, because have our own empire to deal with, an empire every bit as ruthless as either of these. In the face of our empire, we are summoned to live faithfully and these subversive stories are one of our very few resources for doing that.
These stories also tell us something about the character of the triune God to whom we belong. (You thought I had forgotten!) The world is good and we are good because the God who made us is good. The God who made us delights in our delight, not our slavish devotion.
The God who made us lived among us. In the person of Jesus God lived life from our perspective. He woke up hungry at night. He needed his diapers changed. He learned to talk and walk. He puzzled over the injustices he saw around him. He longed for peace. And he taught us how we might life lives in the face of the empire that are fully human, just and peaceful.
The God who made us and who walked alongside us continues to live within each of us and within our communities. So we have all we need to resist the dehumanizing forces around us, the strength we need to live as Jesus taught us. We have all that we need to hear these stories come alive for us and through us. We have all we need to tell our own stories in our own day out of our own struggle.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
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