For those of you who didn’t have to go through the four years of the ELCA Lutheran candidacy process to become an Ordained Pastor, you likely don’t know that every year, besides our internship year, we had to write an essay and be interviewed, by committees and different faculty members, to assess our understanding of Scripture and Lutheran theology, and evaluate our growth and fitness for ministry. It was always an intimidating time because it felt so different than writing a paper or preaching a sermon for class. The question in the back of many of our minds was: is this group of people going to tell me that I’m not qualified to follow my calling? The stakes certainly felt higher, too, each year that we progressed through Seminary. Because the reality is that not everyone who wants to become a pastor is allowed to progress through, for both valid, and sometimes less valid, reasons.
Now, you also might not know that one of my favorite books, and movies, is Jurassic Park. Between my lifelong love of dinosaurs and the absolutely brilliant one-liners throughout the movie, I have always felt like it has much to teach us about both life and ministry. If we compare the second book and movie, we technically even get a resurrection story…but for your sake, I won’t get into my thoughts on that! It’s why the table of my Seminary friends got Jurassic Park at the center of their table during our wedding! So, naturally, I quoted Jurassic Park in one of my official interviews with several members of my Synod staff, as well as my faculty advisor. I had the distinct honor of being the first student to quote that in one of those interviews for her in over twenty-five years; amazingly though, I wasn’t the first in her tenure! While it would probably annoy me to no end to be in his presence for an extended period of time, I particularly appreciate Ian Malcolm’s comments regarding chaos theory and how life will find a way forward; there is only so much that we can do as humans to control creation, despite what we may think!
As I know quite well right now from trying to balance working, preparing for vacation, and all that goes into buying a house and moving, there are so many moments in our lives that will feel chaotic and beyond our control. My inclination at the first glimpse of chaos is to tense up and wait for the anxiety to take control of my brain, like a turtle that retreats back into it’s shell. None of that is helpful for me while trying to get anything done, I might add, and in fact makes things more frustrating, but it is still my brain’s first response, nonetheless. And, I have to say, it’s always humbling as a pastor when we need to hear the promises of Scripture ourselves, because we forget them too. So, while the chaos of my current schedule has made me overly apologetic, even more so than usual, and extra grateful for my anxiety medication, one of my coaching colleagues reminded me this past week of all the beautiful things that come from chaos…as she pointed out, we don’t even have to look further than the very beginning in the Genesis story!
I know it can be easy to hear either of the stories of the creation from Genesis and feel ourselves start to tune out a bit because the reading is long and we have possibly heard, or at least heard paraphrases, of it many times in our life. And, for much of our church history, we only ever really talked about the creation story as one that was binary. We get the distinction between day and night, earth and sky, the waters of the sea and the waters of the sky, etc. And, as we have heard over and over again, this story is used to claim that God only created two genders. For better or worse, the binary categories of this creation story help our brains neatly catalog the world into different boxes to help us attempt to make sense of something that otherwise feels incomprehensible.
But I want to challenge the understanding of our creation story as binary and divisive. Instead, it is a story of expansion and an invitation into the life of the Holy Trinity when we hear that we are all created in the image of God. Not just a select group of people, but all of us. Not just people who look and act like we think they should, but all people. It can be challenging to our understanding of the world, and it certainly is a direct challenge to the teachings of Christian Nationalism and White Supremacy, but it is also an invitation to ponder more deeply what this beautiful diversity of life tells us about who God is. After all, we are created in the image of God; God isn’t created in our image, despite the fact that we really want to do that because everything is so much easier if God just looks, thinks, acts, and believes like us! But, what does it tell us about God that this beautiful array of life and experience is a witness to who God is? When we consider that, it might help us see the world, and God, differently.
The life of the Holy Trinity is also often described as “the dance of the Trinity.” It is a life that is active and alive, moving in and among us. When we try to limit all of creation to a binary, it stagnates the movement of the Spirit and tries to contain it in neat little boxes. Just because God rested on the 7th day (Genesis 2: 2-3), it doesn’t mean that creation stopped there, but it continued growing, thriving, and expanding! Rest is an important component, but it is not the ending place. Genesis tells “the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created” (Genesis 2: 4), but our world consists of so much more than just these lists. We have species of animals that are too countless to name, including some weird ones like the platypus, which doesn’t fit into the typical scientific categories because it is a mammal that lays eggs and we are told that mammals don’t do that! We don’t just have morning and night, but we have those times in between: twilight, dusk, dawn, sunrise, and sunset. We don’t just have freshwater and saltwater, but the places where the two meet and mix, creating whole new ecosystems in estuaries and marshes that help to support the rest of creation!
This invitation into the life of the Trinity is an opportunity to observe with awe all that God has created and called good, and everything that the Trinity will continue to create and stir up in and among us! When we hear the “Great Commission,” (Matthew 28: 19) as it has often been called, from Matthew’s Gospel today, we often think about it in terms of converting people to Christianity. But, when we focus so much on just the baptizing part, we forget that Jesus also said to teach people “to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28: 20a). This too, has often been approached from a place of superiority because we know the right way, which means you are obviously wrong and we need to correct you. But, this mentality in itself is a betrayal of those very commandments that Jesus taught us: to love God and love our neighbor.
When Jesus sends the disciples out, it isn’t to complete a mass conversion event or to create a community that was what we now call Christian, remember the Christian church didn’t exist yet at the time of story, in name alone. Instead, the disciples were being sent out to continue spreading this invitation into the life of the Holy Trinity, to welcome others into this dance and outwardly claim the reality that they are a Beloved child of God. When we are sent out into our world from this place, it likely isn’t to go and baptize whole crowds of people. But, we are sent out to see how the ever-expansive nature of creation that started in Genesis continues in our world today because the Trinity is still moving and calling us to participate in its glorious dance and invite others to witness this too. A dance that celebrates in joy the diversity which exists as a reflection of the world that was so lovingly created in God’s image, in the likeness of our God, the Three-in-One, whose very existence breaks the binary mold!
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Sunday May 24th, 2026 Worship