Chaos is the Mother of Creation + Trinity A+ ACL/MCL + 2026

 

Chaos is the Mother of Creation

Trinity Sunday, Year A, 2026

 

St Paul’s Emmanuel, Santa Paula and All Santos, Oxnard

The Revs. Alene and Melissa Campbell-Langdell

 

We are transported in the Gospel story to a mountain top.  The wind blows through our hair as we struggle to make sense of what we are seeing in front of us.  We have just been through the strangest 40 days of all time as the teacher we were following was killed and then “not killed”?  He was dead, but now he isn’t?  The world feels chaotic.  Suddenly, he stands before us, and some have bowed their heads or even knelt in worship.  People are not supposed to worship another human.  How are we to make sense of this moment?  How do we make sense of our own longing to risk it all and throw ourselves down before this man?  This God in the flesh? We long to know our place in the world.  Is this mass chaos, or is there some meaning or purpose that continues to work? Have we missed it or is even this part of the plan? 

“We’ve so narrowly missed being gods, bright with Eden’s dawn light” (Psalm 8:6, The Message).  This is Eugene Peterson’s poetic rendering of Psalm 8:6. Peterson’s poetry speaks to our inner longing, to the sense that we have yet to find our proper place in the world or in an ever-expanding universe.  We could have been, we missed it, we messed up.  Where do I fit in?  How do I make sense of a world that feels more chaotic every day? 

Our passage from Genesis has something to say about a world in chaos.  We are very familiar with the majestic opening lines of the Bible.  “In the beginning…the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,” or as Eugene Peterson translates it, “Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness” (Genesis 1:1).  I’ve been reading a story recently that speaks of our profound need for community and connection with one another.  The chaos of the world can leave us feeling disconnected from one another, filled with a bottomless emptiness. 

But if Genesis is to be believed, God’s Spirit is at work in the midst of the chaos.  Creation is formed out of the “soup of nothingness.”  And we are called to be part of it. 

There is something very mundane and earthly about being asked to “Keep things in good repair” (2 Cor. 13:11, The Message). In our translation today from 2 Corinthians, Paul writes to the Corinthians and says, “Put things in order.” But I like Eugene Peterson’s version, “keep things in good repair.”  Our humanness (our not-quite divinity) is a feature, not a flaw.  This is our place in the world, to tend to the community and the places around us.  If there is an area of your life that needs mending so you can be more open to the movement of God, this is your invitation to seek that repair. Do not be afraid of going to a different depth. Or of making a different choice. Your possibilities are limitless. Our God is limitless. Expressed in a human and divine man who lived on earth, but also revealed to us in a multitude of ways.

God placed us in this in-between space.  One might even say that our “less than angelic” status is how God connects to the world.  The love bound up in Jesus brings us into harmony with each other and with all of creation.  There is a beauty in this dance that could never exist if all were still.  If the waves never crashed and roared, the ocean would lose much of its allure.  The vastness of the ocean is terrifying until the rhythm of the tide turns the chaos into a dance. 

How can we be open to the new possibilities this life has in store for us?  While we wait for God’s new creation, for the Spirit’s renewal of the earth, we are not to sit idly by.  We are asked to mend the things we can.  To mend relationships.  To care for the earth.  To seek healing for ourselves and our communities in every way we can.  That is the way to put our lives in order according to the Spirit.

Author Ilia Delio speaks of God as an infinite wholeness, present in all of creation but also somehow not contained by it, in her book The Not-Yet God. How can we see God’s fingerprints in creation and embrace who we are in the expansive nature of all that is? We are not limited just to what we know, but our potential is as vast as the ocean, as the grains of sand on the beach, or the stars in the night sky.

Eugene Peterson translated verses 17 and 18 of Matthew 28 in this way, “Some, though held back, not sure about worship, about risking themselves totally.  Jesus, undeterred, went right ahead and gave his charge.”  Jesus is undeterred by our doubts, by our feelings of failure.  We get a similar passage in the Gospel of John where the resurrected Jesus meets Peter by the shore.  Twice, Jesus asks Peter if he loves him unconditionally, and twice Peter responds that he loves Jesus like a brother; each time, Jesus gives him a job to do: “Feed my sheep.”  The third time, Jesus asks Peter if he loves him like a brother.  Jesus meets Peter where he is at.  Jesus is undeterred by our doubts, by our questions, by our fears of failure, by the things in this world that threaten to overwhelm us.

God in Jesus knows that our capacity, with God’s help, is vast, but that we can also only be where we are at any given moment. There is so much grace in this passage. God invites us into a deeper wholeness, into a new relationship with the triune God, one that began with the very beginning of the universe and continues to unfold, its majesty as hard to explain as the psalmist says. But God also meets us where we are. We do not need to be more capable or open to awe than we are right now. We can worship the way we best can at the moment. And then we set about repairing our little corner of the world, feeding the sheep, loving each other, building community. Knowing that where we are, flaws and all, is exactly where we were meant to be, and with God’s help, even this chaos will be formed into beauty.