After the beginning began but before our beginning began, during the last ice age a glacial outburst from the northeast deposited meters and meters of precious soil in rolling dunes and it was good. A long long time later a group of people settled in the middle of the many creeks below the mountains that are described as blue. They called it Walla Walla. And it was good. Later more people came from the east across the rivers and plains and mountains of this continent. A town grew up in this valley. They are fruitful with their orchards and vineyards and educators, and it is good.
Origin stories matter to us deeply. They trace the mysteries of where we might have come from, but we examine them and tell them because we are trying to understand where we are right now and what comes next. Origin stories are rarely really about the beginning. When we are in the middle of the story of our lives: we are there in that story. Families and careers and surprises. Bravely striving, sometimes stumbling, and hopefully evolving for the common good.How it all began is a story that many people only explore when they have the time or need to do so. Amongst people I know and love, I watch as they research genealogy when the children have left the house when there is more time to be still and wonder.
There has never been an ‘on the scene’ ‘live report’ version of the creation of the universe. It defies logic on an epic scale. In days gone by, they told the story in one way. Today we continue in that wondering by sifting through evidence and data and sharing theories. We tell the tale of how the beginning began through telescopes and microscopes and Mars Rovers. In our first reading, today are the opening sentences of the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Today we heard an older way of asking who we are and where we are going.
The first creation story of Genesis is a story we may have heard so often as to barely hear it anymore. Plus with some of the modern ludicrous things said about this story we might have become good at tuning it out. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The best that scholars can tell this story doesn’t start at the start of the life of the people who heard it and told it. It comes to be in words and parchment at a time when they were just figuring out who they were, where God is, and how they were to move and live and be as God’s people in the whole wide world.
Like so many other core parts of the Hebrew scriptures, this origin story seems to be most shaped by the experience of the Exile. Yet in that moment of brutality and death and destruction, this recitation doesn’t declare that all began in the terrible and ever will be terrible. It offers instead a beginning of placid calm, it hears the whispers of a vision of a caring wise wind brooding like a mother hen over the raw materials. This text celebrates each tiny facet in an intricate and crucial balance of pattern and sound. All quietly but clearly stating that even in pain we dwell in a wonderful and beloved world. This rhythmic wondering at what happened before the beginning began doesn’t do so just to do so, but looks and wonders and tells as a way of digging deep into the hope of a more just future and concludes that we can be good just as the creation is good.
You may or may not know the St. Paul’s origin story begins in a time of messy sojourning. The unpaved roads and commotion of the wild west. I imagine it very much like the set of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. Horses and wagons, dirt everywhere, the hard moments where you have to give up on trying to make life just like it was where you were with the paved roads and what not. Here where you are you have to make good things work with what you have right now.
If I remember the St. Paul’s story correctly, the motivation isn’t told as deeply holy or spiritual. It wasn’t the holy woman coming through and saying ah, this is a holy place, let us set up an altar and worship here. The way I remember the story, there were some fellas in a saloon deciding that in the midst of the messiness there should be an Episcopal church. Allegedly the first meetings were in that same saloon, where there was fussing about the improperness of the tobacco stains on the wall, and the practical if also gross solution. (They 'painted' the whole wall with tobacco spit.)
A saloon on the frontier was about many things, some less virtuous than others. But it was certainly about resting, eating, and friendship. A place to tell stories, to be refreshed, and dream dreams. This is a good origin story for St. Paul’s. It is good because it means that in our deepest roots are not set apart from everyday life and that our deepest pattern is a mission of fellowship, feeding and lay leadership. In the beginning, we began in a wild west saloon, and it was good.
The profile committee and Vestry is deep in its work telling our story about who we are now, who we have been and who you are called to be next. There is anxiety in this moment, both inside and outside these walls. I don’t know if we are in the crisis point of Exilic vulnerability. Sometimes that sense of the doomed seems for certain, moments when I repeat to myself to be brave, hold fast, keep speaking the truth even when I want to hide. Other times, I know that sense of rest and sabbath, I see the skies are blue and the temperatures pleasant and the cherries are ready!
It is a three part dance, a both and an and, and a something else less quantifiable. Which is rather like that mystery of the Holy Trinity. I could flood your ears with explanations of the doctrines about substances and essences. People fought and died for those formulations, so in their memory perhaps I should, but luckily for you I will not.Because as valuable as the complexities are, the basics are about as much as most of us need to know God. After all the point of the Trinity is not to know about God but to know God. So let’s just review the basics.
You have the big G God who creates it all, who seems to be way out there and way in deep. And there is Jesus of Nazareth, God born as a person in a certain time that we can find on a calendar and a place we can find on a map, who is somehow the very image of the big G God, who somehow is my friend and companion through the Spirit. So then there is the Spirit of God who moves us and comforts us and fills us with the most sacred breath and is close at hand and is the same as the way out there and the fella back then. Beyond that is a whole lot of mystery
that maybe words can never express, like no words can ever really describe what it was like before the beginning began. Yet here it is.
And so to is the experience of the sacred Trinity, hat somehow we know God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in their concreteness and their unknowingness. It can make absolutely no sense and at the same time for me, God makes no sense without it. I am grateful for the Trinity, for its formulations and its weirdness, for its expansiveness and its inclusiveness. For its stillness and its perpetual motion. There are ways in which we are much like those ancestors in faith who crafted and shared these first sentences of Genesis. People who were wondering about where we come from to try and place some shape around where we are going.
I invite you to keep thinking about that frontier beginning, knowing that somehow, someway, you are right there with them sitting at that saloon bench start. There is freedom in the messiness of finding ourselves there with them in the wild west. There is energy in letting go of old things so you can discover the new things God has in store for you.
What friends are telling truths and which strangers are dreaming God’s dreams? How can remembering ourselves as saloon guests lead us into continuing to be the Jesus movement, and the Jesus mambo and the Jesus MASH unit in the Walla Walla valley today? For me the greatest gift of the Holy Trinity is that I don’t have to have all the answers, but that I am invited into a relationship with the past and the present and the days to come. It is a gift that we experience the triune God as dancing and dwelling and breathing with us in our history and in our now and in our future. And it can be very very very good.
Let us pray.
Gentle us, Holy One, into an unclenched moment,
a deep breath, a letting go of heavy expectations,
of shriveling anxieties, of dead certainties, that,
softened by the silence, surrounded by the light,
and open to the mystery, we may be found by wholeness,
upheld by the unfathomable, entranced by the simple,
and filled with the joy that is you.
In the name of the Holy Trinity,One God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, World without end. Amen
(prayer by Ted Loder)
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Walla Walla, Washington
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