Made to be Fruitful

The texts for Trinity Sunday can be found by clicking here.

First Sunday After Pentecost (Trinity Sunday), Year A

June 15, 2014

The Rev. Christopher L. Caddell

What do you do?

It’s a question that I am trying to use less and less in the normal course of my conversations.  It’s hard, because the impulse is there.  Anytime I would meet someone new, it was early in the lists of questions to be asked.

What’s your name?

Where do you live?

What do you do?

It seems like harmless small talk – a way to get to know someone new – and it is probably harmless.  It is after all the socially acceptable questions that we ask in those situations.

But it also says much about what we think is important – particularly what men think is important.  Essentially we are asking, “What do you produce?”

We are a culture that is obsessed with producing something – and in many ways it is that question that reveals what we value.

Today is Trinity Sunday – a day in which we recall the church’s teaching regarding one of the things that sets us apart from other religions.

Today I am going to share with you the shortest sermon I can give on the Trinity.

One God, three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Any questions?

If there are, Fr. Larry will be glad to answer them for you following the service. 

Instead what I hope to speak with you about today is that which caught my imagination this week – the story we know so well, the story of creation in the Book of Genesis.

Light from darkness.

Waters from waters.

Land and seas.

Birds and sea creatures.

Cattle, and every living thing that is on land,

And finally, us, human beings.  Male and female. Created in the image of God. 

And when God finishes creating us, Genesis says, God blessed them, and said to them, “Be fruitful, and multiply.”

Be fruitful.

It is interesting to think about how the rest of this story unfolds.  Adam and Eve are in the garden.  They have all they could ever need.  They produce nothing – the garden, God’s creation, produces everything for them.

We know what happens next.  Adam and Eve eat the one thing God asked them not to eat and they are expelled from the garden. 

Adam and Eve have two sons – Cain and Abel.  Cain worked the land, and Abel was a shepherd.

All of the sudden, human beings, made in the image of God, are no longer focused on being fruitful, but rather on being productive.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not saying that we shouldn’t be productive.  There are things that simply must get done.

The grass needs mowing, the laundry needs to get done. As individuals and as a society we need to be productive.  Someone needs to grow our food, build our homes, lay the pipes that bring us water.  And we, in turn, have our own ways of being productive and contributing to the common life we share as a society.

There are simply some things that require that we be productive.

Yet that is not the blessing and the charge that God gave us in creation.  Living into the fullness of what it means to be human beings, created in the image of God requires that we be fruitful.

Perhaps one way of looking at this is through our relationships.

If I were to describe my relationship with a friend as productive, that implies one thing.  It would probably point to a one-sided, selfish friendship.  But if that relationship were fruitful, that implies something totally different.

In the same way, it is doubtful that you would hear someone speak of his or her marriage as productive, but would not sound so strange to hear that same person say it was fruitful.

Our faith and relationship to God is not a productive relationship, but when it is truly lived, it will be one that is easily described as fruitful.

The point is, in a world that pushes us to be productive all the time, it is no wonder why we are depressed, stressed out, and burnt out.  As a general rule we are not living into that which God created us to be – fruitful bearers of the image of God.

The story of creation, of course, ends with the first Sabbath.  God saw all that he had made and he rested on the seventh day.  This will become a cornerstone of the Jewish faith, and one that we too as Christians will inherit through scripture and the Ten Commandments.

Every seven days, a time for rest.  A time set aside.  A time to be renewed.  A time to remember in whose image we were created.

I said I wasn’t going to preach on the Trinity, but I do have one more thing to add.  At the core of that teaching is not just One God, three persons, but rather the relationship between those persons.  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are relational descriptors of how we experience God (and as theologians would say, how God experiences God’s self).  The Trinity was not born out of thin air, but rather was how those first Christians were able to put words to their experience of encountering God – in the persons of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And if we are made in that image, then we too are made to be in relationship with one another.  Male and female he created them – to be in relationship, and to be fruitful.

And yet, when our focus is solely on being productive, we loose sight of those relationships.  But they are who we are created to be.

As we enter this one time of year where our society at least tolerates the fact that we will not be productive every moment of the day, perhaps we can reclaim some of that Sabbath.  A Sabbath that focuses on being fruitful, that focuses on what we were created to be, that focuses on the very nature of what it means to be human, in relationship with God, and with one another.  Amen.