When you set out to make something new, you rarely begin from nothing. Picture a neglected garden bed at the front of a yard, choked with weeds and buried under layers of river rock, old weed barrier rotted down to threads, and the small relics of everyone who tended that same strip of land before you. Hours of pulling rocks one by one reveal a quiet truth. Most of the time, when you bring something into the world, you are not creating it out of nothing. You are working with what was already there when you arrived.
That is the story Genesis actually tells. We tend to imagine it as the account of how God made the world out of nothing, but read closely, it is the story of how God made the world out of something. “In the beginning when God began to create, the earth was complete chaos and darkness covered the face of the deep.” Before the first act of creation, there was already an earth, deep waters, and waters to move across.
God did not speak the world into being from a void. God brought order to the chaos, made a new thing out of the old. And on Trinity Sunday, the same holds true for the doctrine itself: the Trinity is a concept that developed centuries after the Bible was written, an inheritance that some of you hold easily and others find a genuine stumbling block. Either way, it is part of the raw material handed down to you.
“Creativity begins when we learn to take our raw materials and remake them. Faithfulness begins when we have the courage to take what is left to us and make it new. Creation begins with the past and we make it into the future as we go.”
You are no more bound to the theology you inherit than God was bound to the chaos and the darkness of the deep. There is room for frustration at what was left in disrepair, and room for gratitude toward the people who labored on that same ground long before you, people you will never meet. Both feelings can live together.
This is the work First Plymouth invites you into: to receive what came before, to wrestle honestly with it, and to remake it into something that will outlast you. So the next time you sit down to survey the theological rocks and weeds left to you, get your hands a little dirty, make your back a little sore, and dig in as God did. Begin to make something you can call your own.
