Scripture: Genesis 1:1-5; Matthew 28:16-20 Series: Easter
A Trinity Sunday sermon pairing Genesis 1:1-5 with the Great Commission of Matthew 28:16-20. Wilson begins with creation ex nihilo: out of nothing God brought all that exists. Using the Hebrew terms for upper waters and land, he frames creation as pure gift. He recounts how Bertrand Russell’s 1927 dismissal of a cosmic beginning was overturned by Hubble’s and Lemaitre’s discovery of an expanding universe, leaving Aquinas’s Prime Mover better off than Russell. Against the deist ‘divine watchmaker,’ he insists creation is God’s continual sustaining of reality. He reads the Trinity into Genesis: the Father, the Son as Logos/word, and the Spirit (ruach) hovering over the deep as the love between Father and Son. The triune God sings life into existence not out of need but out of love, and that same Spirit flows over the congregation, making today a new beginning because God is present and making all things new.
Illustrations: hebrew-shamayim-eretz, russell-aquinas-big-bang, infinite-chocolate-fountain, divine-watchmaker, spirit-song-of-love
May 31, 2026
Trinity Sunday
Genesis 1:1-5 Matthew 28:16-:20
Three Whats?
“Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”” Matthew 28:16-20
In the Beginning, there was nothing. Like a total absence of anything. Nothing existed. Nothing was there. Think of a thing. Anything. A chair. A cat. A baby. And then it is not there. The not there part is what everything was. All was emptiness and void.
God, though, was not a part of this nothing. God is. God always was and was separate from the nothing. Out of the nothing, creation. Matter. Life. Existence. Planets. Stars. All the things that used to not be here but now are here.
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם In the beginning, God created the waters above or heaven, and the land. In Hebrew, the word for heaven is literally waters above or upper waters. Mayim is waters, she-mayim waters above; upper waters. When you look out at an ocean and you look out at the sky over the ocean, they look very similar. It’s easy to get a sense that these are similar concepts. And with the waters above, we have eretz, the land in Hebrew. It’s not this concept of a globe as we understand it, but the land and the land that is gift. When we look at this, when we sing of all creation, we need to rest in this moment of pure gift. There was nothing, and then there was something.
In 1927, the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote a book that attempted to refute proofs of God’s existence. Russell was very famous around the world in Philosophy and Math and Logic, he was also friends with important people and very respected. He was also a strident atheist and frustrated by continued belief in God. So Russell writes this book to refute proofs for God’s existence, especially the proofs of Thomas Aquinas, which, if you grew up Catholic, you probably still remember them.
- The First Way: God, the Prime Mover
- The Second Way: God, the First Cause
- The Third Way: God, the Necessary Being
- The Fourth Way: God, the Absolute Being
- The Fifth Way: God, the Grand Designer
So Russell, starting with the first proof of the prime mover, said that obviously there was no need for a beginning to the universe, so this is just silly. His argument is longer than that but rests on this point that there is no need to assume the universe has a beginning. There is no evidence either way. Christians and other theists are flat wrong to emphasize this point. This was in 1927. In 1929, Edwin Hubble, who had already discovered galaxies beyond the Milky Way, was able to prove that the universe was expanding because galaxies were moving away from the earth in proportion to their distance. This replicated the work of the Belgian physicist and priest, Georges Lemaître. That is, the farther away, the faster they moved. He proved that space is expanding. It’s growing. We can extrapolate from Edwin’s, we’ll call him Edwin. Edwin’s realization is that if space is expanding, it can’t be expanding infinitely. So there has to be a point when the expansion began. So there’s either a point where all existence began or, an infinite source, like a chocolate fountain, like a heavenly chocolate fountain. There’s always more, you dip your strawberries and there’s always more chocolate. That would be the other hypothesis, but that hypothesis was quickly squashed. Although an infinite chocolate fountain would be really great to have in the narthex, maybe if we can work on that, but instead, this leads to the scientific theory of the big bang.
With this evidence, Thomas Aquinas comes out better than Bertrand Russell.
What we come back to, though, is this moment, this event, when there was nothing.
And then there was.
We know there was something because we are here. You are here. I am here. There is life. There is a world. There are birds. There are air-conditioners. All of these things, chairs and children and skies and sparrows. We know there are things we know that there had to be a source of the things. For a long time, many Christians believed that God created everything and then kind of let creation be. This was a famous argument in the late 18th century called the divine watchmaker. That if you found a watch in a field, you would assume a watchmaker. When we see the complexity of nature, we assume a creator. But this argument is that God created everything and then let it be. This is not the Triune God we worship. For Christians, creation is not just this passive moment that happened long ago with little effect. Creation is God’s continual sustainment of all reality. In Genesis, with these first words, we have the reality of God and God’s self as Father, Son, and Holy spirit.
We have, in the beginning, the Triune God. We have God, the Father, we have God, the logos, the word of God, the son. the word of God is what is spoken, what is expressed from God. What is thought from God. Logos in Greek encompasses word, reason, thought, logic, and more. So God the Father is present. God the son is present. Then we have in verse two, the spirit of God, the breath of God floating over the deep, the ruach of God, what Christians call the Holy Spirit. The love between God the Father and God the Son. We have that here in this beginning, this source. A medieval mystic said that the Holy spirit is the song of love sung by the father to the son.
God as Trinity. We have the Father, Son and Holy spirit singing life into existence for the sake of it. Not out of need or necessity, not to win an argument just to allow it, to offer it.
All of that history comes to bear on our understanding today of the triune God’s creative power in this moment and forever after. God is not just far away but with us, flowing over all things, sustaining all things. God is not a part of creation but the source in whom we live and move and have our being.
Throughout the story of creation, we receive affirmations from God that creation is good. And then at the end of the sixth day, after the creation of humanity, God said that it is very good.
Creation is not a distant thing, Trinity is not a distant thing. Genesis and creation aren’t just fun stories for kids or for confirmation or anything like that. Trinity isn’t just a concept for theologians or academics but who God is. Trinity points to the reality that God created us out of love and desires not only to save us but to be with us. Creation is not just an event long ago but the constant and persistent existence of all things due to God’s amazing mercy. It impacts us directly where we are in our every day life.
The love the Father has for the Son is the Spirit that flowed over creation and flows over us here today as we worship and pray, as we listen and forgive and sing. The Spirit that allows mercy and new life this day to be possible. Today can be a new beginning for you because God is here. You don’t have to leave this building as you walked in, because God is making all things new, including me, including you.
You are loved. Christ’s forgiveness and mercy is found in the very act of creation.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.