In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes about a Tulip tree: There's real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud, and flower.
Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch 99% of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb 150 miles per hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as 6 million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one.

A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes; it splits, sucks, and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out ever more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.
 

"In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters." God's creative wind is still here, precariously perhaps, but here, and this morning when this new day dawned, it looked as dewy and fresh as if just from the word of God. The created, natural world is splendid, and in it we are refreshed and renewed.
Trinity Sunday is the one Sunday each year devoted to that mysterious dance of unity, the Trinity, in which we live and move and have our being. This day offers an opportunity to shed some light on one characteristic of that concept, namely the creative aspect of God.
 

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, it is the Father or creator dimension, that brings forth creation from chaos. In describing God's creative work, we might think of the trinity as world-maker, pain-bearer, love-giver.
 

Today we hear part of the creation story from Genesis. There are two creation stories in Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve, and this one, the Priestly account. This one is a later story and it is the story of creation par excellence. God creates by calling forth. A creative power in God's speaking beings forth life out of nothing. Such life is orderly, sufficient, abundant, harmonious, and good. And then to deepen the mystery of God, the Lord God creates persons who bear the Creator's image and procreative, stewardly authority.
 

There are no other issues interwoven, such as sin, and 'the fall.' It is as straightforward as the poet James Weldon Johnson imagined;
And God stepped out on space, And he looked around and said: I'm lonely---I'll make me a world.
 

The essential message of these verses is the record of creation. From this story we have an image of God as creating, calling a world into being piece by piece, putting disorder into order and then affirming the goodness of it all. God's creation is good. God doesn't make confusion. God creates abundant life and says it is good. God is on the side of pattern and order, system and growing complexity. And all of it is declared 'good.'
 

And while we cannot create a world, or even a living leaf, we can participate in this dimension of God. We do so in our own creativity, for it is there that we touch something of the divine.

In his book, "The Courage to Create," Rollo May discussed the creative process. Creation is bringing something new into being, and then something emerges, a new form or original expression. May writes, "The creative process is the expression of…passion for form. It is the struggle against disintegration, the struggle to bring into existence new kinds of being that give harmony and integration."

We usually thing of creation in terms of art; but it happens in many spheres of life, such as scientific discovery, invention, diplomacy, and child-rearing. Creativity can also happen in our life of faith.
 

We tend to regard faith as something established and given, something we hold on to and sometimes lose. But couldn't it also be a dimension of life in which we use our imagination? It takes at least as much creative effort, energy, and intelligence to do good as to do evil, or nothing. Duke Ellington once said, "I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues."
 

Think about the creative process we undergo simply to apologize, to even see and admit that we are wrong, much less do something about it. What an amazing feat and work of art to convert an average person into a Christlike being. All that transforming-suspicion to trust, vindictiveness to forgiveness, pride to humility, doubt to faith-the list is endless. Yet it happens. We experience it everyday. Not as fully as we would like, not as completely, not as easily. But it happens. Someone once said that a saint is an artist without a craft. Life becomes the canvas, the music, or the word.
The theologian Penelope Duckworth writes, in the life of faith, the tool of creativity is love. Love is both the means and the end of the creative process. When we love we are participating in the creative process of God. God did not create the world and then stop. God goes on creating and re-creating.
We see the creativity of love most clearly in the Incarnation. This is the way God loved the world, that God gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but have eternal life. A colleague once remarked that we could almost expect Eater from God-a grand reversal, a blinding sunrise-but Christmas? Christmas is so improbable, such an amazing rough and tumble story, such a scandalous, crazy plan. To enter our world as a poor human child-how did God ever imagine such an astonishing strategy?
 

The Creator God made the world, and that making was and is an act of love. If we can learn to love, we also become creators of the reign of God. And if we learn to express our love to others and to the natural world, we will come to know intimately the creative dimension of God, the Father.
 

A 17th century English mystic wrote: You will never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothes with the heavens, and crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more that so, because others are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in scepters, you never enjoy the world.
 

Our language about God seeks to lead us to worship and reverence. We celebrate what we know about God! We celebrate God's revealed gifts; grace, love, and fellowship. We celebrate what God has in store for God's people in the fullness of time. Until then, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.