God the Maker, Lover, and Keeper of Our Souls

Trinity Sunday A; Matthew 28: 16-20; 6/19/2011, St. Paul’s, Smithfield

Jim Melnyk: “God: Maker, Lover, and Keeper”

Nearly six centuries ago God granted to Julian of Norwich, a 31 year-old English woman, a series of 16 visions of the crucified and risen Christ. Through the centuries many Christians have come to know and love the writings of that wonderful mystic. It is in Julian’s writings that I have come to find a simple and beautiful truth about our God who’s Trinity of persons we celebrate and praise this day. I have shared passages from Julian’s writings in the past, including the story about her vision of a hazelnut many years ago – even handing out them out during the sermon. Listen once again to the words of Julian:

           

‘God showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and thought, “What can this be?” An answer came, “It is all that is made.” I marveled that it could last, for I thought it might have crumbled to nothing, it was so small. And the answer came into my mind, “It lasts and ever shall because God loves it. And all things have being through the love of God.”’

           

‘In this little thing I saw three truths,’ writes Julian. ‘The first is that God made it. The second is that God loves it. The third is that God looks after it.’

           

Take a moment, if you will, and consider a hazelnut, which is not bigger across than the width of your thumbnail. Imagine the lightness of it. Imagine the softness of its curves, and ponder how tiny a little object this size would be – it would almost be lost upon the flesh of our hand. Even in its simplicity it is truly all that is made, for within itself is the fullness of God’s creation truth. It’s amazing that something as tiny as these hazelnuts and something as simple as Julian’s brief vision would say so much about our God who is Maker, and Lover, and Keeper of our souls.

And yet – and yet, as Christians, this is how we come to know our God – as One who creates, as One who redeems, and as One who sustains us in love. We call it “The Holy Trinity” and work hard to take something as simple as Julian’s vision and make it more complex. We talk about “one in three and three in one” as if it were some sort of a theological shell game or maybe even a holy riddle – “when is one God three persons, yet three persons only one substance?” Even the words we use nearly 16 hundred years after the Nicene Creed was finally argued out sound more like ancient Greek philosophical drama than images we can readily grasp and appreciate today.

           

Yet, no matter how complex Christian theologians try to make it, Julian reminds us that the very essence of God is the joy and love of being in relationship! God’s very Being cries out relationship – and this God of ours yearns to hear an echoing reply of relationship from us!

After all, if one of the great truths about God spoken to in the Trinity is about a God who is in relationship with Godself, and if we are created in the image and likeness of this God, then shouldn’t being in relationship with God and each other be central to who we are as well?

This in part is the great truth I believe Jesus tries to share with his disciples in the waning moments of his life with them in the upper room, and in the several resurrection appearances we have come to know – such as the one in today’s Gospel. It is foundational to what the Spirit of Truth declares to us – that God is Maker, and Lover, and Keeper of our souls, and that we are created to be at one with God even as God is at one with Godself.

           

Last week I spoke about what it means to be filled with the very breath of God – Ruach – the Holy Spirit – the Spirit of God who hovers over the waters of creation as we just heard this morning. Imagine the Holy Spirit of God being born anew in us with every breath we take. What we are invited to ponder on this special day is our own relationship with the One who creates, redeems and sustains the lives of each of us – One we know through the tradition as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

           

If we, as Christians, ponder the source of our relationship with God – ponder its meaning and its challenge – we are likely to find ourselves waist-deep in the waters of Holy Baptism as we spoke about last Sunday – for it is in these rushing waters as much as the rushing wind that we encounter the Spirit of the Living God. As we ponder the source of our relationship with God, we are likely to find ourselves longing to stand before the Holy Table once again partaking of bread and wine – partaking in the body and blood of Christ – breaking bread with friend and stranger alike – and sometimes meeting Christ in the most unlikely of folks. We wait as patiently as possible for the return of the table to our midst.

At this moment in time, rather than the waters of baptism and the gift of Holy Food, we find ourselves being made one in shared prayers offered online – streamed into our homes and out to our patios. We come to know one another through the sharing of God’s Word, and we come to know the One who draws us to this place. For the full wonder of Holy Trinity is the joy God has in making us one. St. Augustine wrote, “Lest you become discouraged, know that when you love, you know more about who God is than you could ever know with your intellect.”

           

In the relationship of sacred water and holy food – in the promise of God’s Holy Spirit filling us as the very air we breathe fills our lungs – we find ourselves challenged to live out our relationships in this earthly pilgrimage in ways that reflect the love of God made known to us in Jesus the Christ – in the One who reveals to us the mystery of the Triune God.

           

When we take the time and the care to learn how to relate to one another in ways that welcome and enable reconciliation, we are living the relationship modeled by God as Holy Trinity. When the well-being of our fellow human beings outweighs the numbers at the bottom of the line – a such as refusing to sacrifice human lives for a healthy Dow Jones Average – recognizing from the earliest of our faith stories that we are indeed our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers – we are living the relationship modeled by God as Holy Trinity. When we recognize that respecting the dignity of every human being, and standing firm against discrimination is all about honoring the image of God in one another rather than being politically correct, we are beginning to understand the wondrous relationship we call Holy Trinity.

Once again last week we promised to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves, and to strive for justice and peace for all people, respecting the dignity of every human being. Recalling those promises we need to ask ourselves how the decisions we make each day – decisions in our own lives, in our work, in our faith communities, and our social and political structures – how do the decisions we make model those promises – model the relationship made known to us in the life of Jesus the Christ – model the relationship made known to us in the life of the Holy Spirit who lives and moves within us – model the relationship made known to us in the loving mystery of our Triune God? Because there’s no sense in going out to make disciples – baptizing people in the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit – unless we’re serious about living out the mystery of God’s love in our own lives each day.

Consider now the many hands and faces of our many communities, with each person holding one of Julian’s hazelnuts in their palms. Imagine the hands of the many people you may have seen in a grocery store, or perhaps the hands of someone with whom you once worked, or went to school. Their hands may be a bit larger than your hands, or perhaps they’re very tiny. The skin may be lighter than yours or darker, older or younger, calloused and hard or soft and smooth. The owner of that hand may be someone you’ve known all your life or maybe someone you’ve never met before – someone you’ve only seen in passing.

In your hand – and in your neighbors’ hands, like the hazelnut in Julian’s vision, we see three truths. The first is that God made us. The second is that God loves us. The third is that God looks after us and lives within us. Blessed be God, and blessed be the fruit of God’s love made manifest in and through us each. Amen.