God’s Beloved, God’s Delight – Br. Lain Wilson

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Trinity Sunday

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5

Several years ago, I enrolled in a drawing class. I am not a creative person, but I thought it would be good to exercise that part of my brain. In my first class, the instructor gave us a stick of charcoal, put us in front of a piece of blank newsprint, and told us to draw anything.

Did I mention I’m not a creative person?

Honestly, I just froze. Absolutely nothing came to mind. I stared at the blank sheet, mildly panicking, and feeling very powerless and very alone.

The class got better, and I did learn to draw. I don’t think I became any more creative, but what I did gain was a fresh perspective, a way of looking through what seemed to be a new set of eyes. I learned to see shadow as well as line, the spaces in between as well as familiar forms.

Today is Trinity Sunday. And on this Trinity Sunday, we are being invited, more than ever, to see with a new set of eyes. As we celebrate the mystery of God as Trinity; as we rejoice in our creation, redemption, and sanctification; as we lift our voices in hymns and praise; we cannot but be aware of what surrounds our celebration. War and political violence, fear and insecurity, petty vindictiveness and hollow posturing. Whether we read it in the news, see it with our eyes, or feel it in our bodies, we are all aware of the overwhelming wrongness that surrounds us, in our country and in our world.

But I think this celebration is exactly what these troubled and tumultuous times calls for. This celebration today of the triune God has so much to say about who God is for us, who we are for God, and who we are for each other. We are invited to see the Trinity afresh, and that seeing encourages us to see others with new eyes.

We praise today God our Creator. Our Rule of Life expresses one central way to understand the Trinity: “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are One in mutual self-giving and receiving.”[1] The very act of creation, of our creation, of the world’s, an act of “pure self-emptying,” is an expression of who God is.

Our creation was in the image and likeness of this self-giving God; sin—turning away from God, again and again and again—eroded this image, making it harder and harder for us to see that God-shaped pattern that we were created with. Disobedience and murder took place in the first two generations of humanity’s primordial story. Each age confronts the consequences of sin in its own way. In ours, dislocation and isolation, convenient violence, demonization and dehumanization. The denial of the inherent, God-given dignity of all of our neighbors, fellow children and creations of God.

Remembering God our Creator today draws our attention out from ourselves: “O Lord our Governor, how exalted is your Name in all the world!” (Ps. 8:1). It draws our imaginations up: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses” (Ps 8:4). And it reminds us of our own dignity as creatures: “What is man that you should be mindful of him? The son of man that you should seek him out? You have made him but little lower than the angels; you adorn him with glory and honor.” (Ps 8:5-6).

How does this exalted language strike you today?

Praising God our Creator today, as we encounter so much hardship, so much anxiety, so much uncertainty, alerts us to the gap between the glory and honor promised us and the sorry state we so often find ourselves in—and the help we need.

And so today we praise God our Redeemer, who meets us in that sorry state, who empties himself and takes on our human nature. “God proves his love for us,” Saint Paul writes to the Church in Rome, “in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8); and it is through him that “we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God” (Rom 5:2).

Remembering God our Redeemer today draws our gaze back down to earth, to our daily struggles and afflictions and inadequacies, to all the ways in which we daily fail to live up to the promise of our creation—draws our gaze to all of that, and makes us know that that failure is not the last word.

What are you carrying today?

Remembering God our Redeemer today reminds us that whatever failures or disappointments or setbacks we face, no matter how bad the world and our own lives get, that is not the last word. The last word is that God has freed us through Jesus Christ, and that God remains with us always.

And so today we praise God our Sanctifier, guiding us who have been created and redeemed through a world that can still so often feel hostile. In the face of injustice, of violence, of overweening pride, of sin—of all that is not God—God our Sanctifier surrounds and upholds and strengthens us with the daily, the hourly, the constant assurance and hope of God’s unfailing love and presence. “We also boast in our sufferings” (Rom 5:3)—what Saint Paul asserts here, as Joseph Fitzmyer notes, is that “suffering and affliction become precisely the point at which hope is encountered and proves itself.”[2] “Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Rom 8:5).

If for us God is Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, what, then, are we to God? We are God’s beloved, and we are God’s delight. “What is man that you should be mindful of him?” What is man—what is humanity—who are we—but God’s beloved creations, fallen and redeemed, God’s image and likeness in the world, God’s children in whom God delights. “I was daily his delight,” Wisdom speaks in the book of Proverbs, “rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (Prov 8:30-31). And so equally today when we praise God our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, we can only be humbled by our own high calling—God’s beloved, God’s delight, the apple of God’s eye.

How does this feel to you today? Do you accept it? Do you struggle with it?

How wonderful, how strange, to know ourselves to be God’s beloved, to come to know and feel in our very bones that we are God’s delight . . . while still seeing all that is wrong around us.

I feel that this may be as much of a mystery as the Trinity is.

If the mystery of the Trinity, even only imperfectly understood, elicits in us praise and celebration, the mystery of our own salvation by that same Trinity—Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier—can only—should only—elicit in us a response of humble thanks and determination to adopt a fresh perspective, to see with new eyes. To see all our neighbors with the eyes of the Trinity: as beloved siblings, in whom is found cause for delight, who suffer in ways that may be hidden from us, and who share in the same hope of God’s future, when all will be one.

Amen.

[1] The Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist (Lanham, MD, 1997), 12.

[2] J. A. Fitzmyer, Romans, The Anchor Bible (New York, 1993), 397.