SERMON Relationships Create Realities

The Holy Trinity, C Proberbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.  

Eight years ago or so, a friend found a book in a New York used-bookstore.  It’s a collection of William Shakespeare’s shorter poems from many decades ago.  My friend knew I loved Shakespeare and old books, so it was a perfect little gift.  

Inside the cover is an inscription:

“To the Peachblossom:

“Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day

All in the morning betime

And I a ‘man’ at your window

To be your Valentine.”

from the Fixer-Upper 

(who even fixes up WS on occasion)

February 13, 1938 [a heart is drawn at the end of the 8]”

The original giver of the book had “fixed up” a line from Hamlet, replacing “maid” with “man,” and thus creating a new verse for the woman he loved.

I could only imagine that the happy couple were now deceased, leaving behind this little memento of their young love.  Some thoughtless child or grandchild had spied an old book in their effects and sold it for what must have been a paltry sum.  A friend of mine saw it and in turn thought of me.  It’s almost nothing--just a little ink on a page.  But it’s a mark left by love.  And as such it is something new--something not quite Shakespeare’s, not quite the man’s or the woman’s, not my friend’s, and not mine.  There may be no way short of DNA testing to find out who the Peachblossom and the fixer-upper were.  Was this dedication part of a long marriage, or a youthful romance, or an illicit affair?  We don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that a man, a woman, and the bond between them created something new.

This is what love does.  It creates things.  The love of one for another pours out in something that is not either person but is something all its own.  Relationships create realities.  A woman and a man love each other, however briefly, and create a new life.  Two people form a household and households form a community.  The artist and the marble bring the young King David to life.  This is what we humans do.  We seek something to love and our love pours out in something new.  It may even make something that outlives us and goes on adventures to destinations we can’t imagine.  I hope I have not offended the memory of the fixer-upper by passing his sacred words around a church.  But he has blessed me, a total stranger, beyond what he could have foreseen when he penned his little love poem 72 years ago.  He has also ruined my own Valentine’s gifts, but that’s another matter.

Relationships create realities.  If I make no other point on this Holy Trinity Sunday, I want to make that.  Let me explain.  Christians do not worship a lonely God who creates the world for some unknowable reason.  We worship a God who was in relationship before there was any creation at all.  Our lesson from Proverbs this morning describes this relationship that existed before anything else.  Out of God comes Wisdom, who is the very power of God to form the world.  God delights in his Wisdom.  Out of this delight pours forth the life of all that lives.  This delight, this love, is older than creation.  Early Christians read this passage and identified Wisdom with Jesus Christ the Son, who was in the beginning with God the Father.  The Father and the Son loved one another with a perfect love, and this bond of love was the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit is not the Father nor the Son but something that flows forth from both.  It is the life of everything that lives.  The Spirit is the hand that leaves ink on a page for generations upon generations to read.  And so the one God, immortal, invisible, and only wise, has three faces, but yet is one in wisdom, power, love, and majesty.  

The Father loves the Son and begets the Son; the Son loves the Father, and this mutual love expresses itself as the Holy Spirit.  And since love always pushes outward, it creates.  It scatters the galaxies across the deep, it lights the starts, it gathers atoms into cells and cells into plants and animals.  It turns stardust into hills and mountains and fertile soil.  It quickens life within life and music within our voices and love within our hearts.  It makes something out of nothing.  It makes new somethings out of all the somethings that are passing away.  This relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from before time began creates all the realities of time itself.  

But not only that.  

This relationship within the heart of God does not only flow outward in creating the world.  It also redeems the world that has fallen through human sin, error, and selfishness.  We do not reflect this primal love in our own lives as we should.  We do not embrace creation as God’s delightful handiwork.  We want to invent wisdom for ourselves.  Yet God is greedy for life, and God wishes us to enjoy a happiness beyond life.  So God the Son comes to us as a Savior promising grace.  And since we resist even a Savior, God pours the Holy Spirit into our hearts to bear witness to that grace in the middle of our confused and chaotic lives.  

This means that the same Spirit who hovered over the waters in creation hovers over us in our baptism, as we become part of the new creation.  The Spirit turns the sufferings of this fallen life into endurance, character, and hope.  The God who created us for Godself and who set our hearts beating also grants those hearts faith.  The God who opens our lips to breathe opens them again to offer prayer and praise.  The Trinity whose love called us into existence also gives us the power to love one another.  

In the Christian church, we call the doctrine of the Trinity a dogma and a mystery.  This can be misleading.  The Trinity is not a logical hoop you have to jump through in order to be saved, although our creed this morning can give that impression.  It is not a musty old word game that no one cares about any more, though plenty of theologians have tried to make it into just that.  The Trinity is God’s very being.  The Trinity is God’s special imprint on all of life and all of human experience.  It is a mystery, but it is not a secret.  If you’ve ever held a child or kissed someone you loved or wiped the brow of a dying person you have experienced something of the mysterious life of the Trinity.  There is you, there is the other, and there is the sacred bond you share, if only for a moment.  That moment is God’s fingerprint on our lives.  These relationships create new realities.  They change the world, one blank page and one inked dedication at a time.  

Think of that the next time you put pen to paper to express your devotion.  Or the next time you change a diaper.  When you bless a meal at home, or make sandwiches for strangers through the Night Ministry, or build a home with Habitat for Humanity for someone you may never meet.  You are experiencing the life of God.  You have seen a little glimpse of God the Father walking over the unformed earth with the divine Wisdom--delighting in each other and delighting in the world that they are making.  Amen.  

Rev. Ben Dueholm

May 30, 2010

Wicker Park Lutheran Church

¹ John 1:2² Nicene Creed, Third Article³ 1 Timothy 1:17⁴ paraphrase of Proverbs 8⁵ cf. Romans 4:17⁶ 1 Corinthians 7:31⁷ Romans 5:5⁸ Genesis 1:2; 2 Corinthians 5:17⁹ Pslam 51:15¹⁰ The Athanasian Creed