Mind of the Maker

Weyland the Smith

Propers: The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 22), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Who’s the real you? Who are we, really?

Is it the part of us we keep hidden away inside, a mystery even to our own conscious minds? It is the part of us that we present to the world, the public face of our actions, our words, and our deeds? Or is it the image that others have of us, the part of us that lives on in the public imagination: our reputation, our legacy? Which one is real? Which one is you?

This is not such an easy question. If it’s the secret self within, then there’s the worry that no one will ever truly know us as we are, because even we do not fully understand all the depths hidden within our own hearts. But if it’s our reputation—if our true self is the way that other people see us—then we find ourselves desperate to do anything, even horrible things, if only to enhance our celebrity, our popularity.

In this day and age, however, most of us put our chips on the middle option. Who we really think we are, our true self, consists of the person we present to the world. In other words, we define ourselves by what we do and what we say and what we choose. But this comes with its own set of problems, for if we assume that we are the person we present, if we are the life that we build, then it’s all on us, isn’t it?

We choose who we are. We make ourselves. And so if we don’t seem good enough or smart enough or rich enough or thin enough, that’s our fault. There must be something wrong not simply with what we’ve done but with who we are—because we are what we do. We have failed somehow. We’ve made bad choices, and the only way to improve is to make better ones. And so it all becomes about guilt and stress and consumption. We define ourselves by our preferences, politics, and purchases. Sound familiar?

Americans keep trying to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps because we think the self-made life is the only one that’s worth anything. It’s our great national myth. We cannot separate a person’s value from his or her opinions because we think that our opinions are in fact what give us value, that they’re somehow the building blocks that make us who we are. You make you!

And so we spend our lives forever comparing, forever customizing, forever consuming, because we think we are our own makers, we are our own gods. Which means that if we fail—when we fail—there is no savior waiting to catch us. Just one more failed god upon the pile.

A while back, an author by the name of Dorothy Sayers wrote a fascinating little book entitled Mind of the Maker. In it she argued that since God is both Creator and Trinity, and since we are then made in the image of God, it therefore follows that each one of us is also a creative trinity. Here’s what she means.

Imagine, if you will, an artist: sculptor, painter, author, what-have-you. First the artist has an idea, a great truth held in his or her mind, desirous of expression. Next the artist embodies this idea in a work of art, something concrete: a sculpture, a painting, a novel, perhaps even a performance, like an opera or a play. Finally, the audience reacts. The work of art affects them, becomes a part of them. They respond to it; they share it; they criticize it. They enter into relationship with it.

Where then does the true art reside? Is it in the mind of the maker, the idea hidden away within the artist’s head? Is it in the work itself, the painting or the play that has real form in the real world? Or is art, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder? Does it exist within the audience, since the audience is of course the only reason to express anything in the first place?

Sayers’ argument is that it’s all three. Or more precisely, that the three are one. The idea is the art; the work is the art; the reception is the art. Yet there are not three works of art but one. The fullness of the art resides in each and together they are trinity, three-in-one, unified yet unconfused. And of course this is how we as Christians understand God.

Who is the true God? Is He the infinite, transcendent, unknowable Father, the Source and Font of all Being, in whom we live and move and have our being? Is He the Incarnate Son, God-With-Us, who is the visible Image of the invisible Father? Or is God the Holy Spirit, the Breath and Life of all Creation, who resides in each and every one of us through our Baptism, forever reflecting the Father’s glory, forever binding us together as the Body of Christ?

Of course, they are all the same God: beyond us, beside us, within us. The Three are One.

So it is with us. We are all of us artists, all of us creators, all of us children of the Trinity. And so we ourselves are trinity. The hidden self within, a mystery even to our own minds, so full of potential and possibility: that’s who we are. That’s really us. The life we live, the choices we make, our words and our deeds and our actions, that’s who are as well. That’s really us too.

And then there’s the part of us that lives in our loved ones, in our friends and our neighbors, in our parents and our children, in the lives of all of those we’ve touched in some way, be it trifling or profound. Our spirit lives in others while we are yet alive. When I think of my wife, our children, my most beloved friends, they speak in my head with words that aren’t mine. They are a part of me. They live in me, and I in them. We are not so easily separated, one human from another. To God, in fact, we are all one Adam. To God, in fact, we are all one Christ.

This is who I am too, who I am to others. That’s really me.

So when Moses asks in our reading this morning, “What other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is whenever we call to Him?” do not mistake this for Ancient Near Eastern hyperbole. God is closer to you than you can imagine. God is within you, all around you, nearer to you than your own jugular. There is a Spirit living inside of you, who is the Spirit of Christ, who is in turn the living Image of God the Father; so that you and I are one in Christ as Christ is One with God. This is who we are in God.

That’s what all this is about, by the way. All our liturgy, all the Church, Word and Sacrament, is about becoming one with God. In Baptism we are joined to the death and Resurrection of Jesus, dying to ourselves to rise immortal in the Spirit. In the Eucharist, our Holy Communion, we consume the Body and Blood of Christ so that He is now within us, making us holy, making us His own, so that we can now go out and be Him, be Jesus, for a world still very much in need. Not only has He saved you, but He is even now saving the world in and with and through you.

I’ll bet you had no idea that you were as mysterious and omnipresent and wondrous a creature as you are: the you within, the you without, the you who lives in others. And yet there are not three of you, but one: a little trinity unleashed upon the world by the joy and the glory of God.

Little wonder, then, that He does love you so.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.