Transcript
The Spirit Creates
First Baptist Richmond, June 15, 2025
Trinity Sunday
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago…
When I was a boy, my parents used to call me Jimmy, which is a nickname for James. When they were feeling affectionate they might add my middle name, and call me Jimmy Green. But if they ever used all three names—James Green Somerville!—I knew I was in trouble, and they meant business. Today we’re using all three names for God—Father, Son, and Spirit—not because God is in trouble, but because today is Trinity Sunday and we want to make it our business to know God at the deepest and most intimate level. Names are one of the ways we do that. For example: there are people these days who call me Dr. Somerville, but there are other people who call me Dad, and that’s a whole different level of relationship.
I remember hearing a sermon once where someone rattled off all the Hebrew names for God, and what each one meant. There was Adonai, the Lord of All; Elohim, the God who creates; El Shaddai, God Almighty; El Elyon, the God most high; Immanu-El, God with us; Jehovah Jireh, the God who provides; Jehovah Raphah, the Lord who heals; Jehovah Shalom, the God of Peace, and Jehovah Mekkodishkem, the God who sanctifies. Some of you may know all those names and if so I’d like to thank you for not correcting my pronunciation. But why do you care? Why did that preacher care? Because these are the ways the biblical writers
referred to God, and these names tell us something about God’s nature and character. If you were trying to get to know God at the deepest and most intimate level, you might want to know those names.
But what about the names for Jesus? I did a quick search on the Internet and found, “The 50 Names and Titles of Jesus Christ.” Here are just a few: “Savior, Redeemer, Bread of Life, Lord, Creator, Son of the Living God, Only Begotten Son, Beloved Son, Holy One of Israel, Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” The list goes on and on. But people also ask, “What are the 12 names of Jesus? What are the 100 names of Jesus? What are the A to Z names of Jesus?” If you’re interested you can find answers to all these questions just by doing an Internet search. And if that’s not enough you can find a list of the 1,000 names of Jesus, as I did. I don’t know if that makes it easier or harder, but it suggests that there are people out there who want to know Jesus at the deepest and most intimate level.
So, what about the Spirit, the third person of the Trinity? It won’t surprise you that the Spirit doesn’t have as many other names as Jesus, but it does have a few: the Spirit of God; the Comforter, Helper, Counselor, Advocate; the Spirit of Truth; the Spirit of Christ; the Spirit of Wisdom, Revelation, Knowledge, Counsel. Even that list could go on and on if you were really looking, and in this sermon series that’s what we’re doing: we are “Searching for the Spirit” by looking through each Sunday’s lectionary readings for evidence of the least visible person of the invisible God.
You can find some in the reading from Romans, where Paul, who loved the Spirit, writes, “We boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and
hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” I love that! God’s love/ has been poured into our hearts/ through the Holy Spirit.
The Gospel lesson also contains an explicit reference. Jesus says, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.” I love that, too: this idea that Jesus knew there were some truths his disciples just weren’t ready for in the First Century, but promised them that the Spirit would continue to teach “the things that are to come.”
And then there’s the passage from Proverbs, which doesn’t mention the Spirit by name, or at least not by that name. It begins with a reference to “Lady Wisdom,” who stands at the crossroads and calls out to all who will listen. “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth, when he had not yet made earth and fields or the world’s first bits of soil.”
It sounds for all the world like the beginning of John’s Gospel, where the author writes: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God and all things were made through him. Without him was not anything made that was made.” In Proverbs it’s not the Word, but Lady Wisdom, who joins God in making everything that was made. Listen: “When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he
established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of that place in the Book of Job, where Job demands an audience with God, an opportunity to plead his case. But God answers: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”
Well, Job wasn’t there, but apparently the Word was there (that is, the Word that became flesh), and Lady Wisdom was there. She says as much: “When he established the heavens, I was there.” Now, I may be stitching these scraps of Scripture together in ways they were never meant to be, but when I do I begin to get a picture of Father, Son, and Spirit working together to create everything that exists. And I love it that the Spirit is presented as female—as Lady Wisdom—just because of the way it seems to balance things out.
In Greek the word for spirit is pneuma, which is neither male nor female. The word paraclete, which is the special word Jesus uses for the Holy Spirit in John’s Gospel, is male. But the Greek word for wisdom is sophia, which not only is feminine but sounds feminine. Again, I’m not sure that it matters, and, as you’ve
heard, there are lots of names for Father, Son, and Spirit that suggest a multitude of attributes. God’s love for his children is sometimes characterized as motherly. Jesus talks about gathering the people of Jerusalem under his wings as a hen gathers her chicks. But I like the way the Spirit steps onto the stage in Proverbs 8, dressed as Lady Wisdom, speaking of her role in creation, because it may be true that what creation needed more than anything was a woman’s touch.
After talking about the way God brought her forth before the beginning of the earth when there was nothing—no depths of the sea, no springs of water, no mountains, no hills, no earth or fields, “or the world’s first bits of soil,” she says, “When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep.” And that’s a lovely, primordial picture of how things began. We’ve gotten so used to the scientific explanations of the beginning of the universe, so accustomed to talk about the Big Bang, and the hot, expanding gases that eventually cooled to form galaxies, stars, and planets, that we rarely look back at the way primitive people understand the world. But the Bible was written a long time ago by people who didn’t have telescopes. They wrote about what they saw with their naked eyes. The earth looked flat, like a big, round plate. It looked as if there were a dome over it with sun, moon, and stars affixed. And there must have been water under the earth, they reasoned, because where else did rivers and streams come from?
With that sort of primitive understanding the author of Proverbs—inspired by the Spirit—writes about Lady Wisdom being there when God drew a circle on the face of the deep. You can almost see it, can’t you? Do you remember the opening verses of the Bible, where it says, “In the beginning when God began to
create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God swept over the face of the waters”? I’m picturing an endless ocean, stretching out in every direction, with the Spirit blowing this way and that way, full of restless energy, waiting for God to get things started. And then he did. He bent down and drew a circle on the face of the deep.
That was the beginning. That was when God marked out the boundaries of the earth. And then he raised a dome over his circle that would be the sky. And then he sank pillars into the watery depths that would be the foundation of the earth. And then he raised up mountains and hills, let the water break through to form rivers and streams, assigned the sea its limit, so that it wouldn’t transgress his command. And all the while, says Wisdom, “I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
And whatever the scientists might say about the way things actually came to be, there is something extraordinarily beautiful about this picture of the playful spirit, working alongside the master builder, as together they create heaven and earth. And playful may be exactly the right word to describe the work of the Spirit, because, have you looked at the world lately? In our newcomers class here at First Baptist we say that one of our values is “the beauty of diversity,” but we also say that we get that from God, who seems to love diversity. Imagine a world where there was only one kind of fish, one kind of bird, and then look at the world we live in. Imagine a world with only one kind of animal, one kind of human, and then look at the world we have.
It may have been the influence of that playful spirit, working with God in
the beginning, that said, “Oh! I know! Let’s make an animal that has the bill of a duck and the tail of a beaver! Let’s make a bird that can’t fly, but can run as fast as a horse. Let’s make a whale as big as a barge, but as gentle as a lamb. And then beyond that, let’s make people and animals, birds and fish, flowers and trees, as wildly diverse as possible. Let’s make millions of species, not one. Let’s give the botanists and the chemists, the astronomers and the physicists, the geologists and the biologists something to do. Why not? We’ve got all the time in the world, and all the imagination there is.” And God said, “Let it be.”
Now, I know this is Trinity Sunday, the only Sunday on the Christian calendar devoted to a doctrine, and if I’m going to talk about a doctrine I should probably present you with something a little more orthodox. I should remind you that, “The Holy Trinity, comprising the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are in an eternal, loving relationship. They are distinct persons, yet one God, existing in a harmonious communion of love.”i I should tell you that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God, while maintaining that the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Spirit and the Spirit is not the Father. And yet these three persons of the Holy Trinity each have so many names and so many attributes that the very diversity God so loves appears to be present in its unity.
What holds it all together? What makes God God and not just a billion broken fragments of the Divine? I think I’ve already told you. I think it’s love. In the same way the force of gravity keeps us flying off the face of the earth the force of love keeps Father, Son, and Spirit together. I read or heard somewhere that the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and the Spirit is the love that exists between them. If that’s true it would make sense of something I’ve been doing for years.
If you do a word search of my sermons you will find that I use the word God a lot, and I use the word Jesus a lot, but the word I probably use most apart from those two is the word love. Sometimes I feel almost apologetic about it: “Sorry I talk about love so much,” as if love were that mushy, romantic notion we celebrate on Valentine’s Day. But what if it’s more than that? What if love is another name for the Holy Spirit? Then wouldn’t it make sense that any Trinitarian preacher worth his salt would spend some time in almost every sermon talking about Love, that playful, creative, sometimes shy, always holy, Spirit who shows up on nearly every page of sacred Scripture?
—Jim Somerville © 2025
