Sunday, June 4, 2023
/The First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday (Year A)
Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8 or Canticle 2 or 13; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20
The Rev. Clint Brown
In late April of 1810, a beautiful Viennese noblewoman, Therese Malfatti, opened a letter addressed to her and watched as a piece of music fluttered out of the envelope and onto the floor. She leaned [over] to pick it up and saw that it was labeled simply: “for Therese.” The scrawled handwriting on the manuscript was immediately [recognizable]; it [was that of her] suitor, Ludwig van Beethoven. A few months shy of his fortieth birthday and increasingly desperate to marry, Beethoven had fallen in love with Therese earlier that spring and had proposed. The marriage never took place for reasons [that are] unclear, although it seems that Therese was willing, but her family was not. This little story is worth repeating, because when the music was found many years later among Therese’s effects, its dedication was mistakenly read as “Für Elise,” and the piece has been known by that title [ever since]. This, perhaps one of Beethoven’s best-known pieces, was thus no trifle for its composer but a musical love note; or [perhaps] more likely, a musical farewell to a [love that could never be].[1]
Sometime this week, I encourage you to do yourself the favor of putting on a recording of this famous piece and listening to it again with fresh ears, knowing what it meant to its composer and his doomed love affair. Imagine the impression it must have made on Therese Malfatti the first time she sat down to play it at her piano. I guarantee you will not hear its emotionally charged three minutes the same way ever again.
Both the piece and the story capture well an essential quality about the music of Beethoven, and that is its very transparent autobiography. Music had not always been so personal. Before Beethoven, music had been intended more or less for entertainment; or, if it was “serious” music, reserved for the exclusive use of the church. But with Beethoven we see a seismic shift. Music was liberated. It could be serious about humanity as well as about God, and Beethoven was almost single-handedly responsible for this new and romantic view of music as personal testament. What Napoleon’s guns were doing to old Europe, Beethoven’s towering genius and Promethean sense of destiny was doing to music. Now music was free not only to plumb emotional depths hitherto unknown but to wax philosophical and poetic. And while no artistic effort has or can ever be completely devoid of some mark of its creator, never before had music been quite such a vehicle for personal expression.
On this Trinity Sunday, our readings celebrate the Triune God with an emphasis on creation – God as Creator. God’s creative acts are God’s means of personal expression. The Priestly writer who composed the first chapter of Genesis sometime in the early sixth century before Christ, was straining every category and means to capture the awesomeness of God’s creative activity. Compared to the gods of the peoples surrounding the ancient Hebrews, here was a portrait of how Yahweh, the one true God, had created from nothing and formed humankind in God’s own image. For his God, things were both grand and personal. And when, centuries later, Jesus spoke of the God of Israel as his Father, and commanded his small band of disciples to baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, he was making plain that God, now revealed as Triune, was not and never had been done with creating. God was and still is at work in the world, bringing something new into being every time a person accepts baptism. God’s personal expressivity continues to be on full display in both the very big and the very small, not only in the realm of nature but equally so in us.
It is this thought of God’s continuing work in us that I most want to leave you with today. You are an expression of God’s creativity. I believe that we don’t stop nearly often enough to consider the significance of this extraordinary fact, the fact of our having an existence at all. God has, as it were, given each of us a canvas upon which to paint a life, and our manner of life, our posture towards its possibilities and its challenges, our choices, these are our paints and brushes. There will be times when we will attempt to do things far in advance of our technique and our efforts will appear amateurish; times when our picture will look alright, but we could have risked more, attempting bolder strokes or brighter colors; or when we will get halfway through a portrait and realize we need to start over again because what we are painting is not truthful, not true to ourselves and our values; there will be days, weeks, or even months and years when our canvases will be clouded over by setbacks and disillusionments and darkness blankets what was once a sunny landscape; there will be times of dryness when we completely lack the inspiration to try and sit staring at a blank canvas (in those times we might do well to ask ourselves if it is paralysis because of fear, or, worse, the realization that we don’t have anything worth saying?); but, then again, there will be those times when we get things right and everything comes together, when we will feel at the full height of our powers and produce a masterpiece. Here is the crucial thing. To know yourself to be a child of God is to know that your life has significance, that it is always worth the effort of pressing on and making the most of it. Going through the motions, just getting by, is not enough, and neither is living irresponsibly and wastefully. This life is an extraordinary gift and far too precious to reject the call to be the best that you can be.
Whether you find yourself in a high place or a low place this morning – whether you believe your life is heading down the right track or not, know this – you are the unique expression of a personal God. God has created you in order to be revealed in you.
[1] Robert Harris, What to Listen for in Beethoven: The Essential Introduction to the World’s Foremost Composer and the Hidden Pleasures of Classical Music (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1996), 17.