God Took Nothing and Made a Someone

Growing up in Southern California, I saw a poster with a line that I’ve never forgotten. It grew out of the late 1960s activism surrounding racial justice. The poster carried a photo of a plaintive-faced African American child, an urban neighborhood his backdrop.

The caption: “God doesn’t make junk.”

That statement, while true, is a bit of an understatement. God does make people worthy of respect when he oversees the birth of any child, but God does more than not make junk. God, we learn from the Jewish and Christian traditions, fashions each person with special pleasure, takes delight in each one. I find that remarkable.Certainly a child—anyone, really—has moments that make us doubt that. But any human person can feel a lightening of the heart at the very idea.

The author of Psalm 139 turned the insight into a soaring prayer:

For it was you [O God] who formed my inward parts;

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

As a child going to church and Sunday school, perhaps where I saw the poster in the first place, I got some vague idea about God creating not only the world but in some mysterious sense, creating me.

I knew that meant that I had value, coming from the hands of a creative God.

But until I began reflecting on the Trinity, as I have been lately, getting down deeper into the realities it points to, I don’t think my belief in God creating me—or anyone—stirred up in me much excitement or exuberance.

But now the Psalm that speaks of God’s making of us takes on new meaning. It gives a glimpse of a God who relishes the creatures he makes—lives noticed and known and enjoyed by the Lord of time and history.

Of course, it’s true that in God’s ordering of things he gives agency to persons like us in the bringing a life into the world. Conception enlists the coming together of male and female. All kinds of very human steps (and accidents) lead to a person’s existence.

But the Psalm tells me that every person is more than the by-product of biological goings-on. Whatever the biology or the mystery of the mechanisms, God was personally involved. There was divine intention and delight. God took what was nothing and made a someone. I certainly didn’t create my own identity. No one loved oneself into existence. That took others. That took God.

And if I was made, I matter. For doesn’t this mean that you and I are God’s personal and beloved creation?

But there’s more, and here’s where the Trinity comes in, because in this glimpse of who God is we catch a picture of more than a Creator God, but also a profoundly relational, interpersonal Being. This is a Divinity already familiar with the satisfactions of eternal intimacy. If Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live in happy communion, it is not a lonely God who makes us while lofted away in some place of divine solitude. Even our creation was a collegial affair. When God makes man, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image.”

That picture of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit taking delight in one another began to open me up to this added dimension of my making, this idea of the Triune God also delighting in me.

Julian of Norwich caught the whiff of such good news centuries ago. God, she wrote, “has made us only for himself, and restored us by his [Son’s] blessed Suffering, and sustains us in his blessed love, and all this is out of his goodness.”

If the Triune God had such a caring hand in my and your making, and if God as Trinity is already relational, I think it follows that God continues to give us personal attention.

One way to read Advent, to live more fully in this season in which I’m writing, is to see how the God who started it all, who had a gleam in his divine eye, hasn’t left the premises. That Presence hasn’t stopped showing delight in those he made and still sustains.