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En el nombre del Dios: Creador, Redentor, y Santificador. Amen.
Last week on Pentecost Sunday we celebrated the establishment of the community of Christ on earth. Today, Trinity Sunday, we celebrate the Community of God. One reason the liturgical calendar puts these principle feasts side by side is that we learn how to be the community of Christ on the earth by living like the community of God: a community in unity with itself.
Easier said than done… Years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine who was a Presbyterian minister and is now an Episcopal priest. I asked him what heaven would be for him; how he understood it. He said that for him, heaven would be to know everything there is to know about God.
My initial, interior response, was sadness. First of all, he’s a very smart man. How could he think our finite brains could ever hope to truly comprehend the infinite? More importantly, however, was my friend’s use of the word “about.” To seek to know about God isn’t the same as to seek to know God. Knowing about God objectifies God. God is other, outside, observed.
I felt lonely for him because Jesus didn’t come to be observed or studied by us but to reconcile us to God. The Holy Spirit descended upon the community of Christ at Pentecost because God chose to dwell in us, to be one with us forevermore.
I don’t think I’ve shared with you yet about one of my longstanding hobbies: quantum physics. One of my favorite quantum physicists is Fred Allan Wolf who wrote “Taking the Quantum Leap” in 1982. I’ve been reading his papers (and others’ works) ever since.
Quantum physics is concerned with the micro-universe, sub-atomic particles like quarks, and the macro-universe, galaxies – going as far as we can go in both directions. What I have learned from this discipline is that everything we learn points us to something we don’t know. Beyond anything we can know there is always more.
Fred Allan Wolf says the farther physics goes into the micro and out to macro-universe the closer we get to mystery. “The trick” he says, “the real trick in life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery.” (A scientist said that!)
When we think about it, there is much we already know about God. We know that God is the source of all that is. We know that Jesus said he and God are one. We know that Jesus promised the Holy Spirit of God would come, clothe his followers with power from on high and lead them into all truth. We know that this would happen over time as Jesus said in today’s gospel.
We know that God is relationship: a Trinity who lives in Unity. We know that we have been brought into that relationship through Jesus who reconciled us to God, making us one with God as he is one with God.
We know that God continues to be revealed to us in creation, in prayer, in community, in our own bodies, and in the gift of our intellect. When Jesus said, I have many things to say to you and you will know them over time, he was talking about the kind of knowing that happens by entering the mystery – a knowing that happens in the wholeness of ourselves; in the wholeness of our community, and in the wholeness of creation – from the tininess of a quark to the vastness of a galaxy.
God is revealed to us in many ways. Have you ever had the experience of a breath-taking sunrise? …or stood in the timelessness that exists as you peer over the edge of a cliff on the Blue Ridge mountains? Have you ever heard the healing power of the crashing waves of the ocean? …or been lost in the universe of a star filled sky? If you have, then you have been in the mystery of God.
When I hold my new grandson and he loves me with his whole little self, I know God. Am I alone when I say that when my dog snuggles into me and looks at me with adoring eyes, I know God? Does anyone else experience that?
When I remember my mother’s smile or see her in a dream, our love feels as real as when she was alive and I know… that’s God, because I know, we know, that God is love, and love never dies.
Every time we gather for Holy Eucharist where we, as the community of Christ on earth, are nourished, strengthened, and enlightened by Word and sacrament, we know God.
God is revealed through the prayers we’ve prayed and hymns we’ve sung together a thousand times. Sometimes, God chooses to be revealed in the midst of a hymn or a prayer we’re going through by rote, not really paying attention until some divine truth hits us, switching on a light of understanding, transforming our understanding entirely.
Trinity Sunday is a good Sunday to be an Episcopalian. We don’t try to solve the mystery. We simply enter it. When we do, when we’re quiet and make space for God to speak in us, amazing things can happen. Love we didn’t know we could have is given to us, insights light up our understanding, and truths are revealed that connect us to everything and show us how to go forward on our path of our faith.
Theologian Christopher Morse says, “Faith is in the first instance, God’s doing. It is God’s relating to human beings in such a way as to relate human beings to each other in ministering to the common good. How and when and where God’s spirit achieves this is not subject to human control. The Spirit’s working for freedom is revealed only by the free working of the Spirit.”
Standing firmly on the foundation of our faith, in unity of community with one another, we can let the Spirit of God work freely in and through us, and we can soar freely with Her going wherever God leads us, certain that there is always more God, more love, to be revealed.
Amen.
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