RCL - First Sunday After Pentecost: Trinity Sunday - May 30, 2010

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC

RCL - First Sunday After Pentecost: Trinity Sunday - May 30, 2010

Rublev Trinity Icon

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

A million-billionth the size of the head of a pin, not yet energy or matter, explodes and in 10 to the minus 37th of a second expands to create the universe. Unfolding according to a law of nature, a law somehow already present, already active, which St. John’s Gospel would come to identify as a work of the Logos, the Word of God, an energy driven by the Spirit becomes particles, then atoms, then molecules, as more and more complex combinations unfold, dancing to primeval patterns formed so deep that every pulse of energy, every atom, every molecule already knows the dance. The universe from the beginning dances according to the patterns of the Word and the energies of the Spirit..

Matter forms and combines in dust and clouds and spheres, denser and denser as its own gravity pulls it in and together. Elements form, heat melts, cold freezes, gases blanket the celestial balls. Stars are born, planets circle them. In some places that dance is the only dance. So far.

In others, on our own planet, oxygen and water form, and more and more complex molecules. The energy of the dance, the laws present from the moment of creation, Spirit and Word, impel this energy-filled matter to reproduce itself – one molecule divides into two, two multiply into four, four into eight, sixteen, 32, 64, 128, 256..., billions, trillions, in the blink of an eye (but there are no eyes!). The waters fill with them. Amino acids become amoebas, amoebas become multi-cellular, simple becomes complex, growing, separating, specializing, from cells to organisms. Eons pass. Proto-plants and proto-animals differentiate, change, become more complex, filling the sea, then the air, then the land, forming and shaping, straining in adaptation. The Spirit, The Word, deep down move everything that is onward, and everything that is, everything that lives, gives its unconscious praise for being, hope in being born, joy in the flourishing of its nature, expectation for what is yet to come from its dying. Life lives from life.

The world is Trinitarian in its very being: Creator, Word and Spirit are simultaneous, proceeding from the creative will, each equal but not alike, the world the project of this triune God Who is beyond all our understanding and yet present all in all.

Humans somehow attain consciousness, an awareness that the other is not the same as me, and begin to fathom the mysteries of the design of things, the Word, and wonder at the energy of it all, the Spirit. From the very first we want to know what we are, where we came from, what we are for. We are part of the rhythm of life and yet can imagine ourselves outside it, somehow exempt from it. And we act as if we are exempt from it, as if the other were not other but an extension of our undifferentiated selves, and we suffer for it. We try to imagine what might be beyond. We intuit a Creator, describe “him” in our own images, and as we think about our own images, we know them to be both true and untrue. God, Father, Creator – words, images from our experience. In truth, what we call God is what or who is before the world, outside the world, not defined by the world, unexplainable, ineffable.

Except for one thing: Something has come out of Nothing. This “God” is one that wills being to be. That is what God “is”. I Am Who I Am. Or, perhaps, I Am Becoming What I am Becoming. Or, perhaps, I Am What Is. Or, perhaps, as God said to Job, Why are you asking me this question? The consequence of God’s willing is the Created world, acting according to a rational “Word”, in the energies we have come to call “Spirit”. Like God, the world also is one, and it is three.

But our world has become old. Human consciousness has brought as much grief and sorrow as it has brought us joy. Perhaps more sorrow than joy.

A man appears among a people chosen by God. His words are truth. They strike some to a heart of gladness and they strike others to a heart of guilt and anger. His touch heals. His voice calms the waves of the sea. Multitudes are fed. The dead are raised. His stories unlock the profound secrets of the universe in the most ordinary things. Eyes can see and ears can hear, and what they see and hear is the truth about a world suddenly not alien but filled with life from God, because it is of God.. Hope springs where it has no right to spring. A kingdom is proclaimed, not of man but of God.

Who is this man? He speaks of the Father, of the Spirit, and of himself, as if the three are one, as if he is the human face of God. Some are scandalized, but others leap with joy. Some, perhaps most of us, are both scandalized and joyful. How can this be? Just when we thought we had a grip on him, he is killed. He is never seen in that form again. But in others we come to recognize his unique voice, his unique life, his unique being. No longer dead, but alive, but so unpredictably alive. He gave us his body and his blood for the food we need: Life lives from life. And then he’s gone.

And then, a strange, unexpected, incomprehensible energy begins to flow. Dispirited disciples draw courage from it. Inarticulate workingmen begin to talk of God, and even more wonderful, people start listening to them. A new idea begins to form: The kingdom that man talked about might be happening. People begin to live it, and are so energized in the Word that says the kingdom is possible that the Spirit fills them and leads them and gives them courage where they had none. And gradually the truth dawns – or rather, as that man promised, they are led by the Spirit into the truth: The world belongs to God. That man was God’s Word, who can never die. That man was God’s Son in human life, whose death gives us life. The Spirit which has filled us is the same Spirit whose energy is the life of the world itself, come down on our heads in tongues of fire, energizing the world again.

We are the people this is happening to now. We exist because the Father wants us to. We have met the Word in the Son. We are in the Spirit.

Describing the Trinity is as difficult as describing the world itself, because the world’s life, from which our thought and language flow, comes from the triune life of God. But we are invited into that life. Every creative act joins the Father’s creation. Every act of learning, every discovery of knowledge, every self-offering gift to others is participation in the Word, is participation in the Son. Every cooperation with the energies of life joins us to the Spirit.

Is there any adequate way to describe God? There is one: Love. The will of God is that being may be, that in all its manifest and hidden glory the universe may unfold, and that in time the conscious minds of that universe can come to understand that behind all that is, is Love. Love demands an object. God created the universe, created us, that there might be an other to love, and that we too might learn to love the other.

And so all creation sings God’s praise, each particle, atom, molecule, amoeba, organism, plant, animal in its own peculiar and wonderful language. Their being is itself their act of praise. And as we are drawn into the love of God, we too are moved by the Spirit, but now, in union with the triune God, to speak in spirited energy the Word of praise, praise of the One who made us, we who by God’s gracious will have being, and are drenched in triune love from the beginning of time to the end of eternity.

In the end, finite words fail this infinite task. All we can really say is, Glory. Glory. Glory.