The Second Sunday of Pentecost

Archie, of course, always took a puff on his cigar when he finished singing those lines.

Archie loved to look back to the old days, back to when all was right with the world, unlike the ambiguous, messy, and goofy world of the present.

That’s often the way it is with us human beings. That was the way it was with the people of Israel. They remembered how it was in the past, how life was before their sin and disobedience led them into the turmoil and exile of the present.

"We remember, O Lord, the days when you made the earth and the highest heavens, the days when you chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans into the land of Canaan and named him Abraham. We remember the days when you found him faithful and made a covenant with him and all his descendants.

"We remember the days when you saw the suffering of our fathers in Egypt, the days when you heard our cry at the Red Sea and divided the Sea before us, the days when you sent miraculous signs and wonders and made a name for yourself which remains to this day. We remember the days when you led us with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, to give us light on our way and bread from heaven to eat and water from the rock to drink, the days when we lacked nothing and our clothes did not wear out, nor did our feet become swollen.

"We remember the days when you gave us kingdoms and nations, allotting to them even the remotest frontiers, the days when you made our sons as numerous as the stars in the sky and brought us into the land where we took possession of houses filled with all kinds of good things, a land where wells were already dug and there were vineyards and olive groves and fruit trees in abundance, the days when we ate to the full and were well-nourished, and when we reveled in your great goodness." (Nehemiah 9, passim)

Remembering the good old days, emembering Eden, looking back to a Golden Age when all was right with the world. It’s a habit we human beings have.

So is looking forward to a time when all will be well again, to a time when, once again, we’ll have life the way we think it’s supposed to be, the way we want it, under control.

When I talk with young people who are preparing for marriage, we talk about their hopes for children. And often they say, "Oh, we want to have children, but we don’t plan to have them until we can afford to. We’re going to work for several years, and then, when John has paid off his student loans and is established in his practice, and when I’ve gotten a promotion, and when we can afford a minivan and have saved up enough money and the house is paid for, then we’ll have children." There is a dream there -- a pipe dream to be sure -- of a time when they’ll have all their stuff together. And then...then life will be the way it’s meant to be.

The Bible, too, has visions of the future, visions of a day to come when all will be right with the world again. "In that day," says the Lord, "I will pour out my Spirit upon all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, and your old men will dream dreams, and your young men will see visions, and I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth."

In Jerusalem there will be deliverance, and "the Lord himself will give you a sign. A virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and he will be called "God with us." And "the walls of Jerusalem will be rebuilt, and the day will come when her gates will always stand open. They will never be shut, day or night."

It will be a day, the Bible says, "when the faithful will stand before the throne of God, serving him day and night in his temple," and "he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them, and never again will they hunger, never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat upon them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd. He will lead them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

We live in the mystery of time. And we are fascinated by time, and fooled by it as well. And not a little anxious about it.

There is past, there is present, and there is future, we say. But when we think about it, we are aware that time does not really exist at all, for the instant the present arrives, it has already slipped into the past, and is gone. And we hold the past only in our memory, and the future only in our anticipation. "So what is time?" asks St. Augustine. "If no one asks me, I know," he says. "But if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I do not know."

Clearly we say that there is past, present, and future only because we perceive time as passing, but we cannot hold on to it as existing, because the present of even the previous sentence, even the present of the immediately previous word I just spoke, and which you just heard, is now past. Now it exists only in our memory. We human beings perceive something we call time only because we are continuously coming into being and passing away.

But God does not come into being or pass away. God always is. God’s years neither come nor go. God’s years just are. "Your years, O God, are one day," says Augustine, "and your day is not each day, but [only] today, because with you today does not give way to tomorrow, nor does it come after yesterday. With you, today is eternity, and eternity is today. You have made all times, and you are before all times, and not at any time was there no time."

We live in a world of time and space, and space is just as mysterious as time. Research of the past 50 years suggests to some physicists that there are realities -- they call them quanta for lack of a better description -- which manifest themselves as matter, as subatomic particles, only when they are being observed, only when we are looking at them, which suggests that there is some invisible reality which connects those particles to the observer. More mysterious than that, some of these particles, while they appear to be separated from each other in space, move in concert with each other instantaneously, in a kind of mirror image of each other, or a kind of dance with each other, which suggests that they must communicate with each other, or be connected to each other, by some reality deeper and more mysterious than the speed of light itself...which leads the physicist David Bohm to wonder if, in fact, what we call "location" even exists at all. Perhaps what we perceive as particles of matter separated by space is really an illusion. Perhaps their separation is an illusion, just as time is an illusion. Certainly space, like time, is a puzzlement.

Just this week the newspapers carried a report about astronomers who are looking deep into space, or into what appears to be space, in order to study the oldest light in the universe. They are looking into that "fading glow of the Big Bang of the cosmos" 14 or 15 billion years ago. The report says that they have now detected "the first slight clumps of matter that eventually evolved into the myriad galaxies that populate today’s universe."

It provides observational evidence, the report says, not just theory. It provides observational evidence that the universe did, in fact, begin with a bang and then undergo an unimaginably brief period of ultra-rapid expansion, or inflation," after which the universe slowed down to continue to expand in a more sedate manner.

But "in spite of the name ‘Big Bang,’ the conventional Big Bang theory tells us very little about the Bang," says Alan Guth, one of the researchers at MIT. The Big Bang alone "doesn’t tell us what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged. The conventional Big Bang theory really is nothing other than a theory of the aftermath of the bang. But inflation attempts to describe the bang itself. Inflation theory accounts for the origin of normal matter -- the protons, neutrons, and electrons making up the visible world around us. [This is matter we have now seen, and it is an observation which] predicts the existence of exotic, not-yet-detected forms of ‘dark’ matter and ‘dark’ energy that now appear to dominate the universe." (The Gazette, May 24, 2002)

Yes, it is a puzzlement, a mystery. For now that we have seen the ancient protons and neutrons and electrons that made up the physical world in first few seconds following the Big Bang, mystery remains, the mystery of the "dark" matter and "dark" energy behind them. And even if someday we see the "dark" matter and "dark" energy themselves, even if we devise instruments with which we can directly observe those ancient physical realities, the puzzlement will still remain, because the question will remain: what reality lies behind them, as yet undetected?

And what of those other realities we do detect, realities we have experienced for centuries, those other realities we know, but which remain beyond the ken of sight or instrument? We can understand how the simplest elements of matter can join together to create more complex forms of matter. We can see how oxygen joins with hydrogen to form water. But what about other known realities of life? What about love and faith and hope and joy? What about consciousness? What about the fact that we are aware, aware not only of matter, but aware that we experience faith and hope and tenderness and compassion, aware that we love and are loved?

Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself, say the Scriptures. "God knows we are none of us much good at it much of the time," says Frederick Buechner in A Room Called Remember. "Loving each other is at least easier to talk about [than loving God], if not easier to do, because at least we can see each other with our eyes. We can see each other’s faces especially, and every once in a while, if we have our eyes open, we can see something of what is within those faces. Even with strangers sometimes -- people we pass on the street, or find sitting across from us in a bus or a waiting room, even sometimes with people we know very well but seldom take the trouble really to look at -- we see something that stops us in our tracks. We catch a glimpse of some unexpected beauty or pain or need in another’s face. Or maybe we just notice the tilt of an old man’s Agway cap, or the way a young woman rests her cheek on the palm of her hand, or the way a child looks out the window at the rain, and for a moment, then, our heart goes out to them in ways too deep for words." Is it just matter itself -- protons and neutrons and electrons -- that have banged themselves into realities of life like these? Can tenderness and mercy and compassion -- can consciousness, the fact that we are aware that we love and are loved -- arise from the banging and swirling of protons and neutrons and electrons alone?

And from the depths of our awareness comes a response. "In the beginning," responds the Scriptures. "In the beginning ...God. In the beginning, whenever it was and wherever it was, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ’Let there be light.’ [Photons we call them now.] And God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness...."

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men....

"There came a man who was sent by God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world....

"And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."

And then there’s that mysterious bush. Moses could clearly see that the bush was burning, but it did not burn up. The flames -- the photons, the elements of light and power -- did not extinguish that which was within it. And when Moses approached the angel who appeared in the flames, God spoke to him and spoke the unpronounceable: YHWH is as close as we can come to it. I AM WHO I AM is what it means. But it can also mean, I WAS WHO I WAS and I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE.

"Tell the people, Moses, that Unpronounceable -- the Unknown and Unknowable, THE ONE WHO ALWAYS IS -- has sent you to deliver them from darkness into light, from death into life." For God loves the world he has made.

In fact, as we become aware later in the Scriptures, "God so loved the world that, when the time had fully come, he gave his one and only Son, that whoever trusts in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved."

The Holy Trinity -- this is what we mean by it: that God is the One who spoke the mystery of life into being from before all time. From outside of time and space themselves, from outside all matter, "dark" or otherwise, the Reality behind all matter, the Word beyond all matter, so loved the world that he entered the world of matter and time and space in human form, in a cave or a barn or a manger, later to walk the streets of Bethlehem and Nazareth and Jerusalem as God’s Son in the time of Caesar Augustus. And this Word is also the One, the same One, who still loves the world so much that through his Spirit -- through his life, his living breath -- he continues to walk beside us in our time and in our space, even though he always is and everywhere is.

To say that God is Trinity, One God in three Persons, is simply our space-and-time way of saying that God is the ONE WHO ALWAYS IS AND EVERYWHERE IS, the One who, though he himself remains unseen, made everything that is seen. Such a One is holy, mysterious, beyond all knowing, because those of us who live in time and space cannot ourselves get outside of time and space to know Him as he is, always and everywhere. And that’s why Augustine said that "if you know it, then whatever it is, even if it is "dark" matter and "dark" energy, it is not God."

In a moment we are going to recite our creed. But the creed is not a definition of God. We cannot capture God on a page in the Prayer Book, anymore than we can put God down in notes on a 3x5 card, as if to prepare for a test, or anymore than the bush could capture and control and extinguish the flame. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not a definition of God that we can hold in our heads, and therefore somehow "have" God. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity proclaims the in-finite mystery of the One who always is and everywhere is.

God is mystery. God is the mystery whom the spirit of our age does its best to try to extinguish. Just as life is mystery. Both God and life are mysteries that cannot be captured, cannot be tamed, but that can be experienced. And we can experience THE ONE WHO ALWAYS IS only as we pass through the experience of time and space in our day in this great mystery of life. It is an experience in which we have never had all our stuff together in this world of time and space, and never will, because that’s not what this world of coming into being and passing away is about. It is an experience of mystery, an experience of THE ONE WHO ALWAYS IS AND EVERYWHERE IS as we ourselves pass through the mystery of continuously coming into being and passing away -- a mystery that brings its share of pain, to be sure, but that also brings an ample share of joy; a mystery that we sometimes fear, but that also brings the reality of the redemptive possibility of love; a mystery that is often missed in the tedium of day-to-day life, but that also brings the reality of the possibility of greatness of soul and spirit.

So today we celebrate the mystery, the mystery of God, the mystery of the life of the One behind and beyond all matter, who nonetheless came to live in his world in time and space, and who lives in it still, behind the veil. It is the holy mystery of the Holy Trinity, the mystery of the One who always is and everywhere is, and from whom, though himself unseen, comes everything that is seen.

By faith, we say that he is One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s our way of saying that we matter. It’s our way of saying that we are matter, but that we are more than matter, more than 15 billion light-years of the cosmic hiccups of mass multiplied by the speed of light. We love, and we are loved, because of the One who first loved us, because of the One who spoke us into being from beyond being, the same One who lived and died for us in time and space and who walks beside us in our time and in our space.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.