Mystery

Scripture: Holy Trinity, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

  

You are all atheists.

Or at least you would be, according to the judgment of the Roman Empire in the time of the early Church. Christians were atheists: we denied the gods. And it’s not that we denied one particular god, or even a given pantheon. Monotheism is not a matter of math. No, we denied the entire category of gods and goddesses. They simply did not exist in any meaningful way.

See, paganism is the default setting of humankind; the word “pagan” literally means “common”. And pagans are naturalists; they worship nature. Every pagan Creation story, no matter where in the world, always begins with nature. From nature arise both gods and monsters, gods being forces of order and monsters being embodiments of chaos. Through blood, sweat, and tears, the gods slay the monsters and cobble together civilization, wrangling order out of chaos. Humans usually arise later, as an afterthought or amusement, or sometimes just as nuisances. And we enter a world that is hostile toward us, a world teetering always on the edge of oblivion, held back only by the toiling muscles and cunning minds that bind our precarious civilization together.

Thus we have the three principles of paganism: (1) nature produces order and chaos; (2) the universe is at best indifferent but more likely hostile; and (3) human beings don’t much matter in the grand scheme of things—except maybe if you’re strong. Every pagan, from the Sumerians to the Nazis, has understood the world in this way. There are harsher and gentler expressions of it, but this is the default, this is the common religion of humankind. And the funny thing is that today many people who call themselves atheists in fact embrace this pagan worldview. They don’t worship gods like Zeus or Thor, but they do bend the knee to Reason and Progress, brute forces of order trying to hammer out meaning from chaos.

It’s the Christians who are the real atheists, because we look at this pagan worldview and say, “No. There is more to life, more to reality, than just this. Your blind gods and their petty struggles are false. We were made for so much more. We were made for goodness and for truth and for beauty.”

I should point out that in most pagan religions there is something more than an eternal struggle between order and chaos. Nature gives us questions that nature herself cannot answer. Nature points beyond herself into the great unknown. There is some vast and haunting Mystery behind it all, behind the “common” view of things, and all the pagans knew that it was there. Sometimes they called it the One, or the Source, or the Brahman. But whatever it was, it wasn’t a god. It was far beyond the gods, beyond the universe, beyond everything. It was the Unmoved Mover, the Great Mystery. Best to leave it alone.

But even that was pagan thinking: that the Mystery was too big, too far removed. Obviously we couldn’t matter to whatever lay beyond the veil. We were too small, too unimportant. Too unloved.

Then all of a sudden, come the Jews. Now here was a quixotic people. The Jews once had a little kingdom, nowhere special but on the way to everywhere special. And they had been scattered to the wind when they picked a fight with Rome. But the real kicker was that they claimed that the god of their tribe wasn’t really a god at all, at least not in the usual sense. They worshipped the great I AM, the Source and Font of All Being, the All-Mighty, the Creator: God with a capital G. They claimed to know the unknowable, and not just to know Him, but to have a relationship with Him, a covenant of eternal love and promise.

The Great Mystery had reached out to them—to this smallest and most oppressed of all peoples, exiles descended from slaves—and revealed to them the great Truth behind it all. Nature hadn’t created this God; He had created nature. And when He created her, He made her good, made her overflow with abundance and beauty. And human beings, far from being unimportant, were the crowns of Creation. We were Nature made aware of herself, the stewards of God’s garden. And though we had fallen, though we were broken, nevertheless we were destined to inherit eternal life and grace and glory. Not because we were strong. Not because we were cunning. But simply because we were made by and in and for love.

So much did He love this world of ours, this little dust speck in His great cosmos, that He put aside His glory and power to become one of us, to become a Man born into a harsh and desperate time. And He was born for us, lived for us, died for us. And even as we murdered Him—crucified this Man who was God—He forgave us our sins, conquered death, and raised humanity up to eternal life in the beatific vision of God. In Jesus Christ, the veil betwixt Heaven and earth was utterly and forever rent! The Creator, the Source, the One True God had come to dwell with us, to dwell within us, to heal our every wound and wipe away our every tear.

So overwhelming was this Truth, and so utterly alien to the pagan worldview which is both our instinct and our shroud, that words prove horribly inadequate. You mean to say that God is a Man? Yes, but more than a Man. You mean to say that God is a Spirit? Yes, but more than a Spirit. You mean to say that God is our Father? Yes, but also our Mother and Brother and King and Lord and Lion and Lamb and Priest and Sacrifice and—how, how can words suffice?

God remains the Great Mystery. Yet in Christian tradition, a “mystery” is not something unknowable, but something that can only be understood by experiencing it for yourself. God—the True God, beyond blind forces of order and chaos—is Mystery, and we can only know Him by experiencing Him. We descend with Him into the waters of death and rebirth. We eat His Body and drink His Blood. We hear His Word in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We chant psalms and sing hymns when prose alone proves lifeless. We touch His scars and enter His wounds in the brokenness we share with others in this assembly. And in the liturgy we experience Heaven come down to earth, that we may have a foretaste of the feast to come. We cannot explain our experience of God in Christ Jesus; we can only invite others to experience it too.

This, all of this, is what we intend when we speak of God as Trinity. He is Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is above us, among us, and within us. He is Three, yet He is One. God is Mystery, an inexplicable, depthless Mystery, yet at the same time God is real and He is here and He is for you. This is the experience of the Church. The Trinity is a Family. The Trinity is a Dance. The Trinity is all these things and more, because the Trinity is God, and God is Truth, and the Truth is beyond anything we can imagine. Yet even so, this morsel of bread is God. This chalice of wine is God. These sinners sitting beside us in the pews are God.

Everything is God, and nothing is God. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. The universe cannot hope to contain Him, yet He can fit His entirety within the shell of a nut while still leaving room for the meat. We cannot explain the Trinity! Any attempt to make sense of it on paper would be nothing but a bad analogy, and that way leads to heresy. But we can experience the Trinity. Pray, and Three will hear us. Listen, and One will speak.

God has come to us, in Word and in Spirit, not simply to reveal Himself to us but to become one with us: to invite us inside the very life of God; to join in the dance of the Trinity; to enter into the Great Mystery in wonder and in ecstasy and in awe. And once we see the reality behind it all—once we see that God is not simply an idea but that God is real, and that His reality is bursting upon us in every instant of our lives—others will come. Other people will seek the Mystery that lives within us. And they will ask us, some skeptical, some desperate: “What is it that has found you? What is this strength, this joy, this broken wholeness dwelling within you? Explain to me the Mystery of your God!”

And we will not be able to explain. We are atheists, after all. But God will enable us to invite, and to welcome, and to share.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.