Wonder

Propers: The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

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

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? … The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; His understanding is unsearchable.

Wonder always brings us back to God.

The majesty of the mountain, the depth of the forest, the mind-boggling expanse of the cosmos—it all does something to us, convicts us, gets inside. We can rationalize, telling ourselves it’s just atoms and void, but try as we might we cannot keep beauty from penetrating our soul.

We look at the world around us, Creation in all its glory, and we have this deep intuition that it all means something, it all has purpose. And so our natural response is praise, gratitude, wonder. “How good it is to sing praises to our God!” And it’s right—it feels right—to offer up thanksgiving even when we don’t know to whom we owe our thanks.

Because I don’t care what your religion is or how skeptical you are: goodness, truth, and beauty are universal, unavoidable human experiences, which cannot be explained away nor reduced to the blind mechanics of chemistry. The greatest wonder of our world is, first, that anything exists at all, and second, that it seems to correspond with the rational human mind. It is amazing that the thoughts in our heads match the workings of the world, giving us this concept of truth.

And when we seek out truth, as we are all driven to do, and we uncover it, we call this recognition, literally “re-thinking.” Our thoughts follow the thoughts of the one behind it all, who put all of this together. We recognize Him in His work.

Now, I’m not arguing that God is some sort of demiurge, an intelligent designer who shapes the cosmos like a blacksmith at the forge. God is more than that. God is not a being amongst other beings, like Zeus or Superman. God is Being itself. He is the ground and source of all reality and of all possible realities. He is an ocean of infinite actuality, and everything that exists—every atom, every thought, every moment of time—exists only insofar as it exists in Him.

So when we talk about Creation, we’re not just talking about the natural world. We’re talking about every world, every mind, every person and possibility. And when we speak of God as Creator, we don’t just mean that He put everything in order back at the Big Bang. Rather, we mean that every heartbeat, every breath, every moment that we exist, exists only and completely in Him. Everything that is real, everything that has being, draws its being from the God who is Being itself. For as St Paul writes, in Him we live and move and have our being.

I don’t mean to be esoteric. My point in all this is twofold: one, that our concept of God is infinitely greater than that assumed by the irreligious and by many Christians themselves; and two, that this understanding of God has arisen in every thoughtful human culture, because every human being experiences goodness, truth, and beauty. And those point us to what is real.

When you feel close to God in the forest—that’s real. When a poem sings to you a deeper truth than mere prose over could—that’s real. And when you look around at a world governed by politics, purchases, and preferences, and you can’t quite manage to shake the conviction that there has to be more to life than all this mess—that’s real too.

Goodness and truth and beauty point us to God. And no matter how we might run from them, sooner or later, in a moment of pure wonder, they will break in. They will arrest us, body, mind, and soul. And then we must choose: to pursue that glimpse of pure wonder, pure reality, wheresoever it may lead; or to return to the smothering confines of a comfortably anesthetizing lie, and see what’s on TV.

Now, it’s true that many have acknowledged such a God—the One, the Source, the Creator of All—but have thrown up their hands and despaired of ever knowing Him. He is too high for the likes of us: too transcendent, too unknowable. After all, what has the infinite Creator to do with squishy little apes like us? But this again is a misunderstanding, for while God is above and beyond us, He is also beneath and within and around us, closer to us than our own jugular.

For again, we only have being because God is Being, eternally giving of Himself so that we might exist. And we have a word for that, for when you give of yourself for the benefit of another: love. We call that love. We exist because we are loved. Every moment that we are here, every moment we are created, we are created in love. And we believe that God so loved the world that He entered into it—became a part of it—in order to die for it, to die for us, that He might pour out His own life for the life of the world.

Now it might boggle the mind to think of the world existing in God, yet God then entering into the world, but that’s the whole infinite possibility thing. God can be the Father eternally creating and sustaining all realities; He can be the Son, stepping into His Creation like an author writing Himself into His own book; and He can be the Spirit of love connecting the two, poured out to bind Creator and Creation eternally together.

He can be all Three at once, and still be One God. In fact, that’s kind of His whole deal.

The wonders of Creation and the miracle of the human mind will always draw people toward the truth of God. The story of God’s love for His people Israel, woven like a golden thread through the tapestry of history, and culminating in Christ’s perfect act of worship and praise upon the Cross, will draw people to the beauty of God. And the love shown forth by Christians in the life of the Spirit, through humility and forgiveness, generosity and praise, will draw people to the goodness of God.

Goodness, Truth, and Beauty; Father, Son, and Spirit; are forever calling us back, calling us home, calling us to new life in God.

“Everyone is searching for You,” the disciples said to Jesus.

And He answered them, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”

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