Pentecost Sermon June 12, 2011

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.”

Today we are here to share a joint communion between brothers and sisters of several denominations. We gather together as Disciples of Christ, United Methodists, and Episcopalians. Anyone else out there from a different tradition? We know the sharing of this meal by different names, The Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, the Eucharist, which is a fancy Greek word for Thanksgiving.

The United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church have officially entered into a time of Interim Shared Communion as we move toward the day of Full Communion. All of our denominations are in one way or another in dialogue as we seek to live out concretely the Prayer of Jesus, “That we all may be one, even as our God is one.”

It is fitting that we gather together on this day, Pentecost, meaning basically 50 days since Easter. Pentecost also coincides with the Jewish Feast of Weeks. It can be tied to Passover and the giving of the Law, 50 days from these events, a part of the salvation history of the Jewish people. But it also relates to the underlying agricultural festivals tied to creation. The Feast of Weeks is also a harvest celebration, a time to give thanks for the fruit of our labor and again 50 days from the festival of First Fruits, all tied to the various grain harvests in the Middle East. Seven as you may know is an important number in Jewish tradition. And seven times seven is 49, add one is 50 and this is a great symbol of completion, of culmination.

We have been working together, many of us for many years in this community. Recently we have been doing lots of stuff together, feeding young people at Mending Wings for example. Some of us have been meeting regularly for bible study and leadership has been meeting monthly in our Ecumenical group. We have been working together on our joint Organizing for Mission project. Together we have raised lots of money for hunger relief both here and internationally. So today is a culmination, a celebration of our work together as we seek to model our unity in Jesus Christ. On this 50^th day, this day of culmination.

But today is also a day of new beginning. It was originally the birth of the church, when the promised gift of the Holy Spirit was given and filled all those gathered together on that day. We say happy birthday to the church, and we look forward to another year of our life together and imagine what we might accomplish together in the future.

We do see also how far we have to go to get to the vision of church that was described in that first celebration. Then, it says, all were gathered together in one place. I am not suggesting that we need to go backward and reclaim some lost glory days of the church. Many of us know all too well that the past is gone. But even what we had when our various buildings were filled with people is not the vision put forth by Pentecost. It is a vision of all gathered together in one place. In the early church it was a few disciples who had gathered for the first time together to receive the Holy Spirit. Now in our recent history, the church has waxed and waned in numbers and spread and diversified throughout the world. But it has been for some time many different denominations and faith traditions. Ecumenical movements have come and gone, but that vision of unity remains elusive.

What does a new vision of unity in which we can celebrate our diversity look like? I really don’t know! But today is a celebration of the journey we are on to discover together what it might mean to be a visible sign of the unity we have in Jesus Christ. On this day, at least, we can begin to model a new vision of unity in diversity in which, at least on one day of the year, we can all gather together in one place and be a visible sign of unity. We have a long way to go, we are painfully aware of who is missing from our circle today. Our Circle? What might it mean for us to be a part of circle that is not really ours at all, but one drawn by God to include all of God’s children?

This vision of unity described in this first story was not just one of Christian Unity: the unity of Christian denominations and the Christian church. The people in the crowd that day described everyone who was there: “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

What does this mean indeed? It is a vision of the whole world able for a moment to hear and understand one another. A vision of the world in all its diversity, united. I am not again suggesting that we need to go back, rather this is a call for us to go foward. It was after all, perhaps a fleeting moment, come and gone, a glimpse of something yet to be fully realized. We call it the Kingdom of God. I like to call it the Community of Creation, a vision in which all can share in the blessing of God’s creation, in which there is place at the table for everyone and everything, in which we can truly celebrate all the incredible diversity of God’s creation and know that we are indeed one. But what does it mean to go forward toward this vision. What does it mean indeed! We also right now live in a community full of different languages and cultures and people from many nations, all sharing together this land. We live here also with all the plants and animals, with the river and sky and the valley and mountains. What indeed does it mean for us to live together celebrating our unity in diversity? We have a long way to go.

But this day can be for us a marker of our progress toward that vision as we seek in all we do to embody the unity we share in the Spirit of God.

I often think of our work together as an artist’s work. Monet, the French impressionist, painted a series of paintings of haystacks. He painted them from every angle, at every time of day and every season, with lots of different colors and textures. Imagine the intensity of this kind of play or work, depending on how you look at it. I sometimes say that he was trying to get it right, but there is no right or wrong here, there is only getting to know that haystack in all it possibilities, just getting to know in all its various forms and expressions, one field of haystacks, in all its depth, in all its variety.

That seems to me what our life together is all about. We are called to model a new kind of community in which all can be included. A new vision of unity made possible by God through Christ in the Holy Spirit. God has made us all one, God proclaims us all one, and our task is to live into that reality, to be who we are. One people in filled with the Spirit of God. As God is One so we are all One! Take out your paint brushes brothers and sisters and go to work, playing with that image. Draw for each other a picture of what this unity looks like, find your inspiration from the Holy Spirit, and play with all the colors on your pallet, spend time exploring this vision of unity every day and throughout the year. This is your liturgy, the work of the people, your calling, your mission, your sacred play. To be one as God is one.

On this day, we come together at this table to join together once again in sacred play. We take these symbols of bread and wine and we say that they are the sacrament of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and we gather around the table a visible sign of the unity we have in Jesus Christ, we say that we too are the body of Christ a visible sign of unity of all of creation. I want to tell you that whole world is the Body of Christ, these elements of creation, bread and wine, proclaimed by us here to be the Body and Blood of Christ. Do we fully understand what we are doing? Hardly. Are we a full and complete expression of this unity as we look around the room today? Hardly. But nevertheless on this day we have arrived at a culmination. We are here today to celebrate the fruits of our labor and most importantly the fruit of Spirit of God at work in us. But every end is also a new beginning, moving us forward into the future. Every end is a beginning.

One of my favorite quotes from St Francis is, “Brothers let us begin in earnest.” He said this at the beginning of his ministry and he said on his death bed. Sometimes we can get frustrated when we think of how far we have to go to truly model the kind of unity that God would have us be. It always seems like we are always just beginning. But on the other hand if we imagine the infinite task, the eternal play involved in just getting to know a haystack, then we can turn our lives from dreaded task to sacred play. The truth is we are always just beginning to model, unravel, know in all its depth, the mystery of this infinite Spirit of God that unites all of the incredible infinite diversity of creation.

And so brothers and sisters let us begin in earnest. Come share this birthday meal, which is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet which we will share one day with the whole world gathered together all in one place. AMEN

Sermon July 17, 2011 Proper 11, Year A

One theme in today’s lessons is the question of discernment. How do we know God’s will? In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that we have to leave the wheat and weeds growing together in the field until harvest because if we try to pull out the weeds we may damage the wheat. It’s hard to know the difference between the good seed and the evil seed, but it is also about just logistics and practicality. It’s just hard to separate weeds from a field of wheat, hard to separate out the good from the evil. I went to see the final Harry Potter movie on Friday. And not to give it away if folks haven’t read the book or are interested in seeing it, but if you read any of them you know that this same question runs through the books. It is pretty obvious who the main villain is, but throughout the books the allegiance of many of the main characters is uncertain, often in question. Even Harry Potter the hero himself has a strange connection to Voldemort, the villain, and is often questioning himself, others are doubting him, and not to give it away, separating the good from the evil even in Harry Potter is saved to the very end.

In today’s Gospel, who is good and who evil, these kinds of judgments are left to God and the angels, its not our business. It is hard to really gauge our own best of intentions let alone those of others. Decisions we make are often able to be second guessed, and we struggle with what is the right thing to do in a world that often gives us choices between the lesser of two evils. And when we look inwardly we see that that line between good and evil runs right through the middle of all of us. Outwardly, life is at best ambiguous. It’s hard to tell if things are getting better or worse, and when we look inwardly at ourselves it is so easy to doubt our motivations. Are we really following God and some higher calling or are we really being somehow selfish, tragically misguided.

But there are moments of clarity that we put our faith in. That night in the desert Jacob had his future pretty clearly laid out for him. Well at least the broad brush strokes: He was going to get the land, have abundant off spring, and be a blessing to many etc. Maybe this vision was not so clear on the details of how this was going to happen. So it with us. “We pray, thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done.” We’ve got the broad brush strokes of the Kingdom of God as where we are headed, what we are anticipating. We know that Jesus is our example and we are called to follow him, even to the cross, and we have a whole list of the fruits of the Spirit and a sense of the kind of people we are called to be and the kind of community we are called to model together as the Body of Christ. But we don’t always get the details of exactly how that is going to come about, and we don’t have any certainty or guarantee of exactly what our role is going to be in the grand scheme of things.

What Jacob did know though when he woke up was, “Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it.” This little place in between Beer-sheba and Haran was non other than the house of God, the gateway to heaven. He got both a glimpse of the future, but also a glimpse of the present, the here and now in a new light. And it became now a past moment that he always wanted to remember. Jacob marked it with a stone, a pillar, and called the place Bethel: House of God. We mark holy places and set them aside because something important happened to us. How many of you have holy places, special moments where something deep and powerful happened to you? You may or may not think of them as Holy. But we all have places where you learned something important about yourself, where you confronted something, a danger inward or outward that you triumphed over, where you saw or felt something that transported you beyond ourselves or deeper into ourselves than you had ever gone before. We have moments in our family history, the birth of child, a marriage, a death which we mark and memorialize, maybe not with pillars of stone but at least with photo albums. These are moments that we know that we have to remember. And we spend a lot of time re-membering them. That is what we do every Sunday here at the altar, re- member, and bring forward again, make present the Last Supper, but also the many ways that Jesus fed us, the Wedding at Cana, the Feeding of the Five Thousand, all the ways that Jesus brought forth for us a taste of the heavenly banquet, a vision of the whole world sharing in the blessing, having a place at the table. This is an encounter with the Holy.

So this is a first step to discerning God’s will. We must know that everyone, at every moment, and in all places can encounter God and get a glimpse into heaven. All places are potentially holy places like sleeping out in the desert, or eating a meal together. We are in relationship to God’s through God’s creation and one another and the possibility of revelation is around us all the time, the world is constantly speaking to us.

I remember a moment in Heathrow Airport, in London, after I had taken my children around the world with Sheri’s ashes and I was thinking about how God has spoken to me on the trip and I suddenly realized as if for the first time that this was nothing unusual at all. God was speaking to people all the time. I looked around the airport. We were sitting at some tables is a coffee shop, people were browsing the newsstand nearby or sitting in chairs at their gates, and suddenly I realized that everyone was in some kind of relationship with God right at that moment. I began to imagine them all. That man over there just had a fight with his wife on the phone and in his anger he was having a hard time listening to God. This guy running to catch his flight was too busy to hear anything, though that doesn’t mean he wasn’t being called. That woman over there sitting quietly reading a book – you’d never know it to look at her - but she just had the most profound religious experience that will completely redefine her life, and she was utterly transported by it and maybe know one will ever know about it. That older man in the corner is confessing some deep pain that he is trying to let go of right there in front of me. This young man is dreaming of all the things he is going to do next in his life, he’s anxious and excited and scared all at once and he is trying to stay calm, praying for some peace. That woman also lost a loved one and is deep in thought about her grief grasping for some way to comfort herself and looking out into the darkness for some sense of a way to deal with her pain. That guy in the business suit with the lap top and the brief case, just made the biggest deal of his life, and he is awe struck by his good fortune and under his breath you can barely see his mouth move as he utters a silent thank you. And so on and so forth all around me people were in relationship to God, to some ultimate reality, a holiness beyond themselves that called them to respond to something deep within them, or to stretch beyond who they were, or to understand something new, or to able to receive a gift beyond measure.

The Psalmist says, Lord, "You know my sitting and my rising, you discern my thoughts, you trace my journeys and my resting places, acquainted with all my ways.” God knows you and you are in a relationship with the holy in all you do, everywhere you are, in all your relationships. You are surrounded by this holiness, in God you live and move and have your being. God knows you. The Psalm goes on, “You press upon me behind and before and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me it is so high that I cannot attain it. . . I climb up to heaven and you are there, I make the grave my bed and you are there, I take wings, and dwell in the sea, even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.”

This awareness that God is guiding behind and before us, coaxing and calling us, and surrounding us on all sides – this may be the first step and the last step in discerning God’s will. All we really get to know. But this does not mean that we can know exactly what God is up to in our lives, in fact it is quite the opposite. This lead the Psalmist to exclaim, “How deep I find your thoughts, O God, how great the sum of them. To count them all, my life span would need to be like yours." Exactly. It turns out that it is enough, the beginning and end, just to have this wonderful knowledge that God is there, which is itself unattainable but through God’s revelation to us.

Nor does this great vision of being surrounded by God and upheld by God mean that we are immune to suffering. We are not guaranteed our personal safety just because God is watching out for us, or calling us to some grand purpose. In fact, again quite the opposite. More suffering, more pain, more risk, that might just be what lies ahead of us the more we follow Jesus. We follow him into uncertainty, risk, and what we can expect if anything at all is a cross, which we are called to take up. We like to think that if God has given us a particular ministry, God will take care of us and it. This may be true, but we have no idea about what “taking care of” means. What happens to each of us individually or how it is that our lives together play out to bring about the kingdom, all the details of how we get from here to there are not worked out really, for us to know at least. We have no idea exactly what our part in the grand scheme of things will be. We are a just a small part of cosmic story of the whole creation being made new again.

The passage from Romans speaks of “All of creation groaning in travail, waiting for the revelation of the children of God. We are apart of this cosmic context of what God is up to. In the words of Julian of Norwich, the 14^th Century Mystic who who had an incredible vision of all of creation like a hazelnut in the hand of God, “All shall be and all manner of thing shall be well.” She had this vision while contemplating the suffering of Christ on the cross. We are all suffering, groaning as in labor pains, waiting for a new creation to be born, in which the vision of the Just and Peaceable Kingdom of God will indeed come and God’s Will will indeed be done on earth as it is in heaven. This is what we wait for, no matter what, and it is this that transforms all of our lives now into glimpse of the holy, knowing that this God is not some far off God, in the future, but comes to us out of the future and surrounds us now with Love and Joy and Peace beyond measure….. We have the potential to encounter this God now in every moment of our lives no matter what. It is this reality that allows us to endure everything and anything for the sake of the Gospel.

I know that we are facing many decisions as a congregation. God is calling us all the time and in all places to follow him. God has said to us as surely as he said it to Jacob that we are a part of cosmic, universal grand work of God bringing about the healing of all of creation. This is God’s will. We pray for guidance as we should, even though we are not always clear about which way to turn, which particular fork in the road to take. Not always clear what it means to be faithful in any particular moment. Knowing that even if we chose wisely we will not be immune from risk or danger, or disaster even, there are no guarantees. But nevertheless, we can risk all because we know that no matter what we do, where we go, God is with us. And this wonderful amazing knowledge gives us one certainty and one certainty alone. One thing we believe, no matter what: “All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Brothers and Sisters, find your holy place, know that God is with you and make this your prayer, “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done on earth as it is heaven.”

Sermon, Proper 20, Year C, September 19, 2010

Throughout the banking crisis we watched as banking executives continue to reward themselves with large bonuses even as the crisis continues. Every time a new round of bank bonuses is paid out, a public outcry follows. We consider it beyond reason and good conscience that those who presided over conditions that fueled the crisis and used public funds to bail themselves out, would then pay themselves lavish bonuses. We wonder what the bonuses are for since the performance of these executives does not seem to indicate these large sums of money. The unemployed may well ask, “Where’s my bailout?”

The bankers seem to turn a deaf ear and find various ways to defend their actions, saying the bailouts are necessary to fulfill obligations set by contracts. However it works, the message beneath it all remains, “This is the way the world works.” Only when the public outcry becomes loud enough, do these “leaders” reconsider.
In the Gospel, Jesus tells a parable about a dishonest manager. He’s too proud to beg and not strong enough for manual labor. He acts cleverly for his own benefit. He uses his position to make friends for himself so later he will have a place to go after losing his position. And then, we are amazed to here the master in Jesus’ parable commend the manager, though not for his dishonesty, but for his carefulness in his affairs of business.

Understanding Jesus’ commentary following the story is one of the most challenging in all the gospels … Is Jesus advising his followers to do likewise? Here is a more convincing interpretation… “Children of this age,” Jesus observes, understand how the world works and use it to their benefit, why do “Children of the light” not understand the ways of the Kingdom of God? … “While those who have the most at stake in this age make use of their understanding of “the way the world works” in order to shore up their own privilege and security, Children of the Light are advised to use their understanding of the way the Kingdom works in order to aim for a different goal, their welcome into “God’s home.” Children of the Light are those who respond to examples of “the way the world works” with witness to “the way the Kingdom works.”

But how does this Kingdom work? The idea of eternal homes gives us a glimpse…The dishonest manager was about to lose his means to earn a living and he made deals with who might be expected to repay him a favor by welcoming him into their homes… Jesus has told his followers to give to others without expecting anything in return and to give to those who have no other way of returning the gift. In giving without expecting return the Children of Light are anticipating their welcome not into the homes wealthy in the present age, but into God’s eternal home in the Kingdom.

God’s Kingdom is one of most abundant grace. I think that is one of the experiences of Mending Wings over the last year. We had the idea of offering something of ourselves and gifts from this congregation via the funds from the grant. Not everyone was physically present but everyone WAS present on Wednesday nights at Wapato Presbyterian Church with our thoughts and prayers. And we received so much more than was given. I’m sure each of us would reflect in a different way on the experience. Children of Light therefore respond to “the way the world works” with witness to “the way the inclusive Kingdom of God works.”

Jesus counsels his followers to use their wealth as a witness to the way God’s Kingdom works as opposed to making friends with the powerful in the present age.

The scriptures today call out a sense of extraordinary stress and despair over economic oppression with resulting poverty and the results of war that lead a people to cry out for help from God and to wonder with Jeremiah, “Is there a balm in Gilead?” and to affirm with Jesus, “You cannot serve both God and wealth.”

Francois is a refuge from Rwanda, after fleeing genocide. Jean is a refuge from Congo and narrowly escaped a brutal mass execution of the entire staff of the hospital he served. Both are professional men with Africa as their country of origin. Francois was a medical liaison training villages throughout the country in AIDS prevention. Jean worked as a microbiologist. They both lost family, friends, stability , hopes, dreams, jobs, their homeland.

After a long time, they came to Chicago, “a very foreign place.” They connected with a church in Evanston, Illinois and began attending a men’s prayer and study group. They had lost much, but not their faith in God. The leader of the prayer group, one day, asked a question. “How do you plan for your future?” The members of the group were primarily professionals and then there was Jean and Francois. Someone spoke of needing to make his own way, to plan and prepare for success and in living in this way be protected from harm. The refugees spoke of discovering that no plan was really trustworthy, even if you do pray regularly and give your tithe. The professional spoke of material property, the marker of success. Francois and Jean spoke of steadfast faith despite calamity as the marker of success. The first group spoke of a corrupt government and its leaders. The refugees suggested the group couldn’t fully comprehend a corrupt and broken government and simply offered to pray for our leaders. The first group spoke of needing to save resources and be cautious in charity as a hedge against personal disaster. The two men spoke of learning to be happy with daily bread and finding ways to help other refugees and people in need with any resources available. Very different world views emerged from people who studied the Bible and have experienced very different lives. “A penny saved is a penny earned” - Ben Franklin. A Rwandan proverb says, “We hear you eating in the bushes.” (Meaning you are hording a resource you should be sharing).

All of this happened six years ago. The professionals are now asking, “Is there a balm in Chicago?” Francois continues to thank God for daily bread. The real estate developer is now attempting to rediscover who he is, relearn what faith in God is about and to find peace with daily bread and broken dreams.

Francois found his wife and family after ten years. His trust is in God, not circumstances. His favorite hymn is, “God will make a way.”

God will make a way. He works in ways we cannot see. He will make a way for me. He will be my guide, hold me close to his side. With loving strength for each new day, He will make a way.

AMEN

The Mystery of The Holy Trinity, May 2010

Last Sunday, we baptized Jennifer “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Today we try to get a glimpse, a hint of understanding of who this three-in-one God, this Trinity, is. Does believing in the Trinity, as Christians – do we mean that we believe in one God – or three Gods, as the Muslims claim we do?

What do we mean when we recite the Nicene Creed? “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty…We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ…We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life…” Do we believe in one God or three Gods?

For us to fully understand the nature of the Trinity is as futile as the little boy’s actions in a story about St. Augustine. One day, while Augustine was struggling to understand the Trinity, he decided to take a break and go for a walk on the beach. There he saw a little boy digging a hole in the sand with a seashell. When he had finished digging, the boy ran to the edge of the ocean, filled his shell, and raced back to pour it in the hole.

After several trips back and forth, Augustine asked him what he was doing, the boy replied, “I’m trying to put the ocean into this hole.” Augustine then realized that this was precisely what he was trying to do – fit all the great mysteries of God into his mind. But we do need to have some understanding of the Trinity.

Suppose we look at an egg. There are three parts to it: the shell – would you call that an egg? And the white or albumin – would you call that an egg? And the yolk – would you call that an egg? Well, the egg is made up of all three parts – the shell, the white, and the yolk. The egg is incomplete without one of these elements – yet we would call all of them egg!

So it is with the Trinity. God is one – just as a complete egg is one. Yet God is made up of three persons – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So, the answer is YES – Christians do believe in one God – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit! Three persons, ONE God.

If I were to separate the shell from the white and the white from the yolk, the egg wouldn’t now become three eggs, would it? It would still be one egg. So it is with God.

If you find that you have difficulty envisioning the Trinity, you are not alone. That difficulty is wide-spread. Steve Woolley, the retired priest from Walla Walla whom I have mentioned before, appears to thoroughly enjoy putting articles, or reflections of his own, on the Internet to stir up the clergy in this Diocese. This week, he wrote a bit about the Trinity. He says, “Speaking for myself, I like to think that I am a rather orthodox Nicene Christian…

The fact is that orthodox as I might claim to be and try as I might, I cannot hold a comprehensive unified view of the Trinity in my head. One ‘person’ or the other keeps popping out as a rather unique individual, existing within a hierarchy at that. How embarrassing!” He also quotes the author Katherine Mowry LaCugna, who wrote: “The doctrine of the Trinity is more like a signpost pointing beyond itself to the God who dwells in light inaccessible…”

All we can ever know about God is what God chooses to reveal to us. Beyond that, in this life, God will always remain a mystery. The mysteriousness of God is the whole point behind the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine does not define God, but it does describe what God has allowed us to know of Himself. It will always remain a mystery, because God will always be a mystery – at least in this life anyway. In today’s reading, Paul writes to the Romans: “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit…”demonstrating his understanding of the triumvirate nature of God. Paraphrasing the words of Paul writing to the Christians at Corinth: now we see things imperfectly as in a poor mirror, but then we will see everything in perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God knows me now.

We are encouraged by science to see mystery as the opposite of knowledge. And yet today we are asked to view the mystery through the eyes of Wisdom. Wisdom was present with God at the creation and she continues to be present – not only with God, but with humanity. By calling all people to seek her, Wisdom offers humanity access to the living God. She is at once the embodiment of God’s delight in the world and a dynamic portal to the creating God. Wisdom invites humanity to engage in a joyful search for God’s presence in and through this world.

There is coming a day when we will understand all things completely. But until that time, we live in the mystery of this life. The Gospel passage this morning has Jesus telling his disciples “there is so much more I want to tell you, but you can’t bear it now.” Jesus promised his disciples – and he promises us – that the Spirit of truth would come to guide us into all truth. Not suddenly and instantaneously, but slowly and gradually, in a measure appropriate to our ability to receive it.

So what are we to do with this doctrine of the Holy Trinity? I would like for us to be reminded every time we hear about it or ponder it, that the Good News is not that we have God all figured out, but that God has us figured out. I want us to be reminded that our journey of life is not one in which all the mysteries of life will be solved, but one in which we know that God is behind us, ahead of us, and beside us leading us to the day when all mysteries will be revealed.

As Jason Sierra wrote, this day we are invited to stand in faith, to be precisely where we are, in the mystery of the Trinity, in the mystery of a God revealed to us in this moment, this age, this life, and this faith – a mystery that we can explore and unravel together, knowing that in seeing more truly, with each new revelation, we step into greater hope, greater joy, greater love, greater knowledge and communion with God the Three-in-One.