The Big Bang, the Trinity, and the Shared Life: Sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 7, 2020

In the beginning was the formless void.

One second passed.

In the first second after the universe began, the temperature was about 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit, according to NASA. There were fundamental particles such as neutrons, electrons and protons. These decayed or combined as the universe got cooler. Those that combined began the dance of creation itself, drawn by mutual attraction, spinning around each other and dwelling with each other.

Because light could not carry inside of it, this early formless, awakening mass was invisble, were anyone able to look at it. NASA has described it this way: "The free electrons would have caused light (photons) to scatter the way sunlight scatters from the water droplets in clouds." Yet over time, the free electrons met up with nuclei and created neutral atoms. This allowed light to shine through about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

As scientist and journalist Elizabeth Howell explains, 

This early light — sometimes called the "afterglow" of the Big Bang — is more properly known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). It was first predicted by Ralph Alpher and other scientists in 1948, but was found only by accident almost 20 years later.
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, both of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, were building a radio receiver in 1965 and picking up higher-than-expected temperatures, according to NASA. At first, they thought the anomaly was due to pigeons and their dung, but even after cleaning up the mess and killing pigeons that tried to roost inside the antenna, the anomaly persisted.
Simultaneously, a Princeton University team (led by Robert Dicke) was trying to find evidence of the CMB, and realized that Penzias and Wilson had stumbled upon it. The teams each published papers in the Astrophysical Journal in 1965.(1) 

God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was darkness, and there was light. What our poetic forebears, who told this story around blazing campfires thousands of years ago on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, called “the first day.”

From the beginning of creation, even as the universe has expanded and continues to accelerate, nonetheless, laws of attraction and combination have formed constellations, galaxies, stars, planets, moons, asteroids and other heavenly bodies. Light became the measuring stick for distances and speeds and time, even as those ancestors counted the turning of the new day not with the rising of the sun but with its setting- perhaps so that they could look up around those campfires into the depths of creation and time itself. There was evening, there was morning, and another day’s work and wonder would begin.

The very lessons of our universe remind us that beginnings lie in darkness, but that the darkness gives way to the light, and both become visible, present to the naked eye. Yet the other lesson from the resonant and wondrous tale of the universe’s beginning—whether expressed by astronomers and astrophysicists or by ancient holy men and women—is that all that we know, all that is good, as God declares in our account from Genesis, comes about through things combining. This mutual dependence enables all that is to become stronger, to expand, to flourish. Those elemental particles that failed to respond to the pull of attraction decayed and died. 

Even as the spaces between the objects in space continue to increase, nonetheless they are tied together by their common origin. The space between doesn’t undermine or diminish the original unity, energy, and essential commonality that existed in that first moment and continues onward.

This is a lesson we forget at our own peril. And that’s why I give thanks for us to have this opportunity today to ponder the mystery and the gift of the reality of the Trinity. This doctrine—described in various places in scripture, even as the term “Trinity” never appears—reminds us that the very God we worship relates to itself and to us only in community. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Abba, Christ, and Paraclete; Source, Word, and Advocate; Earth-Maker, Pain-bearer, Life-Giver. All distinct, and yet all one.

Early Greek theologians proposed an important word to explain how the persons within the Trinity related to each other in unity: perichoresis, which, roughly translated, means rotation, to describe the mutual indwelling, mutual existing, and mutual penetration of each person within the Godhead. English theologian Alister McGrath describes perichoresis as allowing “the individuality of the persons [within the Trinity] to be maintained, while insisting that each person shares in the life of the other two.” Yet, a more poetic description of perichoresis, inspired that it shares a root with the word “choreography, perhaps, is “the dance of the Trinity.” Yet this kind of dancing is not like ballroom dancing, where the two partners move largely only in response to each other. This kind of dancing is the kind that invites others to join in.

A few years ago, in Barcelona, my dear friends Joe and Joanie, my daughter Katie, and I were in the town square, watching people from all over the city come together to perform traditional Catalan national songs and join together in folk dances. All around the square, groups of people from four to forty or more would gather around mounds of flowers and form circles by joining hands. Yet those on the outside of the circle were not mere observers—soon the dancers invited others into their circles and move their feet together as a display of their pride in their culture and home. 

And yet, they invited strangers, including my daughter and my myself, to learn the steps and dance with them in their celebration. Even those who were not Catalan were welcomed into the circle, taught the steps and encouraged, and then celebrated as all joined together in celebrating essential unity in diversity, in beautifully expressing the vitality and resilience and mutual bonds of community.

As English priest and poet John Donne insisted four centuries ago, no person is an island, separate from others. And that truth is rooted in the nature of God Godself, and in the nature of our essential relationship to God.

We worship a God who exists in community. We worship a God who creates form from formlessness and light from darkness, a beautiful and necessary darkness because it allows us to see light. We worship a God who calls us into community—and more astoundingly, through Jesus, who is both God and human—invites humanity into God Godself and invites us into the dance. A dance that is the basis of life itself, a shared life that cannot exist without each other. 

By taking on our humanity, God invites us into the dance of divinity. God indwells in us, and we indwell in God. What a wonder! What a blessing! It’s as our psalm today wonders, in the Common English Bible translation, 

3 When I look up at your skies, 
     at what your fingers made— 
     the moon and the stars 
     that you set firmly in place— 
4       what are human beings 
             that you think about them; 
         what are human beings 
             that you pay attention to them? 
5 You’ve made them only slightly less than divine,
   crowning them with glory and grandeur.
6 You’ve let them rule over your handiwork,
   putting everything under their feet— 
7     all sheep and all cattle, 
       the wild animals too, 
8        the birds in the sky, 
          the fish of the ocean, 
              everything that travels the pathways of the sea. (2)

Some have looked at that last claim of dominion over creation and misrepresented and misused it. We have been given the gift of freedom, but that freedom comes with a responsibility and duty to the rest of creation to care for it, to serve it, to realize our indwelling within it, our literal dance within creation, upon which our very existence depends. We are tied together with everything from the smallest honeybee to the most humble laborer halfway around the world who harvested the cotton that made the clothes you are wearing. We are tied together to the man gasping for breath in the street and suffocated by contempt as much as we are tied to familiar friends and family.

Window in St. Gabriel of the Sorrowful Mother, Avondale, PA

In being invited into the dance and life of the Triune God, we are also repeatedly called to celebrate and give thanks for our dependence upon unity with each other. From the simplest perspective, this is one of the most important commandments we repeatedly receive from God, the message given to prophets and sages throughout the ages. Our gospel reminds us of our anointing to each other, our responsibility to share the Good News of salvation to all the ends of the earth, to invite ever more people into the dance of love that shapes, sustains, and blesses us. To invite everyone into life abundant. To stand alongside the oppressed and the exploited and to love them with the same breath given to each and every one of us by God at our birth. To proclaim boldly and joyfully our common humanity, our common dignity, our common loveliness and belovedness in the eyes of God.

This drawing together into mutuality and interdependence flies in the face of those who worship self over community. As we watch people all over the world pour into the streets animated by concern for a man they have never met whose life was taken in a slow, torturous, lynching played out before our very lives, we are called to join in that dance too—this is, in fact, what we are made for. To love one another as much as we love ourselves, and to be willing to lay our breath and movement alongside the vulnerable in reverence to the life and love that calls us into the dance of God, the dance of the Trinity, the dance of the universe. To realize that we are all diminished by even one person’s suffering, and that we are given a holy charge to resist anything that would divide us, to repudiate it as being unholy, death-dealing, and evil.

This is why the doctrine of the Trinity matters. It matters, because it affirms that life abundant is not found through self-centeredness, but through community and mutual aid and unity with one another, with no exceptions. Our task—no, that’s too negative a word. Our joy, our honor, our privilege and gift from God Godself—is to make sure that everyone and everything hears the call to join in, too, and has the ease and the freedom from anxiety, pain, suffering, and fear to take each other’s hands and learn the steps. To be welcomed into a dance that starts in the testimony of astrophysics and the testimony of scripture that love, the saying yes to the pull of attraction between bodies that are all equally treasured and honored regardless of difference. This love and unity is the force that binds the universe together and allows it to flourish, and draws us into life eternal and abundant.

Margie Thompson, Dance of the Trinity

This is how we participate in the life of God—a God who could take no notice of us, as our psalm reminds us, but instead chooses to lift us up into the divine life itself. A God who reaches out to us in love repeatedly, despite our circumstances or flaws, despite our sin and willfulness and tendency to cruelty when we give in to fear. As we join in the dance, we find that those things that we clutch to ourselves, like hatred, racism, violence, exploitation, contempt, hard-heartedness, fall away, spun off in the beauty of the dance of love that God has knit into creation from its very first bursting forth from the womb.

This day is a new beginning. May we clasp hands in love and hope, and join in the dance that unites us with God and unites ourselves with one another.

Amen.



Preached at the 10:30 am online service from St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, on June 7, 2020.


Readings:
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Psalm 8
Matthew 28:16-20


Sources:
1) Elizabeth Howell, “What Is The Big Bang Theory?” November 7, 2017, at Space.com, https://www.space.com/25126-big-bang-theory.html
2) Alister McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, p. 325, cited in “Perichoresis,” in Theopedia, https://www.theopedia.com/Perichoresis.
3) Psalm 8:4-8, from the Common English Bible.