The bigness and the closeness of God

Way back in 2008, Fr. Jose Gabriel Funes, a Jesuit priest, who was at that time the director of the Vatican Observatory, said that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

Inconceivable! Whenever I mention this to folks, the first response I get is “Wait! The Vatican has an observatory?”

This seems more than a little ironic given that little falling out between the Inquisition and the astronomer Galileo 500+ years ago.  Actually, the Church—Roman Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, and Protestant—has supplied the scientific community with physicists, astronomers, engineers, inventors, and all kinds of researchers for long time, many of them ordained, since the beginning of what we now call “modern” science. In fact, there’s even an Anglican religious order called the Society of Ordained Scientists. But that’s not the point.

Basically, this Jesuit priest said that it is okay for Roman Catholics (and the rest of us) to believe in aliens. As Admiral Pike will someday say to Captain Kirk, “I am relieved!”

This is not just esoteric speculation. Since science is all the time showing us how vastly big and how vastly small the universe is, is God really bigger than all that?

I am no scientist, and I don’t play one on television, but knowing that we have the technology to see to the very edges of the universe and, at the very same time, we can also measure the smallest of particles, including one so small and so basic that it was unofficially named after God, what Fr. Funes said begins to make sense. God is greater than all of everything and the more we see the vastness of the universe, the more we see the majesty and power of God.

Okay. So, God is very, very big. Doesn’t that also make God incomprehensible?

Well, except for God’s grace and for the fact that we humans are wired to inquire, that would be “yes.”

God has always been incomprehensible by any ordinary standard. Justin Martyr, that seeker for the truth who died in the year 167, said that anyone who thinks God even can be named and understood in conventional ways is “hopelessly insane.”  And yet we still seek. 

And we aren’t the first. Would it surprise you to hear that in the 14^th Century there was a solitary English nun who once contemplated both the very small and the very big?

Dame Julian of Norwich was an anchoress, a nun not attached to a convent, who lived in a private monastic cell attached to the Cathedral in Norwich, England, when she had visions, or “showings,” of God. One of those “showings” came as she contemplated the inside a walnut. She saw all of God and God’s creation contained inside that little shell. To see the vastness of God in something so small ought to appeal to us who know the wonder of DNA and marvel at pictures sent back to earth from a spacecraft now travelling outside our solar system.

And what did Blessed Julian see in her walnut sized looking glass into the cosmos? She found love. Rather than be overwhelmed by God’s sheer size, Blessed Julian found love. Toward the end of her life, she penned this short but profound exchange: “Would you know your Lord's meaning?” she asks. “Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love.”

We can seek and ponder and reason…because we are wired to inquire… and in the end we find that God is always shown best in relationship.  This is where our evangelical friends, have it right, along with sacramentalists like us: what really changes us is our relationship to God, who comes to us where we are as we are and meets us at the point of our deepest need.

Many years ago, a good friend and golfing buddy, a Unitarian minister, invited me to come and preach at his church… on Trinity Sunday (the stinker)! A more intellectually and theologically inquisitive group I’ve never seen! So, I decided to lean into the wave: I said that during the first Church councils that were hammering out Christian doctrines that the majority of the Church could sign onto, the first trinitarians were in fact the most fervent unitarians and that they won the day. What I meant was that they affirmed the fullness and oneness of God in three persons in specific contrast to the super-market of divine beings that made up the Greek and Roman way of thinking for centuries. The Christians who gave us the Nicaean Creed were all about the Oneness of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (Alas, preachers have been taking the veg-o-matic to Nicaea, ever since, but that’s for another day!)

There are people, some of whom are of a scientific mind, and even some religious folk, who proudly wear the badge “skeptic”, who tell me that the Trinity is incomprehensible. To which I say “yeah…and…?” 

To which I might reply, “… tell me again about the multiverse….?” You know, the idea that there are multiple universes that exist at the very same time? Besides the fact that it makes for some good (and some really awful!) science fiction, it reminds us that we Christians aren’t the only ones in the cosmological marketplace where apparently contradictory truths can co-exist at the very same time.

And how about the mathematics that underpin modern physics, chemistry, astronomy, and make all your favorite gadgets work…what is the basis for that? About a decade ago, Scientific American spent a whole issue debating the assumptions—and the implicit acts of faith—behind the high-level mathematics that undergird the advances we take for granted. The wonderful thing about physics is that the more you drill down the more our perceptions change, and that’s when the line between fact and faith becomes blurry. The more we unravel the mystery, the more mystery there is.

And to a person of faith that, as the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams once said in an Oxford debate with the late Dr. Richard Dawkins, is a beautiful thing.

The Trinity, the Christian doctrine that says that the oneness of God is expressed in a trinity of persons and a unity of being, tells us some things several things about the very nature of God:

First, God is complex to the point unknowing.

Second, God is by definition relational and that means interactive; and

Three, God is by grace knowable.

Christians believe that the God of the whole vast universe, the One who made heavens and earth, is also the One who walked the earth in the person of Jesus Christ. The God whose Spirit moved at the beginning of the universe and brought it forth, either by word or by big bang, is also the Holy Spirit who animates our hearts. And as vast as creation is, God is this close.

The Pop Atheists do have a point, even though they often frame the question so that only their answer makes sense (as human beings love to do!). They often claim there is no God because of all the awful things people do in the name of God. Of course, the problem with that argument is that it says nothing about God, but a lot about us. And people will cite science (or something they claim to be science) when they do awful things all the time. The big wars of the last century, not to mention the calamities of pandemic, war, and dislocation in our own time, all show us that. Besides, theirs is not a new observation. The Hebrew prophets made those same observations and in more detail.

Similarly, the folks who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” take the truth that we are all spiritual and have the capacity to inquire and to know God and assume, therefore, that there is nothing that the community of faith, ancient liturgy, or scripture can teach us (except for perhaps some nice poetry and cool music).

But we can’t do all this inquiry—scientific or spiritual—alone. We can’t see the farthest galaxy or the smallest particle without teams of people, curiosity, the right tools, and the confidence that there is something to see. Inventors, explorers, and researchers are often held up as individual heroes, and they may be; but without the research, experimentation, and observation of those who went before (even if their conclusions were different) their work would not be possible. If good science is subject to rigorous peer review, then how can we think that we can learn about the source of the universe, and the meaning of our place within it all by our lonesomes?

In all this, the common element is the human one. What really worries—and turns off people—is not God nor science, but the messiness of human relationships. The politics, the cruelty, the unpredictability, the irrationality, the selfishness —the sin— of humankind, these are what really gets in our way. Blame it on God, if you like, but the problem is us.

The Trinity that we celebrate today tells us that our complex God is at once relational, knowable, and intimate.

The second half of our church’s year begins today, and from here until Advent, we’ll learn about the nuts and bolts of everyday Christian living. Learning and doing the teachings of Jesus begins by contemplating and celebrating the wonder, complexity, and simplicity of the Holy Trinity. All of things we do as faithful followers of Jesus, our prayer, worship, learning, and service; our community here and our acts of care in the community we live in; all of it begins here—looking with wonder and awe at our place in this wonderful cosmos and our living connection to a loving God who loved us first.

Now if you’re thinking “I’m not ready to take on that task. I don’t know anything… not even where to start, it’s okay. We don’t have to know it all. God knows that we can only know so much. We can’t get away from the fact that the universe is vast while our brains can only fit under a baseball cap. The Trinity shows us the remarkable truth that God is not so distracted and entranced by the bigness of creation to forget about us. God comes to us in ways we can understand, know, and touch; in beautiful things both small and vast; in redeeming relationships; in prayer and silence, in music and art, in science and meditation; in broken bread and poured out wine; in companionship and service to others; in the incarnation and person of Jesus.

The Trinity reminds that the very bigness of God is as close to us as our hearts.

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This is the Bulletin for Worship for The First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2026 at St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for Trinity Sunday, Sunday, May 31, 2026.

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here.

Thomas the Inquirer

Science is a life of exploration and awe, and so is the life of faith. Too often, we tend to treat faith and science as if they are mortal enemies, so that when we hear the story of the apostle Thomas who demands proof of Jesus’ resurrection, we are tempted to see him either as our hero or a cosmic party-pooper, depending on which side of the equation you find yourself.

I have never understood the popular tendency to see faith in God to be at odds with the work of science. And I have been suspicious of the times when religious people treat faith as if it were science and secular people treat science as if it were faith.

For me, science and faith are like the peanut butter and jelly of human inquiry and meaning, with the arts and music serving as the bread. That’s because I grew up in a household steeped in science, art, music, and religion. My mother was a librarian who served on the altar guild and her father was an engineer who taught an adult Sunday school class. My father was an aerospace engineer who eventually was ordained a deacon. When I was a kid, I followed the space program the way other kids followed their favorite sports team, actor, musician, or celebrity. I loved physics and biology, was so-so in chemistry, but don’t ask me how I did in calculus … and I went to a church where my Sunday school teacher also taught physics at a local college.

This last week, we watched with awe, wonder, and appreciation as the Artemis 2 crew circumnavigated the moon and returned safely to earth ending a fifty-year absence from human lunar exploration.  And I remember when the days when the space race was a contest between super-powers over how best to organize societies. It got so intense that even God was dragged into the Cold War. After Yuri Gagarin was the first human to orbit the earth, Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev loved to say that Gagarin never saw God, heaven, nor angels out the window of his space capsule (Gagarin never actually said that, and besides he was a secret Russian Orthodox Christian, but I digress….). Then, a few years later when Apollo 8 first orbited the moon, and the crew took turns reading from Genesis on Christmas Day. Moving, yes, but it was also a kind of a technological and ideological “gotcha!”

It can be easy to fall into the trap of treating faith like science and science as if it were a religious faith, which can lead to some very strange and silly debates. Remember back in the 1990’s there was a televised debate between a biblical fundamentalist named Ken Ham and the science popularizer Bill Nye. Watching that caused me to want to throw something at the television, not least because it was mainly two people who were not interested in listening but talking past each other loudly, with a moderator scoring points as if it was a ball game. From a theological perspective Ham could have been smacked down by a first-year seminarian, and from what I could see Nye was more smug than scientist in his presentation, so the whole thing was embarrassing.

As you might guess, the whole science versus religion thing has never been a hobby horse that I wanted to ride. Which is but one reason why I found myself drifting away from my adolescent attraction to Biblical literalism, and into a different kind of faith.

When I am asked to share my faith story, I often begin by saying “I was a teen-aged Baptist.” I attended a Baptist youth group in a church that taught a kind of Biblical literalism that included a belief in a seven-day creation, and a version of the Rapture with all the end-times trimmings. I never heard them talk about the sun orbiting the earth, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. What was surprising, though, was that there were members of that church who worked in aerospace or served in the nuclear navy, and others who were doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals, and one or two who even taught science and math in the public schools.

Here’s the thing: the whole Genesis versus Evolution debate is not about science. It’s about how to read the Bible. It’s one kind of Christianity trying to use the creation stories to prove that their way of reading the Bible is the only way to read the Bible. They really don’t give a fig about science. When they say, "if you can't believe in a seven-day creation, then you can't believe in the Bible, and so you can't believe in Jesus" they are presenting a kind of slippery-slope theology that is a particular way of believing and following Jesus. There is nothing about science in this approach. And science popularizers should stop taking the bait.

The whole thing just makes me want to sigh deeply and give everyone back their homework papers covered in red and say, “do over” while sending them to their rooms without their suppers. Every now and then I will get asked whether as a “man of God” I believed in the Garden of Eden, the Ark, Balaam’s donkey, or what my end-times theory is. Not so much about to live and do the work of Jesus. So, there it is. Occupational hazard, I guess.

This is why the apostle Thomas is one of my biblical heroes. He was the apostle who was absent when Jesus made one of his first resurrection appearances, and he would not simply take the word of his excitable friends at face value. And he wasn't skeptical of Jesus, he was skeptical of the other ten disciples-- he doubted their observational skills in the turmoil of the moment. He wanted empirical proof. And he came out with the life of faith.

A week after Easter, Jesus provides it for him when he appears in the upper room a second time and offers to show Thomas his wounded hands and body, but in the Gospel Jesus offers all of us a last beatitude as the punch line, which, by the way, underscores the whole point of the Gospel of John: “blessed are you who have not seen and yet believes”.

Because the story deals with the role of doubt in the life of faith, it also speaks directly to the false but popular division between faith and science. Thomas wants proof…he wants his faith to be grounded in the concrete. Jesus is willing to indulge that need as okay but pushes Thomas to have a faith that is informed by the realities of his world and to have his place in the world to be informed by his faith.

And I like that because I want science to be treated like science, and not like theology. At the same time, I realize that the life of inquiry that drives scientific exploration is fundamentally a life of faith. Now a particular inquirer may or may not have the same theology as me…they may not even believe in God…but their quest is a fundamentally a quest for meaning as much as it is a search for how things work.

Thomas, to me, is the patron saint of the skeptical inquirer. He wants proof before he can make the step of faith. There are times when a literalist approach to faith…scientific or religious…gets in the way. Because the problem is not that our religious stories and our science do not line up, but that they are doing different – although sometimes overlapping – things!  

The real challenge is the meaning that we make out of what we know, experience, and explore. What does it mean that the universe is apparently infinitely small and at the same time infinitely vast? What does it mean that we have the power to change the world we live in, for good or ill? What drives our ethics and whom do we serve? What will ground our ethical and moral choices?

Thomas meets the risen Christ in the upper room and comes to believe. But instead of getting stuck on his skeptical moment, let’s look at what Thomas does with this new knowledge and where his renewed faith takes him. Tradition says that Thomas founded churches in Persia (yes, that Persia… modern day Iraq!) and then in modern day India and Pakistan, where he was eventually martyred.

And where does our confession of the Risen Christ take us? Maybe not so far geographically, but wherever we go, we are challenged to live our faith in the face of life’s contradictions and wounds, and to see the wounded and risen Christ present to us wherever we go.

Our doubts, our unanswered questions, are the ants in the pants of faithful living. Whatever our certainties and whatever our questions, our life in Christ is grounded in the living presence of the risen Jesus who comes to us exactly where we live in the way that we need, in the company of people and fellow inquirers who also experience the Risen Christ in word, sacrament, and Christian community.

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This is the Bulletin for Worship for Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026 at St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026.

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here.

Our Mysterious, Complex, Relational, Knowable God

I have a question for you. As we contemplate and celebrate the Feast of the Trinity, and as we enter into the “everyday,” “workaday,” and, yes, the “summer vacation” part of the Church’s year, I have a question for you. It’s simple. And not so simple. You ready? Here it is:

What is your way in to God? What opens the door to the divine for you? What introduces you to Jesus and readies your heart for the Holy Spirit?

Is it the vastness and wonder of God’s creation? Is it the sense of meaning and redemption that you have found in your relationship with God in Christ? Maybe you were a person who has suffered addictions, or abuse, or stuck in a cycle of really bad choices and have found healing and wholeness when you came to faith. Perhaps there was a time when you sought meaning, hope, or direction, and it came to you in an encounter with God. Maybe the door opened for you when you came to sobriety, to health.... or just to your senses!

Some people don’t really know… I get that!... but they know… something is drawing them in. I have found a surprisingly useful tool that can help all of us explore and go deeper into our spiritual journey and discover how wonderfully close the fullness, vastness, wonder, and love of the One God is to every single one of us.

It’s music. I love the visual arts, too, especially painting and iconography, but on this Trinity Sunday, I want to invite you to go deeper into this wonderful theological textbook and book of poetry that is our Hymnal. In doing that, I’d like you think about how it is that you meet God… because however that happens, I’ll bet that there is hymn for you!

The Trinity, the Christian doctrine that we contemplate and celebrate today, says that the oneness of God is expressed in a trinity of persons and a unity of being. The One God is manifested in a Trinity of persons. This is much more than metaphor, and we must avoid the temptation to reducing our language of God to mere "base three" thinking.

The Trinity tells us several things about the very nature of God. Not only do we know the One God as a unity of persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but the Trinity also tells us that: 

1. God is complex to the point unknowing;
2. God is relational; and,
3. Because of that, through God's grace and action, God is knowable.

So, among other things, the Trinity also tells us that God offers us a variety of ways “in” to our relationship with God:

•        We can contemplate the majesty and wonder of the God of All Creation in God the Father.
•        We can enter in to intimate, healing relationship in Jesus, God the Son.
•        We can enter in to the mystic power and mysterious movement of God in God the Holy Spirit.

These "ways in" should not be confused with the "roles" or "functions" of each person of the Trinity. While God want us to know Him, and know we have to take small spiritual bites on the way to knowing God, we have to be careful not to slice and dice the One God!

Of course, God is bigger than the universe, and our brains can only fit into a baseball cap; so yeah, the best we can do is use analogies to describe the fullness of God. This is a start, but it can get us into trouble.

Remember that each person of the Trinity all contain the entire fullness of the One God! And before you reach for the aspirin, remember that the Trinity shows us that God is complex, mysterious, and knowable all at the same time! What we need is holy imagination, grounded in prayer, scripture, the creeds, tradition, and in the worship of the church.

Think of the ways that God has led you into a deeper knowledge of God, I think that you will find that it depends on your learning style and way of looking at the world.

One of my favorite films is the 1997 movie “Cosmos,” where Jodie Foster plays a scientist…and religious skeptic…who is sent on a mission into an artificial wormhole built on the basis of instructions received via a radio transmission from the star Vega. As she travels she witnesses a magnificent celestial event, the birth of a star or and on seeing the light show she sobs and exclaims that she “... no words, no words... to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful! I had no idea.”

Back in 2012, famed atheist Richard Dawkins debated the Rt. Honorable Rowan Williams, who had just wrapped his term at Archbishop of Canterbury, and described in nearly poetic terms the vastness and complexity of the cosmos asking why one would want to “clutter” up the beauty of science with religion. But as he spoke, Archbishop Williams just nodded, closing his eyes as if he was imagining the scene for himself. In response, Williams pointed Williams did not see God as mental clutter. “Let’s call him a combination of love and mathematics,” he said.

“The writers of the Bible,” Williams noted, “were not inspired to do 21st century physics. They were inspired to pass on to their readers what God wanted them to know.”

And that’s why we find ourselves expressing our encounter with God in poetry, art, and music, and why we often turn to the language of mystics and spiritual directors like St. Julian of Norwich, and even writers like Tolkien, Charles Williams, or Dorothy Sayers or Jan Karon, who in various ways explore their encounters with God in poetry and fiction.

And that brings us to the job that we’ve been given. Go and tell. Make disciples. Baptize and teach.

God speaks to us in the way that meets us exactly at the point of our greatest need. In Matthew’s last chapter we see people who go and tell about the risen Christ. Some people see the Risen Christ and don’t know what they’ve seen, like the soldiers who observed the risen Christ from afar, but since they have not met him, there is no relationship. It is at best only an interesting phenomenon, or a story but nothing more. Without that connection, there is no belief and there is no change.

But for those who enter into a relationship with God in Christ, who dare to go deeper, everything changes. The two Marys who met the risen Jesus in the garden. The eleven and the rest of the imperfect church who met the Risen Christ on the mountain. We meet him here in Christian community and in the sacramental life. The fullness of God being made known in Jesus tells us that Godself is best known in relationship. And from there, we meet God in the people God gives us.

So here is both Good News and a challenge: We who worship, and we who are still trying to understand are also all sent! The challenge is not to be distracted by what we don’t know but to dare to enter into relationship with God in the everyday. The fullness of God is made known in the Holy Spirit in the person of Jesus, who give us the power to change so that every day we can become more and more God’s people.

And every day, we go and tell. We can choose to be intentional about our message or we can just leave it up to the first impression. What will we say? How will we live. There is a saying out there, sometimes attributed (without evidence) to St. Francis of Assisi, “Preach the Gospel. When necessary use words.”

We have seen the fullness of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit made known to us where we live and work and play. In Christ we know our savior and friend, our companion and teacher, our sovereign and our rest. We will tell that we have met the risen Jesus in our daily living and that God is changing us.

So, fellow friends and apprentices of Jesus, we are blessed, truly blessed, when we live Good News, and we tell what we have seen and heard. And remember, we are never, ever alone. 

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Bulletin for Worship for Trinity Sunday, June 4, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for Trinity Sunday, June 4, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on June 4, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on June 4, 2023.

Which way is "up?"

There is an old story that comes from the heady days of the space race between the USA and the former Soviet Union sixty years ago. The story goes that when Yuri Gagarin, the first person to fly in space and orbit the earth, made his voyage in 1961, that he looked out the window and observed that he did not see God.

It gets weirder. 

It turns out that Gagarin never said anything one way or the other about seeing God out the window of Vostok-1! But we do know this: in the days before his rocket lifted off from Star City on the Wednesday after Orthodox Easter, Gagarin took his daughter, Yelena, to be baptized.

The only record of the infamous comment in fact comes from a speech by Nikita Khrushchev in the month or two after the flight. And he didn’t quote Gagarin but rather, in an attempt to mock religion, said what Gagarin didn’t see. The Western press, perhaps spotting an opportunity for propaganda (or else not being able to understand Russian) immediately attributed the words to Gagarin. 

I wonder if this comment, and the minor media and geo-political flap that arose from it, didn’t inspire a 1963 film Heavens Above!, where Peter Sellers plays a naïve but well-meaning vicar accidently appointed to a snobbish parish but who did exactly what Jesus taught: he gave away food, sold all his (and his parish’s) possessions, and welcomed the poor into his church, becoming such an annoyance that he is shot into space as the new Bishop of Outer Space, orbiting the earth reading the psalms over the radio from his space capsule. 

The misquote attributed to Gagarin was definitively answered by three American astronauts, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman as they orbited the moon in Apollo 8 seven years later on Christmas Eve, 1968. The three astronauts took turns reading Genesis 1:1-10, the creation story, on the same flight that gave us the iconic image of the earth rising over the horizon of the moon.

The geography of holiness is a tricky and dangerous thing!

The Feast of the Ascension, which comes forty days after Easter, describes and celebrates the return of the living, crucified, and resurrected Jesus to heaven. Many people, especially today when we can peer into deep space at other galaxies, get hung up on what is meant by “up.”

What is described in both the Book of Acts and in the Gospel of Luke is not a mere disapparation. Jesus doesn’t just disappear into the ether, but instead physically rises up into the sky, leaving the disciples staring into the heavens, mouths agape, until an angel comes and tells them to “snap out of it!” and come back to earth.

As sophisticated as we are, no matter how many airline flights we take, and no matter how many space shots we’ve witnessed, we still tend to think of heaven as “up” and hell as “down”, with us living somewhere in the middle. But as interesting as this cosmological hot-hero sandwich might be, the real significance of the Ascension is not geography but relationship!

If you turn to the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, you will discover that “the mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” (p. 854)

In both the Gospel of Luke and in the Book of Acts, before he returns to heaven, Jesus tells his friends and apprentices to say put, and await the gift that God will send them.

He also teaches them one last time how everything they have seen and heard fits together as God intended. We discover that the disciples were not powerless nor afraid but spent their time together in what must have seemed like a transformed community: they prayed and sang and worshipped. They were not hiding but lived out in the open going between their home(s) and the Temple through the streets of Jerusalem!

What changed was the geography of holiness. Their place, their city, once a place of foreboding and death, is now a place of wonder and worship. They saw the world and their place in it with new eyes, and this even before the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, would arrive in another ten days!

You see, the Ascension didn’t just take Jesus back into heaven, into God’s realm in the cosmos, the Ascension revealed how the friends and apprentices of Jesus were now themselves drawn living in a new relationship with God and each other through Christ. They were changed. Their relationships with each other and even, in their eagerness, with the world was transformed.

The Ascension shows us the sneakiness of God. Its importance is exactly backwards from what we expect. We think it is about going “up,” when in fact it is God coming “down,” tuning our hearts and our senses towards Christ! The Ascension is daily living the prayer we pray every day: that God’s work is being done on earth—all around us! —just as it is in heaven!

So which way is “up?”

The Ascension shows us that as we are drawn to Christ, to each other, and to the world, we are being drawn to God. That way is “up!”

In God’s strange incarnational economy, Christ draws us towards heaven while at the same time showing us the only place we can really find that God is right here-- where we live, work, study, and play. The Ascension shows us that God’s power and healing is not reserved for the someday but is ready for us now. The Ascension demonstrates that in all of our everyday living, the Risen and Ascended Christ continues to be present.

The Ascension reminds us, as Orthodox bishop Metropolitan Anthony Bloom once said, “that the realm of God is dangerous. You must enter into it and not just seek information about it.” Look at what happens in Luke and Acts. Jesus draws to heaven and invites us to work in The City—in the places and in the relationships where God has placed you. And the only place where we can receive “power from on high” is in “the city,” where we his people live, pray, work, and worship.

When we do heavenly worship, with glorious music, we usually think that we are drawing ourselves towards heaven—and we are—but we are also witnessing to the reality that God is all the time bringing heaven to earth. I told you… God is sneaky that way.

This is the geography of the holy. As God’s people, the more we are drawn to heaven the more we live in service to the world; the more we are drawn to that ascended vision, the more we are invited to stay in the city. In the geography of the holy, we don’t need to go elsewhere to find God because the place where we find the power of God is right here all along!

It is said by some who knew him, that Yuri Gagarin carried in his pocket a small icon, right up until he died in a plane crash in 1968. I don’t know. But I do know this: we here in this city, in this place, in our witness, worship, and in our holy work, we baptized people are icons of the holy. What God is doing on earth with us now is what happens in heaven, just as Jesus said when he taught us to pray.

In the Ascension, we are invited to at once look up and see heaven and go out into the city and so inhabit the geography of the holy.

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Bulletin for Worship for the Seventh Sunday of Easter-- Sunday After the Ascension , May 21, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for 7 Easter A- Sunday after the Ascension, May 21, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on May 21, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on May 21, 2023.

The vastness and closeness of God

In 2008, Fr. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

When I mention this to folks, the first response I get is “Wait. The Vatican has an observatory?”

This seems more than a little ironic given that little falling out between the Inquisition and the astronomer Galileo 500 years ago.  Actually, the Church—Roman Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, and Protestant—has supplied the scientific community with physicists, astronomers, and all kinds of researchers for long time, many of them ordained, since the beginning of what we now call “modern” science. But that’s not the point.

Basically, this Jesuit priest said that it is okay for Roman Catholics (and the rest of us) to believe in aliens. As Admiral Pike will someday say to Captain Kirk, “I am relieved!”

This is not just esoteric speculation. The question is really this: now that have a hint of how vastly big and how vastly small creation is, is God really bigger than Creation?

I am no scientist, and I don’t play one on television, but knowing that we have the technology to see to the very edges of the universe and measure its size, at the very same time we can use colliders to measure the smallest particle we can imagine, which was unofficially named after God, what Fr. Funes said begins to make sense. God is greater than all creation and the more we see the vastness of creation, the more we see the majesty and power of God.

Okay. So, God is very big. Does that make God incomprehensible?

Well, except for God’s grace and for the fact that we humans are wired to inquire, that would be “yes.”

God has always been incomprehensible by any ordinary standard. Justin Martyr, that seeker for the truth who died in about 167, said that anyone who thinks God can even be named is “hopelessly insane.”  And yet we still seek.

Would it surprise you, you who routinely and daily live with the benefits of chemistry, physics, microbiology not to mention also live under the shadow of a global pandemic and what we used to call “The Bomb”, to hear how a 14^th Century English mystic once contemplated both the very big inside the very small?

Dame Julian of Norwich was an anchoress who lived in a private monastic cell attached to an English Cathedral when she had visions, or “showings” of God. One of those “showings” concerned happened when she contemplated what she saw inside a walnut. She saw all of God and God’s creation contained in that little shell. To see the vastness of God in something so small ought to appeal to us who know the wonder of DNA and marvel at pictures taken from an orbiting telescope.

Rather than be overwhelmed by God’s sheer size, Blessed Julian found love. Toward the end of her life, she penned this short but profound exchange: “Would you know your Lord's meaning?” she asks. “Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love.”

We can seek and ponder and reason…and we should because we are wired to inquire… but finally we discover that God is always shown best in relationship.  This is where our evangelical friends, have it right, along with sacramentalists like us: what really changes us is our relationship to God who comes to us where we are and touches us as we are, at the point of our deepest need.

There are people, some of whom are of a scientific mind, and even some religious folk, who proudly wear the badge “skeptic”, who tell me that the Trinity is incomprehensible. To which I say “yeah…and…?” 

I might also reply “tell me again about the multiverse….?” You know, the idea that there are multiple universes that exist at the very same time? Besides the fact that it makes for interesting science fiction, it shows us that Christians aren’t the only ones in the cosmological marketplace where apparently contradictory truths can co-exist at one and the same time.

And how about the mathematics that underpin not only modern physics but also chemistry and astronomy…what is the basis for that? About a decade ago, Scientific American spent a whole issue debating the assumptions—and implicit acts of faith within them--behind the high-level mathematics that undergird the advances we take for granted. The funny thing about physics is that when you drill down deep enough not only do our perceptions change, but the line between fact and faith becomes pretty darned blurry. The more we unravel the mystery, the more mystery there is.

And that to a person of faith, as Archbishop Rowan Williams once said to evolutionary biologist, and famed atheist, Dr. Richard Dawkins during an Oxford debate, is a beautiful thing.

The Trinity, the Christian doctrine that says that the oneness of God is expressed in a trinity of persons and a unity of being, tells us some things about the very nature of God. I'll name three:

First, God is complex to the point of unknowing.

Second, God is by definition relational and that means interactive; and

Three, God is by grace knowable.

The God of the whole vast universe, who made heavens and earth, is also the One who walked the earth in the person of Jesus Christ. The God whose Spirit moved at the beginning of the universe and brought it forth, either by word or by big bang, is also the Holy Spirit who animates our hearts. And as vast as creation is, God is this close!

We are able to measure how big and how small creation is using the tools that see down to the sub-atomic level and also galaxies far beyond our own; but there is no limit to how close God is to us.

Of course, we can only know so much, and often we distort or trivialize what we do know about God. We can hyper-focus on that one truth that makes God real to us … and in our fervor risk turning that truth from liberation to oppression. That’s how heresy happens: you take one truth and follow it out to its own illogical conclusion.

The Pop Atheists claim there is no God based on the folly of those who do awful things in the name of God, which, of course, says nothing about God, but a lot about us…and the prophets described that observation first and in greater detail.

Similarly, the folks who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” take the truth that we are all spiritual and have the capacity to inquire and to know God and assume, therefore, that there is nothing that the community of faith, ancient liturgy and scripture can teach us. To which I reply, if we cannot see the farthest galaxy or the smallest atom alone, without the help of others; if we cannot learn and fight disease alone; then why should we think that knowing the depths of God in the depths of human experience is a thing we can do all by ourselves, without tools and without help?

In all this…skepticism about religion, doubts about God, anxiety about our future…the common element is the human one. What really worries—and turns off people—is not God (nor science) but the messiness of human relationships. The politics, the meanness, the unpredictability, the irrationality, the selfishness—the sin—of humankind, is really what gets in our way. Blame it on God, if you like, but the problem is us.

The Trinity, which we celebrate today, tells us that our complex God is at once relational, knowable, and intimate. 

The Holy Trinity is, for me, my spiritual "LaGrange Point" where life hangs in the gravitational pull between science, spirituality, and lived experience. 

And I love that we start our season of “ordinary time” between now and Advent—where we drill down into the nuts and bolts Christian living by learning (and doing) the teachings of Jesus—by first contemplating and celebrating the wonder, complexity, and simplicity of the Holy Trinity.

God knows that we are limited and that we can only know so much. We can’t get away from the fact that the universe is vast and yet our brains can only fit under a baseball cap. But the Trinity tells us that remarkable truth that God is not so distracted and entranced by the bigness of creation to forget about us. That is why God comes to us in ways we can understand and know and touch; in the incarnation and person of Jesus; in beautiful things both small and vast; in redeeming relationships; in prayer and silence, in music and art, in science and meditation; in broken bread and poured out wine; in companionship and service to others; in birth, cross, and resurrection.

The Trinity reminds that the very bigness of God is as close to us as our hearts.

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Here is a link to the bulletin for the First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater

Here is a link to the Scripture readings for Trinity Sunday

Here is a link to a video of the sermon.

Here is a link to a video of the liturgy. 

Here is a link to a sermon by Bishop Nicholas Knisely of Rhode Island (web link).

The lengths that God will go to restore community

Easter Sunday, 2021

I don't know if you noticed but once again, the Triduum landed on another holy feast: Maundy Thursday was also April Fool's Day. So during this octave of All Fooles Day, I am reminded of these sage words which come as both a proclamation and a warning: “Seeing is not believing. Our senses can deceive us.”

What? We are talking about Easter here, aren't we? Certainly!

“Seeing is not believing. Our senses can deceive us.” This is not advice that Yoda might give Luke Skywalker, but are words spoken by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in the TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. “Seeing is not believing.”

He goes on: “The cosmos … is stranger than we ever could have imagined. Light, time, space, gravity conspire to create realities which lie beyond human experience.”

He proceeds to reflect on the incredible discoveries of what the night sky has been telling us that until very recently we could not hear, let alone comprehend.

MIT physics professor Max Tegmark wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times a few years back in which he reported on what he calls “the bombshell announcement of the discovery of cosmology’s holy grail: telltale signature of ripples in the very fabric of space [from] our cosmic origins.

“If this discovery holds up,” he goes on to say, “it will go down as one of the greatest in the history of science.

“It teaches us humans that we need to think big,” he says, “because we are the masters of underestimation.”

We need to think big, because we are masters of underestimation.

I like that.

Our gathering on this Easter Day in and of itself is evidence of a ripple in the very fabric of reality. And this ripple invites us to more than think big, but to imagine and trust in the impossible. To put aside underestimation.

It all began early on the first day of the week. The women were confronted with the news, “He is not here, but has risen.” And that's where Mark's Gospel ends.

But they must have told somebody, because for one thing, we here we are today! Singing , hearing and proclaiming, and standing in awe of the power of God in the Risen Jesus.

Madeline L’Engle, who wrote A Wrinkle in Time, reflected on how God works through the impossible:

“The first of the gloriously impossible things that Jesus did was to be born — the power that created the universe come to live with us as one of us.  And now his time on earth was over, and in the eyes of the religious establishment of his day, he had failed and they had triumphed.  True, he had healed a few cripples and lepers, given sight to a few blind people, driven out a few demons; but he threatened the religious establishment and they killed him.  Or thought they did.”

This was hard new to digest. Even Jesus’ closest followers at first resisted the reports that “he is risen.” Because for all kinds of good reasons, such news was beyond their comprehension. They were still reeling from the horror and the terror of crucifixion. They were rattled, afraid, grief-stricken, demoralized, devastated -- undone.

In the months leading up to that first Easter, whenever Jesus brought up the question and manner of his death, his followers refused to accept it. The idea of death, let along crucifixion, was too much. They didn’t want to hear it. And if they could not imagine or contemplate his dying, then they would surely have tuned out any talk of resurrection.

Jesus told them -- but they could not hear it. They could not comprehend it. It was too big. It was too good to be true.

And all of the Gospels all agree on this point. Luke tells us that when they first heard the news from the women, it “seemed to them an idle tale.” You know what that means: empty talk, a silly story, a foolish yarn, utter nonsense, sheer humbug. We just heard in Mark how the women who came to the tomb could not process the news, even when delivered by angels.

Many of you here know what it’s like to live in the wake of death. You know it firsthand. It’s engulfing. We feel it in our bones. Death ripples through time and rips through our lives -- it tears us apart. We know it well, all too well.

All of Gospel accounts in the New Testament, the one from Mark this morning and all the other Gospels, were written at least 30 to 40 years after the events took place but by then the memory was well seated into the community's memory. And common to all these accounts is that no one saw it coming. They were completely blindsided by the resurrection. 

Then, as now, talk of resurrection sounds too good to be true. Too big. And even after they touched his wounds, ate with him, heard him teach the Scriptures, and watched him ascend to heaven, that memory of that initial surprise stuck with them.

Notice that public relations and spin control was not at the forefront of the minds of Jesus’ followers. You would have thought that 40 years after the events, when the Gospels were finally written down, the leadership of the early church would have ever so slightly shaped the stories to boost their own authority and legitimacy -- especially if one assumes that the original accounts were essentially fabricated in the first place. I mean, if you're going make something up as audacious as the Gospel, wouldn't you want to make yourself look good in the process? 

In today's world, it is easy to imagine Peter, James and John, for instance, going over the final edits of the accounts and proposing a rewrite something like this: “Yes, we were there on the morning of the third day, waiting for the stone to be rolled away, because he had told us it would be so! Sure enough, when the glorious news came: ‘He is risen!’ we, his closest trusted and most loyal companions, met up with him in Galilee as planned. And well, the rest is history!”

No, that’s not what happened! Not by a long shot! For whatever reason, they did not re-edit the story. Jesus’ first followers all admit that they were overwhelmed by his death -- confused, perplexed and deathly afraid.

These accounts ring true, precisely because they line up with what we know to be true about death.

It makes perfect sense that resurrection would be, on the face of it, nonsense – that the reality of it would take a while to sink in. It makes sense that it would be remembered as utterly inconceivable, unbelievable. As too big. As too good to be true. But at the same time, so undeniably true that the experience pierced through all their wonder, disbelief, and skepticism.

The apostle Paul wrote the first letter to the Corinthians twenty or so years after the time of Jesus, and it is the earliest written record of the resurrection we have in the New Testament. By that time, we read, it was regarded as “of first importance” in relation to the message about Jesus: that he died, was buried and was raised on the third day, and that he appeared to Peter, the 12 and then to 500 others at one time. And, Paul says, most of them are still alive, though some have died.

By that time, resurrection had become the explanation for their whole existence. Jesus’ resurrection had become the reason for hope for all who had died and will die. It had become a matter of first importance not just about Jesus but also about us -- all of us -- subject as we are to this human condition.

By then, it had become the cornerstone of the Christian message. They called it Gospel, or “good news.” The good news about Jesus, about God, about humanity, about life. The fabric of death that enshrouds all of humanity has been ripped open, and there is light. Undying light.

They understood that Christ did indeed harrow hell, because their own thinking and way of seeing and being was utterly transformed by encountering the Risen Jesus!

Before long, those early Christians had learned to think big. In Jesus, God had conspired to create a reality that until then had been beyond human experience and comprehension. There was something deeper than death. There was a love stronger than death.

I don't know if you noticed, but The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was martyred on this day 53 years ago in 1968. He once wrote about the lengths that God has gone to restore us to proper relationship with God. He says that the Christ’s incarnation is a real, practical confrontation with evil but one that does not resort to evil to overcome it. He says that the cross, in particular, is:

"...the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is the symbol of God's triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation."

What drives God’s resistance to sin and evil? Love. God’s divine (agape) love for us and for all creation. This is why King advocated non-violent resistance as the means to end injustice. Nonviolent resistance brings an end to hate by being the very embodiment of agape—God’s divine live.

The evidence of this ripple in the fabric of time -- the evidence of resurrection -- lies not in just these accounts, whether from the Gospel writers or from Paul. The evidence of the ripple of resurrection lies here with us, some 2,000 years beyond its origin.

So go ahead. Be astounded once again! And don't be afraid to "think big" – because we are now, as the disciples were then, “masters of underestimation!” In this time of strife, epidemic, and re-appraisal, allow yourself to be startled by the good news of Easter. And as you encounter the Risen Jesus, share that startling hope with everyone you meet!