I was never much of a science student, so I did not realize, until recently, that in classic mechanical physics there is a well-known problem called “the Three Body Problem”. Roughly speaking – very roughly – the issue is the problem of predicting the motion of three mutually attracting bodies, like the Sun, the Earth and the Moon. Apparently it is not so easy to do!
A short discussion of the Thee Body Problem from the Physics Department at Drexel University tells me that this problem “exhibits all the hallmarks of chaos.” And if it is the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon we are talking about, this sounds worrisome, since I had rather thought that we had a bit of a grip on understanding the relationship between all three, and that the chances that the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon might veer off course and smash into each other had been more or less ruled out.
It turns out that chaos theory is not quite as chaotic as you or I might think. This scientific theory does not posit, as I understand it, a state of “utter confusion” – which is the definition we most often think of when we talk about chaos. In fact, chaos theory does not imagine the simply random interactions of the universe. Rather, this scientific category encompasses systems that are highly dependent on initial conditions, and yet have somewhat limited predictability. The well-known question being posed by a physicist in 1972: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”
The Three Body Problem seems like an apt metaphor to reach for on Trinity Sunday. In Christian theology, after all, we have something of a Three Body Problem: we have to account for God’s revelation of himself in the three Persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And many pages have been filled over the centuries with explanations of the relationship and activity of these three apparently mutually attracting persons, that they are three Persons of one God.
And yet, study, ponder, or investigate the relationship of these three as we may, a complete understanding eludes us. Try as we do to comprehend how it is that a Trinity of Persons is truly the Unity of God, it remains a mystery to us. And if we are still referring to St. Patrick and his shamrock as a teaching aid for the God who created the universe and all that’s in it, then it would seem we have not traveled very far in our understanding of God! Which leads me to wonder if perhaps we have to consider the possibility that God as he reveals himself to us is something of a chaotic God.
And here science comes to my aid. Because I do not mean to suggest that God’s actions are entirely random and his purposes without meaning. But I do mean to suggest that God’s activity in the universe is of a somewhat limited predictability, and is highly dependent on what we might call “initial conditions.”
And it turns out that a more historic look at the idea of chaos takes us right back to the beginning. One of the earliest definitions of the word referred directly to “the formless void” that we are told about in the first lines of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Here is chaos: the beginning, the initial conditions; God’s Spirit – or his wind – moving, swooping, over the watery face of chaos, with perhaps no more force than the flap of a butterfly’s wings. And now his voice – which I have always imagined as a booming, thunderous voice, but perhaps it is nothing more than a whisper – he speaks.
We could not have predicted the results of his commands: the wonder of creation. And we could not have known from the outset, as God knows, that it was good, this creation he has wrought. But this is our chaotic God, who, with the flap of his wings and the whisper of his voice, brings forth the wonders of the universe!
At least twice in the Bible our imaginations are called back to the beginning. Here, in Genesis where we encounter God and his Spirit, and in the opening of John’s Gospel, where we are told of God and his eternal Word. And so, from the beginning, we encounter a Three Body Problem. Whence this voice? Whence this Spirit? Whence this Word? How are we to understand that they relate to one another? Are these the persons of a chaotic God?
If we remind ourselves that chaos is not, first and foremost, a state of utter confusion, but rather, that pregnant but still undefined state of limited predictability when God’s Word, carried by his breath, had not yet been spoken over the formless void, is this an image of the God of chaos – since only God brings order from the chaos?
And if those first verses of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible tell us, in the beginning, of the butterfly wings of God setting an ordered course for the chaotic matter of creation, are we free to wonder if the winds that blew in Galilee centuries upon centuries later had been stirred by those wings?
And is there a resemblance, or even an echo, in the voice in Galilee to that first voice that spoke to the chaos? Is there an inevitable link from the command that brought forth all creation to the command that tells the eleven disciples to “Go” into all the world and make more disciples with the gifts of love by baptizing and teaching in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit?
And did those eleven disciples not flinch at this complicated formula - this Three Body Problem - because somehow they could simply see that it was good? Were they un-worried because they already knew how Jesus, with his gentle breath, had given them peace in the chaos of the world and of their lives?
Of all people, you would think that we modern (or post-modern) people could appreciate a chaotic God: a God who speaks divine order to chaos with limited predictability, but still spectacular results. Of all people, you would think that we modern people, who recognize the limits of our ability to understand quite the way the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon interact, we who cannot solve the Three Body Problem for bodies that we can gaze at through a telescope – you would think we would find the mystery of three persons in one God plausible.
Of all people, you would think that we, sophisticated, 21st century Americans, could grasp how it is that the merest flap of God’s butterfly-wings in the beginning of all things has remarkably and mysteriously brought us to this moment – that we could not have predicted – when we hear again that simplest and oft-repeated command of Jesus, “Go,” telling us that like the rest of creation we have something to do in fulfilling the purposes of God, by sharing the teaching and the grace of his love with anyone who will listen.
Of all people, you would think that we, who have adapted brilliantly to the utter confusion that we have made of the world around us,would hear the possibility of beautiful truth in the revelation of a chaotic God who translated order out of chaos in the beginning of time.
And, alone among God’s creation, we can choose to sit stupefied and stymied by our quandary over the Three Body Problem of God who has revealed himself to us in the complex unity of three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Or we can heed his voice, be lifted on the currents of his breath, and animated by the gift of his love; and we can Go into the world to share that love, and see that it is very good.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
18 May 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Cyclone Pentecost
And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind…. (Acts 2:2)
It was not the flick of the switch of the Large Hadron Collider – a particle accelerator outside of Geneva that has been built in order to smash protons together and that some say could create a small black hole that would swallow the earth – but it was not this, the work of scientists over-stepping their bounds that wreaked havoc with the earth last week. It was not the hands of men that swirled the winds together in a great turbine and that churned the waters from their depths to wash over the Irrawaddy Delta leaving death and destruction in their wake.
It was what the insurance companies call an “act of God” - in the rush of a mighty wind and its accompanying surge of water – that brought catastrophe to Burma: a country that can hardly afford such a fate.
And today, on Pentecost, when we remember the great rushing wind that first carried the Holy Spirit into the midst of the church, we can be forgiven for wincing at the cruel irony of these parallel stories: the whoosh of great blessing that announced the arrival of the Holy Spirit, and the terrible spinning gusts of Cyclone Nargis that washed over the better part of a nation with it a 12-foot mound of water.
No wonder ancient voices spoke about God’s wrath and his fury – words that today make us squirm but which may ring true when we consider the work of his fingers this past week. No wonder the Psalmist posits that “the earth shall tremble at the look of him.” No wonder so many run for cover under the easy platitude that God moves in a mysterious way, and then do their absolute best to avoid or ignore God’s movements altogether. No wonder the world is confused about God and ready to believe those who forcefully preach that God is not great.
And yet, we could be forgiven for wondering, in the grip of disaster, if God is, in fact, good. But can we doubt that he is great? What is a cyclone to God but one of many eddies that he leaves in his majestic wake as he veers across the universe, his mantle of midnight velvet and stars with its white-capped ocean-fringe brushing up against we poor innocents – and few more innocent than the poor, common people of Burma.
Flip the dreaded switch of the Large Hadron Collider and risk the destruction of the world. This we could understand: our un-doing brought about at our own hands, by our own proud science, in our own relentless need to be masters of everything. But how can God bring such mayhem to his own creatures on the same winds that once promised hope, and that fanned the tongues of fire that crowned silly disciples?
Is it only at times of disaster that it occurs to us that God is powerful? Are these incidents of destruction the only acts that we could possibly attribute to God anymore? Have even we who believe ceased to allow for the possibility that God is, in fact, great? Are we so impressed with our own human power, our own human creativity, our own human ingenuity that we believe we have left God behind, the divine vestigial relic of a darker age?
And is this our bright age – when still more will die in Burma because of the recklessness of a paranoid junta; when the gunfire in our own streets brings down children or cops without much distinction; when we cannot conceive of an end to a war we thought we were clever enough to control; when we have doused the good earth with poisons we have the gall to call “fertilizers”; when we keep going to the gas pumps to get our fix no matter how high the price of oil climbs – is this our bright age?
And suddenly today comes a sound from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind.
We – bright things - have locked our doors against the wind as though a cyclone were coming straight for us. We have hunkered down in our self-sufficiency, and our certainty that the world and its fate really rests in our own hands. We have milk and water and toilet paper in our bunkers. We still have duct tape and rolls of plastic here too. I, myself, have helped screw hurricane straps onto new houses in the Gulf Coast to keep them from blowing away. We know how to protect ourselves when we want to. We know how to keep the doors locked tight.
And if we know how to keep the wind out and our roofs from blowing off, we also know how to lock the doors to keep God out. We know where to put weather stripping so not even a draft of him can blow in through the cracks. And the world today hardly knows the difference between the insurance company’s description of an “act of God” and the real thing, mostly because the world today is not much interested in acts of God.
In my Bible only two pages separate the two different stories of Pentecost: the stories of God’s gift of the Holy Spirit in Acts and in John’s gospel. But of course there is a sharp contrast. In Acts, Luke tells us of the rushing, mighty wind, and the tongues of fire. But in John the doors are locked, and the disciples are hunkered down; but Jesus finds them and comes to them anyway. And there is no commotion, no wind, there are no tongues of fire. There is only his greeting of peace, and then his gentle breath on them as he tells them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
John says it happened late on Easter Day, and Luke tells us that it happened fifty days later. But scholars assure us that although the timing and the circumstances are described differently the stories are about the same thing: about God’s gift of his Holy Spirit to his people after the resurrection of his Son.
If it is true that God moves in a mysterious way – as it manifestly appears to be – then we may have to account for his movements that terrify us, and drive us behind locked doors. But we also have to account for God’s quiet presence in our midst and the greeting of peace from the lips of his Son Jesus.
And if it is true that the Holy Spirit of God can and does ride on the violet currents of wind and water that can and do wreak havoc in the world, it is also true that Jesus’ gentle breath bequeathed that same Spirit to us, to bring us peace.
The designers of that particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, quite staunchly defend their work against criticisms that when it is turned on it could create a black hole that would swallow the earth. Nevertheless, when the suggestion was made, they did agree to double-check, to run the numbers, and they did review Stephen Hawking’s theory that such micro black holes would evaporate if they did just happen to get formed. They did allow for the possibility, however remote, of phenomena more powerful and dangerous than those built by their own hands and intended to replicate the forces of creation.
If we can imagine our own human capacity to wield such power, why is it so hard for us to conceive of a God who wields yet more power than us? And why do we find it so hard to believe that the Son of God could harness that power with his own breath and share it with us for the singular purpose of bringing us peace?
And it may be that the great gift of Pentecost is the realization of God’s determination to share with us both his power and his peace. It may be that the proximity of these two stories of the Holy Spirit – just two pages apart in my Bible – is intended to link them in our imaginations, and to temper the almost un-bridled power of that Spirit, on the one hand, with the un-compromised dictate of peace, on the other.
And it may be that our challenge as mere humans is not so much to hedge against the possibility that we have usurped God’s creative power to the extent that we might unwittingly form black holes – one of the most mysterious features of the universe. Rather, it may be that our challenge is to accept that the phenomenal power God has given us, by the extraordinary gifts of his Spirit, is intended to bring us peace.
And maybe the reason we think of natural disasters like Cyclone Nargis as “acts of God” is because we can’t help but seeing in these tragedies a projection of ourselves, and our own tendency to mis-use the power God has given us by his Spirit.
We Christians have always believed that despite this reliable tendency of ours (to mis-use the gifts that God has given us), God determined to send us his Son as our neighbor, our brother, our friend. And in living with us as closely as a neighbor, a brother, a friend, Jesus has always been close enough to breathe on us as he offers us Peace.
And even now, in this place, he is near enough to breathe on us. At this very moment, tiny eddies of air, perhaps stirred up by a cyclone on the other side of the globe, are swirling invisibly around us. They will not ignite in tongues of flame to dance above our heads. Theses currents of God’s breath are hardly detectable, easily missed or ignored. Yet, they carry with them the un-matched power of peace, in the echo of Jesus’ resurrection greeting to his friends: a power more awesome than anything the scientists in Geneva or anywhere can replicate.
And it may be that the flicker of candles is the only potential evidence of that gentle breath floating among us even now, deceptively slight, pregnant with power, promising peace, and waiting only for us to inhale.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
11 May 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
The Unknown God
Saint Paul, who has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, was quite a traveler. And he seems to have adopted, in his travels, the attitude that when in Athens, one should do as the Greeks do – up to a point.
Paul is seldom given credit for a sense of humor, but I think we see it on display in this passage related by St. Luke of a speech that Paul gives to a group of Athenians as he stands on the Areopagus, or Mars Hill. ‘How religious you Athenians are!’ he tells them. ‘As I walked your streets, I found an altar with the following inscription: To an Unknown God.’ How very religious indeed, to erect a shrine to we know not what – just to be on the safe side. Paul is being a bit facetious here.
Of course, in our own day and age it has become a popular sport to level a similar observation at people of faith. How religious we are, are critics cringe. We gather here week by week and day by day – the thinking goes - to sing our hymns and read our stories and say our prayers and offer our thanks to a God who is virtually unknown to us or to the world, who is figment of our collective imaginations, a God-delusion that makes us feel better about ourselves and the world but which doesn’t even spur us on to good works very often.
In the minds of many people these days (most of whom seem to want to write books about it) we Christians, and people of other faiths, are as deluded as the ancient Athenians who would take seriously an altar to an Unknown God. And we are no better off.
Considering the world we live in, it is not surprising that many ask whether or not the God we worship is anything more than a delusion. Considering the state of affairs among nations, and the degradation of the planet, a person could wonder whether the God we praise is any more involved in the world than some Unknown God.
The Unknown God really is the Just-in-case God, who is worshiped in an effort to cover our backsides. And as such the Unknown God is a largely undemanding God – after all what could he require of us, since we don’t even know who he (or she) is?
And it might be fair to ask whether the Unknown God is worshipped today in many churches. After all, when in Rome or Athens or America, do as the locals do. And this is more or less what our parents did, or what the nuns taught us to do. And don’t worry so much if you begin to wonder that the God we worship is really an Unknown God. Brunch will be served soon enough. For many of us, the Unknown God – susceptible as he is to the delusion critique – is still not such a bad God, and maybe just about all the God we want, since, after all he doesn’t require much of our time, money or energy.
But notice what Saint Paul tells the men and women of Athens. See that he does not denigrate the Unknown God, and he does not even argue against the pantheon of Greek religion. He doesn’t even write a book! What Paul says is this: ‘I know who the Unknown God is. He is the God who made the world and everything in it, the Lord of heaven and earth. He does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself give to all men life and breath and everything. I know who the Unknown God is!’
All these centuries later, and so far from Athens, we live in a world of Unknown Gods. Half the time we seem almost ready to worship at their altars. We could almost imagine every single ATM in this city as an altar to Unknown Gods; then we’d know who or what we worship since there is no surer indicator of what’s important to Americans than what we spend our money on. These Unknown Gods do require very little of us – except our regular visits to their altars of cash dispensation.
But are we left wondering whether or not the atheist book-writers have a point? Do we sometimes wonder if we are deluding ourselves? Have we followed this path of faith just-in-case? Do we live in a world of Unknown Gods because there is no real God to know?
It may be the case that the way to answer this question is the same way Saint Paul answered it. That is, we may find that there is no way to assure ourselves that God is not a delusion other than to discover (perhaps to our own surprise) that we know who the Unknown God is.
Perhaps we have come to know this because we see how much has been given into our hands: the blessing of a child, the love of family, the benefits of wealth, even dominion over so much of this planet. Or perhaps it is because of a sin forgiven – one we thought we could never live down. Perhaps it is the on-going encounter with beauty that we cannot explain any other way. Perhaps it is that tiny spark of hope that lifts us out of despair in the face of the death of someone we love.
In all these ways, and countless others, the living God makes himself known to us. And most profoundly, for us, in something as simple and ordinary as a morsel of bread, and a sip of wine, God is known and among us day by day.
For us, living in a world of Unknown Gods can become a daily exercise in discovering that we know who the Unknown God is! There is no proof of this, of course. There is still room for doubt and delusion, for error and uncertainty. There is only the Way that follows Jesus’ commandment to love one another as he loves us, which means with every ounce of our being, and with all humility, as we wash one another’s feet. And that Way leads us past many altars: some at which we feel right at home, some to strange Gods, some that spit out cash as long as you have your card and your PIN number, and some to Unknown Gods.
Having walked this Way for some time now, I have been past a lot of altars, and so have you. And we have seen a lot of evidence of Unknown, Just-in-case Gods, as well as the people who suspect that these are the easy Gods to serve.
And perhaps we should follow the example of Saint Paul. What is the point in denigrating these Unknown Gods of the world we live in? What is the point in arguing against the pantheon of secularism? What is the point of writing a book about it? As Saint Paul knew, when in Athens, do as the Greeks do, and when in America... what else can we do in this land of Unknown Gods?
We can only follow the Way of Christ’s commandment of love, which leads past this altar, whose simple offering of bread and wine reminds us that we know who the Unknown God is! He is the God who made the world and everything in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, who does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needs anything, since he himself gives to all people life and breath, and everything!
He is the God who sent his Son into the world to save us from sin and death, that we might have life and have it abundantly. He is the Lord of Life who died for our sakes and who gives us his body for food and his blood for our salvation. He is the Light that continually dawns in the east, and the new life that rises up from the grave.
He is the God who knows us each by name, and even the number of hairs on our heads, who once would show nothing more than his back to Moses but who now delights to dwell by his Holy Spirit among us, living, breathing, and working in each and every one of us.
Yes, we live in a land of Unknown Gods, but we rejoice, because we know who the Unknown God is. Thanks be to God!
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
30 April 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia