Douglas Hickey
Brothers and sisters,
In our reductive and myopic age, everything gets tossed in a blender and thrust under a microscope.
Reality is nothing but physics. Life is nothing but chemistry. Consciousness is nothing but computation. If you want to really understand something, break it down to its component parts, roll back the clock, and—voila!—discover there’s no there there, no man behind the curtain, no god in the machine—just starting position, vector, and mechanism.
What a heartless, stupid, brainless world to imagine (quite literally).
The triune God in whom we live and move and have our being doesn’t care so much about origins. He creates from nothing and for nothing but his own delight out of his own superabundant love.
He parachutes into the middle of history on a rescue mission, unbound by anything that has come before. He is surprise and renewal, the inversion of what is inevitable and what is impossible.
If you want to really understand the world, look to Christ who died and who lives again. He is the cornerstone. Everything else—science, history, psychology, you, me—we’re the metaphor.
But it’s hard to hold this truth in mind. Breaking things down to parts is comfort food.
I remember how scandalized and disillusioned I felt when I first heard in my 20s that the word “Trinity” never appears anywhere in scripture. If it wasn’t there at the beginning, that meant it was a human invention, a late addition, a distortion of the true Gospel message.
Today the Episcopal church celebrates the feast of St. Gregory of Nazianzus.
One of the Cappadocian fathers, St. Gregory lived hundreds of years after Christ. He was a reluctant bishop and, by most accounts, a difficult guy to get along with. But he was instrumental in formulating the trinitarian theology we recite in the Nicene Creed every Sunday.
We remember him not because he created a novel doctrine—the doctrine of the Trinity had always been there, woven into scripture, whispered in the prayers of the faithful—but because he participated in the Spirit’s ever-unfolding revelation of divine love, proceeding from the Father, leading the church into deepening truth.
May the Spirit lead us as well.
Amen.
—Douglas
