Sermon: Trinity Sunday
St. Matthew's Episcopal Church
[Note: this sermon involved a
prop. I took an 11 ft. pole and taped off various depths to scale. So, math--it turns out you use it after all! This infographic approximates a few points on the pole.]
I wonder what some of y’all may be thinking now.
“Oh no, it’s Trinity Sunday, and the priest has a prop. Is he going to
try to explain the Trinity with a prop? Please, no.”
Well, yes, I have a prop. But I
have no idea how to explain the Trinity with a huge honkin’ pole. So, that’s not what I’m up to.
Instead I want to talk about the ocean.
The ocean is a remarkable and mysterious place. We have only explored 5% of the Earth’s
oceans; yet it’s 73% of our planet’s surface.
We have better maps of Mars than we do our own ocean floors. Isn’t that amazing?
Specifically, I want to talk about the Marianas Trench, the deepest
point of Earth’s oceans. It’s nearly seven
miles from the surface of the ocean.
36,960 feet. To put that in
perspective, that’s from where we are sitting to Santan Village. But I’d like
you to imagine that this pole represents the seven mile distance from the
surface of the ocean to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
The first
line you see represents the deepest a human can dive without a suit. But the
reason we can’t go further is because the pressure can crush our bodies.
Now the second
line, that’s known as the twilight line.
That’s about 650 feet down. Some
residual light continues down, but that’s the point that photosynthesis, which enables
plants to grow, stops. Many animals at these
depths have become transparent.
This third
line is the deepest a human has gone in a suit (2,000ft).
At the 3,300 ft line, the fourth line, there is absolutely no sunlight. Pitch black.
At this point, the only light comes from the creatures who can make
their own. Like the angler fish, that
really ugly looking fish with the light on its forehead (y’all seen Finding Nemo, right?). Most
beasties at this depth and down are either red or black. The temperature here is also near freezing.
Some whales are known to dive almost two miles down (9,500ft). That’s the fifth line.
At the sixth
line—10,000ft--you start what is known as the abyss. ¾ of
the ocean bottom is that this level and the average depth of the ocean floor is 12,000ft down—That’s the seventh line here. Very little life can be found below this line--starfish
and tiny squids. The pressure is too
much for anything else. So even fish
cannot typically exist this deep; only a few can. Think of how empty that makes the oceans—vast
areas of dark nothingness.
The eighth
line represents the beginning of the last layer, which extends from 19,686 feet
to the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean. These areas are mostly found in deep water
trenches and canyons. The temperature of the water is just above freezing, except
where you might find deep ocean vents releasing boiling hot sulfuric gases and
waters from the lava and magma beneath the earth’s surface crust. And the pressure is an incredible eight tons
per square inch. That is approximately
the weight of 4 cars squeezed into a square inch.
In spite of the pressure and temperature, life can still be found here.
Invertebrates such as starfish and tube
worms can thrive at these depths, sometimes living off of the gases and heat
produced by these vents, which would be toxic for us to be around, and way too
hot for us to survive. The water at these vents is over 750 degrees Fahrenheit.
More people have visited space than this part of Earth.
The surface of the ocean comes with its own sense of mystery, and a
back-and-forth between serenity and danger.
Gentle breezes give way to storms and hurricanes, turning the surface
from placidity to rhythmic waves, to roiling seas and crashing waters. Far beneath the surface silent earthquakes in
the deep come to the surface as tsunamis, pushing the water to high waves that
crash flood into land.
The ocean—the deep—the seas of the world have always captivated
people. Ancient cultures would have been
familiar with strange beasts washing up on shore—imagine seeing a beached whale
for the first time, and wonder what to make of such creatures. They knew the sea was dangerous from storms
and shipwrecks. They knew that there
were depths they could not sound.
The point I wish to make with this pole is to show we do know quite a
bit more, but we also know that we do not know everything. Every deep sea dive shows us a new
species. Fish long thought extinct occasionally
wash up on our shores. Shipwrecks and natural
disasters still haunt us.
The seas are mysterious. They
have inspired—and continue to inspire—mythologies.
They represent chaos and danger, they are easily imagined as having
character and life all on their own. Think of the many stories of literature that use the sea as setting and
character.
One such story is the creation story of the Enuma Elish, the creation story of the Babylonians. Tiamat is the goddess of chaos and of the
ocean. She was the mother of the gods,
but she was murdered, and her body was divided to become the rest of the
universe.
And we might be so conditioned to hear our own creation story as
creation from nothing, but the deep was there from the very beginning.
Did you catch it?
In the beginning when God
created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and
darkness covered the face of the deep,
while a wind from God swept over
the face of the waters.
The words for “formless void” in Hebrew is tohu vabohu, also meaning “waste and wild.” It means that at the beginning, there was
nothing only in the sense that it was not
yet a thing. But this means that for
the Word of God—Christ, which in the beginning was with God and was God and was
the one through whom all things came into being—for the Word, there was
something to speak to in order to
bring things into existence. And the
Holy Spirit swept over the face of the deep.
From chaotic nothingness, the triune God made space for things to become
what God would call good.
The deep waters also play a role throughout the Bible. Whenever the deep appears in the Bible, it is
often a metaphor for trouble, for chaos.
Jonah—famous for being spewed from the mouth of a large fish-- prayed
aloud to God, saying
I called to you, O God, out of my distress, and you
answered me; *…
You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas,
*
and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and billows passed over me.
Then I said, “I am driven away from your sight; *…
The waters closed in over me, the deep was round about
me; *
weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the
mountains.[1]
Imagine if you were
at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, looking up. Well, you couldn’t see it—it’s
too dark— but imagine you could. Like
Jonah, at the roots of the mountains—the walls you would see would be seven
times the height of the walls of the Grand Canyon.
Can you hear that
sense of depth, of being in over one’s head?
Psalm 130, one of my favorites, begins
“Out of the depths I call to
you, O Lord, consider well the sound of my longing soul.”[2]
It brings to my mind the vision of drowning. The sputtering, the useless kicking that
never seems
to get us to the surface. The
panic that threatens to shut down our mind and our breathing. The troubles in our lives sometimes feel like
drowning; and the Biblical writers created a tradition in which the image of the
mystery and power of the sea—and the deep and drowning—are sometimes the most
powerful ways to explain and describe what we may be feeling.
Think of how
often you hear others speak of being in “up to their neck.”
And in a world
so expansive—we haven’t even talked about the expanse of space and the universe—we
could ask of God along with the psalmist today:
When I consider your heavens, the work of your
fingers, *
the moon and the stars you have set in their courses,
the moon and the stars you have set in their courses,
What is man that you should be mindful of him? *
With all the troubles in this world, and even that experienced by the
people within this room, we could even ask with the disciples in the midst of
the storm on the Sea of Galilee, “Lord, do you not care that we are perishing?”
before Christ calmed the storm.[3]
In one translation of the Bible, Psalm 139—another favorite of mine—has
the simultaneously comforting and frightening title “The Inescapable God.”
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away…
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night’,
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away…
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night’,
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
Even in the depths, we are faced with what may be both
a comfort and a frightening prospect: God
is present to us, no matter where we find ourselves, in our physical bodies,
anywhere in this universe, no matter the darkness. Even the Marianas Trench. No matter the darkness of our minds or circumstances
in which we find ourselves.
Why would this be frightening? I suspect there are a few reasons, but the
one I am acquainted with most is this: until we trust that the power of God resides
in love and not pitiless judgment, the idea that we may let God all the way
into our lives is a level of vulnerability we may fear. But silly us; God is already there, for we
profess a God who is not absent from any molecule, membrane, thought, heart, or
depth.
There is nowhere God is not.
There is nowhere God has never been.
The God who lovingly made space for creation set the
boundaries of the deep and is with us in the midst of calm and chaos.
This God, in the incarnation, sent the Son to testify
to this love, and show this love’s self-giving and redemptive power in a human
life.
This God, in a procession of power through the Spirit,
sustains creation, and gives life to the Church.
Indeed this triune God is the one who encircles us behind
and before, when we find ourselves in trouble, or when we seek the way forward while wading into the
deep. This triune God is the one enfolds
us within and without, giving us the courage to step into the abyss and testify
to God’s presence in places considered God-forsaken.
That phrase— “God-forsaken”—if there ever was a
heresy, that one is the most dangerous and heartless.
This triune God
also makes us a promise. The sea shows
up one last time at the very end of the Bible, in Revelation
21. John the revelator tells us he saw:
…a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven
and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I heard a loud voice from the
throne saying,
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’
This is the
promise of a God whose love can conquer all.
We are not there yet, but we see slivers of this promise.
Like our oceans,
so much of life is unexplored.
So much remains
a mystery.
So much is always
wavering between calm and chaos.
What makes such
life possible are the very gifts of the God who is everywhere present.
Curiosity to
encourage exploration.
Courage to step
out of the shallows of sentimentality and generalities to risk the hazards and
rewards of the depths we cannot yet fathom.
Resolve when all
we hoped was stable gives way.
Gratitude for
the journey we share with others.
May God give us
an abundance of these gifts,
and may we see
God even in the trenches of our lives.
Amen.
x
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