Trinity Sunday: Homily / Sermon

I have always been interested in science. It's funny, because I've never studied it, at least not since my O levels.

I suppose the problem with studying something is that you have to persevere through the things you don't like as well as the things you do.

It was the origins of things that grabbed me. Not chemicals, nor biology, but the intricacy of the atom.

Protons, neutrons and electrons: the way in which the same building blocks make up so many different materials. I thought learning the periodic able was very dull - but the reality behind it was fascinating. And I've tried to keep up, but it now so very hard: positrons, quarks, dark matter and anti-matter, string theory, the Higgs boson ... So far as i can grasp it, it's amazing, but I don't claim to know enough to even begin to explain it!

And another thing that intrigues me is the universe itself - the sheer size of it, astronomy, the stars and the planets, space dust and meteorites, and the possibility of space travel. I was a child when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and I grew up a great fan of star trek - "Space, the final frontier". My granddad's generation had loved the Western - but for me it was SciFi.

And there's an interesting connection, because these vast planets, stars, moons, spread over million miles of space seem so very like the atoms and electrons.

Now I realise the scientist will say that the atom doesn't really look like that. It's just the way the text books portray them to make it easier for us to understand. But that isn't really the point.

The point is really this. At these too levels of reality. The incredibly tiny, and the unimaginably massive, everything is connected. Everything is related to everything else. Gravity unites planets with stars and moons with planets. Electrons are bound to atoms, and atoms are combinations of protons and neutrons. Stars lies in galaxies and atoms combine to make substances and chemicals. Water is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, and the tides are moved by the moon.

Everything is related to everything else. Even people. Especially people. "No man is an island", the Poet John Donne wrote, and for that matter no island is an island either, as least not in that sense.

And this is all because God who Created all these things is himself relationship. He is one, yet three. His creation reflects his glory, the glory of a relationship, Father, Son, and Spirit - a relationship which gives itself eternally, which expands and spreads through his creation, yet without ever reducing itself, without ever diminishing.

He is bound together by the strongest bonds, yet He gives himself with infinite generosity. We call him Trinity.

And the force that unites him and which he shares with us, the force that enfolds him and which embraces us, we call Love.
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