I keep getting requests for copies of the homily I preached on Trinity Sunday. Difficult to fulfill because I never write down anything for my homilies. So I decided I would give a try at blogging it instead. The readings for that Sunday can be found here.
It all starts with a New Albany high school teacher, Edwin Hubble. The name may sound familiar. That's because NASA's orbiting telescope is named for him. He went on from teaching high school Spanish in greater Louisville to become an astronomer at the Mount Wilson observatory in Southern California. At the time (1919) it had the largest telescope in the world. It allowed Hubble to see something no human being had ever seen, at least knowingly: the Andromeda galaxy.
Strange as it may seem, before Hubble human beings saw the universe as limited to the stars we see in the night sky. After Hubble the size of the universe expanded incredibly. Hubble went on to catalogue numbers of galaxies. He also was able to find something by measuring the shift in the spectrum of light they emitted. It's the same technique used today to track storms with Doppler radar. He discovered that all of the galaxies were moving away from us, that the universe is expanding. And strangely enough the farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was moving.
It was a Belgian priest (and fellow alum of the University of Leuven), Georges Lemaître, who realized that if you track all of those galaxies back along their paths at their measured speeds, you end up with all of them in the same place at the same time. It was a fellow physicist who ridiculed his theory of a "primeval atom" as a "big bang." That was the name that stuck.
"Ask now of the days of old," Moses says, "Ask from one end of the sky to the other. Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire?"
13.5 billion years. Give or take a few hundred million. That's how long ago it was. That moment of the primeval atom. And it was only in the first instants as the universe itself exploded into existance that the conditions were right for the creation of the basic elements: hydrogen, oxygen. The heavier elements came later. Forged in the hearts of the first stars.
"Ask now of the days of old," Moses says, "Ask from one end of the sky to the other. Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire?"
13.5 billion years. Give or take a few hundred million. That's how old you are. Or at least 75% of you. All of the hydrogen and oxygen your body is composed of was made in those first instants 13.5 billion years ago. They will only make up you for a very very short time. Imagine all of the places and times that these elements that make up you and I have seen.
We ask from the days of old. We ask from one end of the sky to the other. We listen for the voice of God from the midst of the fire. And we trust that God speaks from the heart of his creation.
Our faith tells us that God is Trinity and Unity. Just as it is hard to wrap our minds around the universe in its vastness, so it is with God. Yet faith says that God - before the beginning of time itself and larger than the very limits of all things - is at the core community.
Our faith tells us that we are made in God's very image and likeness. We must be at our very core community as well. The call to unity, to connectedness with one another comes from the preaching of Jesus, but it comes first from our very selves. It is written into the very stuff of which our bones are made.
And it is a call to unity that reaches far wider than our families and friends, far wider than the human community, far wider than this planet on which we live.
The voice of God sings to us from the ends of the skies, it calls to us from the depths of time, it echoes from the very fires of creation,
"We are one."
Strange as it may seem, before Hubble human beings saw the universe as limited to the stars we see in the night sky. After Hubble the size of the universe expanded incredibly. Hubble went on to catalogue numbers of galaxies. He also was able to find something by measuring the shift in the spectrum of light they emitted. It's the same technique used today to track storms with Doppler radar. He discovered that all of the galaxies were moving away from us, that the universe is expanding. And strangely enough the farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was moving.
It was a Belgian priest (and fellow alum of the University of Leuven), Georges Lemaître, who realized that if you track all of those galaxies back along their paths at their measured speeds, you end up with all of them in the same place at the same time. It was a fellow physicist who ridiculed his theory of a "primeval atom" as a "big bang." That was the name that stuck.
"Ask now of the days of old," Moses says, "Ask from one end of the sky to the other. Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire?"
13.5 billion years. Give or take a few hundred million. That's how long ago it was. That moment of the primeval atom. And it was only in the first instants as the universe itself exploded into existance that the conditions were right for the creation of the basic elements: hydrogen, oxygen. The heavier elements came later. Forged in the hearts of the first stars.
"Ask now of the days of old," Moses says, "Ask from one end of the sky to the other. Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire?"
13.5 billion years. Give or take a few hundred million. That's how old you are. Or at least 75% of you. All of the hydrogen and oxygen your body is composed of was made in those first instants 13.5 billion years ago. They will only make up you for a very very short time. Imagine all of the places and times that these elements that make up you and I have seen.
We ask from the days of old. We ask from one end of the sky to the other. We listen for the voice of God from the midst of the fire. And we trust that God speaks from the heart of his creation.
Our faith tells us that God is Trinity and Unity. Just as it is hard to wrap our minds around the universe in its vastness, so it is with God. Yet faith says that God - before the beginning of time itself and larger than the very limits of all things - is at the core community.
Our faith tells us that we are made in God's very image and likeness. We must be at our very core community as well. The call to unity, to connectedness with one another comes from the preaching of Jesus, but it comes first from our very selves. It is written into the very stuff of which our bones are made.
And it is a call to unity that reaches far wider than our families and friends, far wider than the human community, far wider than this planet on which we live.
The voice of God sings to us from the ends of the skies, it calls to us from the depths of time, it echoes from the very fires of creation,
"We are one."
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