The mind-bending fact of our created reality is that the God Who made all, in some measure is us. And as we wade into these deep waters, more profound truths awaits. Our changeless God is of Three Persons. One of His Persons is in Two Natures. And One of those Natures is human. That is, the very essence (Greek oúsios / ούσιος) of God is touched with humanity. This fact is boldly underlined in our Creed: the Son is `omooúsios (same essence) with the Father.

That this fact matters need hardly be said. It tore the world apart in the fourth century with the majority party holding that the Father and the Son were "similar in essence" (homoioúsios) while the minority party stubbornly upheld the orthodox truth that the Father and the Son are of the same essence" (homooúsios).

The particularity of the Person of the Son is expressed with another Greek word: `υπόστασις / hypóstasis. But this in no way subtracts from the fullness of the Son's constituent participation in the Holy Trinity. The Son is fully man, and the Son is fully God.

It would be a blessing far beyond our deserving if God came to dwell amongst us for a few decades, a stunning fact. But the point of our being created with His Essence and in His Image, the point of God's Son being given the vocation of human-hood (if I can put it that way), is that we forever belong to God — either forever in His Kingdom or forever outside of His Kingdom. And today's gift from the Father, emphasizes both the intimacy and the permanence of our unbreakable ties to God:

Every minute of every day in all of our lives and forever, we belong to God. God is eternal. He is changeless. The Psalmist writes,

Indeed, the Father and the Son are "before all ages" — are beyond time and space. God fashioned the provisional and temporary laws of physics for our sakes. He certainly is not subject to them.

God is Permanent. And the most important thing about us is we are permanent, too. We are the only creatures (whom we can say with certainty) that have no end:

Yes, We shall all be judged, but whatever the outcome, we all shall live forever. G.K. Chesterton made a memorable point. He said that God's people make for a vast population, beyond any possibilty of numbering. But the tiniest fraction of these are those alive today.

By 1980 it should have been clear that this is not a theological proposition alone but a a verifiable fact. For reasons known only to God, sometime in the 1960s we stumbled onto CPR, which then was taught universally beginning around 1970. Before 1970, most people suffering drownings, heart attacks, etc. simply died. But with CPR we began meeting thousands and then millions of people who reported near-death experiences (NDEs), attesting a world after our own quotidian reality. Many were credible scientists. But no matter who they were, the things they reported were remarkably linear.

I had the privilege of meeting a man who lived in a shack in Upstate New York dairy country. He was mostly isolated from the culture. He had no television. He was semi-literate. I was his neighbor working as a farmhand in those years. I would drop by from time to timeto help him repair cars. Over time a relationship of affection and trust grew between us. And then one day, he said to me, "I died once, ya know" and confided the details to me: the room, the window, the corridor, the joy-endowing white light, which surrounded him and filled him up. "Oh! I was never so happy in my life," he said.

The rest of the details, I suppose everybody knows. They have been published with precision. But he had not read these accounts. For the year was 1974, and the first books on NDEs were yet to appear. You can imagine how stunned I was to read this accounts, that this unforgettable tale should be attested in such detail in book after book after book. Amazing. I realized that meeting this man and choosing to spend time with Him was a Divine appointment given me by God.

Today between five to ten percent of all Americans report having had NDEs. As I say, these experiences usually include the detail of "unspeakable joy." But this is one side of the story. Years later, at the Yale School of Nursing I took a course which systematically studied death and dying. By their consent dying people were recorded day-after-day by a hidden camera. I recall one case vividly: an Evangelical pastor who wanted the world to see a man of faith pass into Heaven. The fact of his dying, though, was a most uncomfortable thing to watch, for it was scene of screaming terror as if invisible demons held him in a grip from which he could not escape. I do not wonder why such reports are not compiled and enthusiastically passed on. Yet, this state of soul, of mind, and of body is another aspect of our permanence — the permanent divorce from God, which say with some understatement is without joy, whose name is Hell.

But if

And if all that God made is good:

Then what are we to make of Hell, which is the utter absence of good?

The answer to this riddle goes to the foundation of the human creature. In order that we might be Divine, God endowed us with free will. This is the property which definitively marks all God's Divine creatures: the Holy Trinity has free will; all orders of angels have free will; and we ourselves have free will. This fact is attested by no less than the Arbiter of all:

Evil is no more nor less than the choice to pervert God's goodness. I have just offered a definition of evil — "the perversion of God's goodness." Nothing new is created. In fact, it is good and evil alone which must pass through the gateway of human consent tracing all the way back to Eden, where woman and man chose to depart from pure goodness, which is God. To be precise, they departed into a world where goodness is constantly being perverted. In a brilliant simplicity, we see that all apart from God is goodness perverted. And the life with God alone is good, which we call "the Kingdom of God."

I do not abandon the orthodoxy of a Last Judgment. NDEs were revealed to teach us an important and godly lesson: it is not true that "you only go around once." How often have you heard this said? And usually it is said on the occasion of grave sin.

What happens after the Judgment has been revealed. In any case, remember: when we die, we join God in eternity. You see, we step over the line into eternity. We no longer have chronology; we no longer have timelines. These were constructs created for our sakes. They are filters enabling us to cope with the overwhelming fullness of reality which surrounds us. For example, physicists tell us that we are able to perceive only .0035 percent of visible light. And it is light which enables us see anything. For God, the Last Judgment has "already happened" — all points of time, are present to Him simultaneously.

In revealing our permanence to us, God reminds us of the high dignity of our persons, which had been taught by the Psalmist:

Make no mistake about it: our home is Heaven. We were created with the Essence and in the Image of God, and like our Creator, the Logos, we are fully human and fully Divine. In a statement that is at once a horrible sentence pronounced and good news proclaimed upon the mountains, we shall never die.

I ministered to a man for a very long time who was tormented over the life he had led and his inability (he claimed) to give it up: the life of alcoholism and compulsive promiscuous sex. (Did you know that this was also St. Augustine's dilemma and the reason he declined baptism?) He came to me at one point and told that he was having a bad dream. In the dream he was sitting in a seedy bar in Newark, NJ. The pay phone kept ringing for him. He was told to come to the repair shop to pick up his Cadillac. But he could not leave the barroom, for an old, diseased prostitute held him and would not let him go.

"I have this same dream night after night after night," he told me in exhausted tones. "It means something. What does it mean?"

I told him, "That's no dream. No man has the same exact dream night after night. You are experiencing a Divine vision, a warning for the sake of your salvation. You have been granted a foretaste of the dark kingdom. And now you're receiving a wake-up call."

Sadly, he did not wake up. He would not rouse himself from the stupor of his sins.

Later, he said to me, still in his misery, "Well, anyway, it will soon be over, and I'll be released."

"Over?" I said. "Nothing could be further from the truth. Soon your sufferings will be greatly amplified. Soon you will see these horrors in 'Technicolor.' Now you see through a glass darkly, but after you die, face-to-face."

The question has never been whether there is life after death, but rather where. For it turns out that what we have wanted every day of lives, our daydreams, our desires, the cast of our mind, is what we will have unto the ages of ages. If we do not wake up, our eternity will be no different from that of the tormented man — a world of regrets; a world of lost hope; a world of of incurable diseases; a living eternal death.

But if your daydreams are filled with Divine light, if you just can't get your mind off of God giving thanks for the many blessings you have received, then your eternity will be flooded with His light and pristine and ever-fresh goodness.

Those who have requited God's kind of love in all its beautiful humility have united with God in His humble Heaven. And I love to quote the saint: "It is nothing but Heaven all the way to Heaven."

I say humble Heaven, where the saints abide whose thoughts and prayers continue to descend for our sakes; humble Heaven, where the angels who look upon the face of God continue to guide and protect us; humble Heaven, whose God lovingly numbers the hairs on our heads. And the gift of the Holy Spirit, which betokens God-with-us at every moment and forever. We marvel at Emmanuel. Some say it lasted thirty-three years! This Emmanuel will be every moment, in every place forever. Does not this represent the ultimate humbleness and solicitude of God?

How about the Friend Who never fails us? He stands right beside us, whether we are happy or sad, whether we have problems to solve or not. How about the Friend Who never fails.

And this is where we meet Him on the day of Pentecost — we who wandered East of Eden in our pridefulness, who are still dazed from the destruction of our towering pretensions at Babel, who continue to be separated, often at war, and speaking many tongues. Why, in our Gospel lesson we read that

.... that is, to kill Him. And finally they did kill Him, that He might show them the beauty of Divine descent and humility and lowliness. Beaten and stripped of every vestige of covering. No, there was no loin cloth. Humiliation beyond description of our Almighty God ..... that He might descend even further in His perfect humility and lowliness.

"Greater love has no one than this," Jesus said, "than to lay down one's life for his friends." And who are His friends? Well that answer is taught directly. In fact, the Risen Christ has a little seminar on this subject at the conclusion of St. John's Gospel (Jn 21:15-17). His friends (and all are invited) are those who choose to love with the same self-sacrificing agápe love with which He loved every day of our lives: to give His self-giving love or ..... to deny Him. You see, there's no neutral position. I suppose this why we are asked to focus on this Gospel next Sunday (Mt 10:32 ff.) "If you deny Me, then I will deny you." If we decline to take up our crosses in self-denying love, we can have no part in His Kingdom.

A parishioner at a local OCA church recently told me, "Father, that message your preach all the time? That's a hard sell."

I told him, "I didn't write the Gospels. I just read them. And they are unmistakable on this subject."

During our earthly journeys, we have been taught the power of this love. This love alone can save an irrevocably broken marriage perhaps rent by betrayals on the both sides. This love alone can heal our terribly disfigured children who rightly are filled with anger and resentment. This world can alone be saved by God's kind of love.

But who will deny themselves? Who will sacrifice all they have? To be this person, we must first raise ourselves up to our full stature. We must claim our birthright as children of God. We must act out of our oúsios as Divine beings. This is essence of Pentecost, the Giving of the Spirit.

Sr. Mary Anne and I had a disturbing discussion this morning about a young man and a young woman whose marriage is irrevocably broken and the children who are suffering. In past years, I have appealed to the nobility of the two — asking them to come to their full stature in the sight of their children. I have asked them to think on the higher things.

But with the general abandonment of God, many people ask me, "What higher things? "Whose higher things? .... yours, Father?" Without God, you see, we have no "angels of our better natures."

People today will usually choose for the gratification of their animal compulsions. I have even heard women tell me, "I'm going to show my children what freedom looks like!" I suppose she thought that she had said something very fine, had expressed an exalted sentiment. But all I could see was demons running rampant in a field of victory.

If One-ness with God is our eternal goal, then today we commemorate the foretaste of the Kingdom of Light, the Kingdom where, Jesus says, He and the Father are One. It is a foretaste of the fundamental decision for salvation. For the Holy Spirit cannot dwell midst our animal passions. We must turn penitent hearts toward God. This is the constant message of our Orthodox faith: to live lives in penitance, and in that light (and it is a light) to see the Kingdom. In that instant we will be filled with power and blessing, which we remember in our Feast today. And this is the connection between Pentecost and Holy Trinity Sunday.

So what exactly is that power that is given, what is that "rushing mighty Ruach from Heaven"? It is the power of Divine love. It is ours to have forever or ours to deny in a never-ending darkness.

Let us choose the light.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.   Amen.