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 await us. 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 ousios / ούσιος) of God is touched with humanity. This fact is boldly underlined in our Creed: the Son is `omoousios (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 are "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 is fully God.

Yet, God is eternal. He is changeless. The Psalmist writes,

God is immutable. Indeed, the Father and the Son "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.

After centuries of debate the Great Synod of Moscow in 1667 forbade icons representing the Father and the Holy Spirit. They are not of the order of us. They cannot be represented by any human calculus or means. Yet, icons of the Son have been vouchsafed forever by the Second Council of Nicaea (787) precisely because of the Son's human nature.

We say the very least when we observe that God is Permanent. But, we stretch to the limits of our human vocabulary to say these words: we are permanent, too. We are the only creatures (whom we can say with certainty) that have no end.

We shall be judged. And whatever the outcome, we shall have no end.

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 in 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 highly credible scientists. But no matter who they were, the things they reported were remarkably linear.

I myself had the privilege of meeting a man who lived in a shack in the New York dairy country. He was mostly isolated from the culture. He had no television and was semi-literate. I was his neighbor working as a farmhand during those years. I would drop by to help him repair cars on Saturday afternoons. 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.

Between five to ten percent of all Americans report having experienced NDEs. As I say, these experiences 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 remember 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 one of screaming terror as if 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, 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 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, all orders of angels, and ourselves. 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. 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. In a brilliant simplicity, we see that all apart from God is evil. And the life with God alone is good, which we call "the Kingdom of God."

In this revelation is revealed the high dignity of our persons.

Make no mistake about it: our home is Heaven. We were created in the Image of God, and like our Creator, the Logos, we are fully human and fully Divine. In a statement that is both a horrible sentence pronounced and good news proclaimed upon the mountains, we shall never die. 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, the sum of all our desires and daydreams, is what we will have unto ages of ages: a world of light, of pristine and ever-fresh goodness or a world of loss: of lost chances, of incurable diseases, and of eternal death.

Those who wanted to "be in touch with their inner animal" have retained their hoggish minds in a grotesque eternity where the decency they mocked is nowhere to be found. And those who have requited God's kind of love in all its beautiful humility have united with God in His humble Heaven.

I say humble Heaven, where the saints abide whose thoughts and prayers continue to descend for our sakes, where the angels who look upon the face of God continue to guide and protect us, and whose God lovingly numbers the hairs on our heads.

And this is where we meet Him on the day of Pentecost — we who wander 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 languages. We hear in our Gospel lesson 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.

"Greater love has no one than this," Jesus said, "than to lay down one's life for his friends." And who are His friends? His friends, perhaps all of us, are those who choose to love with the same self-sacrificing agápe love with which He loved, as Peter would learn from the Risen Christ in this same Gospel (Jn 21:15-17). This is the fundamental choice: to requite His self-giving love or to deny Him.

During our earthly journeys, we have been taught the power of this love. For it alone can save an irrevocably broken marriage, can heal our terribly disfigured children, can save the world.

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. And this is essence of Pentecost, the Giving of the Spirit.

If One-ness with God is our eternal goal, then today we commemorate the foretaste of that Unity. It is a foretaste of the fundamental decision for salvation. For the Holy Spirit cannot dwell midst our vile passions. We must turn penitent hearts toward God. And 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.

And 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 and ever or ours to deny in a never-ending darkness.

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