All of Creation, at the morning of the earth and this afternoon, is spectacular in its beauty from outer space to details beheld through a magnifying glass. Yet, crowning all is the fact that the Creator, the Lógos, Who made all (in some measure) is us, and We are Him. As we wade into these deep waters, more profound truths await us. Our changeless God is of Three distinct 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.

As we contemplated last week, these facts tore the world apart in the fourth century with the majority believing that the Father and the Son were merely "similar in essence" (homoioúsios), not the same. The particularity of the Person of the Son is expressed with another Greek word: `υπόστασις / hypóstasis. But this Union of Two in no way subtracts from the Fullness of the Son's constituent participation in the Holy Trinity. The Son is fully human and fully God.

It would be a blessing far beyond our deserving if God came to dwell amongst us for a few decades, as in fact He did. 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 belong to God forever — 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:

The world will not be part of this happy union, but those of us who know and love God will be part of this. Every minute of every day all of our lives and forever, we belong to God. God is eternal; therefore, we are eternal. He is changelesss; therefore we are changeless (in our essence). 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 shall all live forever.

By 1980 this sobering truth was revealed to us, not as a theological proposition but as an inductively verifiable fact. For reasons known only to God, sometime in the 1960s, Cardiac Pulmonary Resuscitation (better known as CPR) appeared and quickly became a technique in every First Responder's "tool kit." Before CPR, many drownings and heart attacks resulted in death. Following CPR, we began meeting thousands and then millions of people — among them credible scientists — who "came back" from the dead, reporting what we now call Near-death Experiences. And their reports were remarkably linear.

Now, in 1974, I had a Divine appointment. I met a man who lived in a shack in in Upstate New York dairy country mostly isolated from the general culture. He had no television and was semi-literate. I lived on a farm nearby, and on Saturday afternoons I would drop by and help him repair cars. Over time, a friendship took root between us. Then, on a day, he said to me, "I died once, ya know." I stopped what I was doing, giving him all of my attention, and he confided the details: the room, the window, the corridor, the joy-endowing white light which surrounded him and filled him. "Oh! I was never so happy in my life," he said. The rest of the details, I suppose everybody knows by now. They have been published in countless books, become the stuff of radio interviews, and have even occasioned television "specials." The important point here is that he had not read or heard or seen any of these accounts. For in 1974 the first books on Near-death Experiences were yet to appear. Needless to say, in 1974 there were no personal computers, and the first search engine was still twenty years off.

You can imagine how stunned I was, therefore, when years later I read the same, precise accounts he had related to me. Today, between five to ten percent of all Americans report having had a Near-death Experience. You see, the other shoe had dropped. I received confirmation that I had indeed been called to a Divine appointment on that Saturday afternoon. As I say, these experiences usually include the detail of "unspeakable joy." But this is one side of the story, the side of the story that we cannot wait to share: "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet .... that proclaim salvation" (Isa 52:7).

But my Divine appointment was to have an additional chapter. Many years later, I took a course at the Yale University School of Nursing, which systematically studied death and dying. By their consent dying people were recorded day-after-day by hidden cameras. One case I will never forget. An Evangelical pastor signed up for the program because he wanted the world to see a man of God being congratulated as he was received into Heaven. The facts of his death, though, were a most uncomfortable thing to watch. For it was a 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 circulated. Yet, this state of soul, of mind, and of body is yet another aspect of our permanence — the permanent divorce from God.

But if

And if all that God has made is good .... (Gen 1:31), then what are we to make of Hell, which is the utter absence of God and of goodness?

The answer to this riddle goes to the elements of God's intelligent creatures — the Angels and Man. In order that these creatures might be Divine, God endowed them with the capacity to choose: to choose for Him or not, which we call free will.

Evil is no more nor less than the choice to pervert God's goodness. You know what I mean: something good and holy and splendid has been presented to you, and you make a mockery of it. Nothing new has been created. Rather, what has been created has been perverted.

One of God's properties is simplicity, and in that simplicity, we say that the choice for godliness is a choice for goodness, and the choice for the ungodly is always a choice for evil or perversion. This good life with God we call "the Kingdom of Heaven."

I do not abandon the orthodoxy of a Last Judgment. Near-death Experiences were revealed to teach us an important and godly lesson: it is not true that "you only go around once", often said as a pretext for committing grave sin. "It will all be over soon. You might as well have a good time."

Remember, when we die, we shall join God in eternity. We shall no longer have chronology. We shall no longer have timelines. These reductive filters enable us to cope with the overwhelming fullness of the Creation. Did you know that we humans have the capacity to perceive only .0035 percent of visible light. You know what visible light is .... visible light is that thing which enables to have perception. Without visible light we are plunged in deep darkness. One three-thousandeth of one percent. That is all we see. Why that's almost nothing! The fact is, we live in a box almost completely isolated from the "reality." If reality is the fullness of everything around us, we are able to perceive one three-thousandeth of one percent of that reality.

In the widest frame, which is God's view, the Last Judgment has already occurred. When we die, the Last Judgment has already occurred. God holds all points of time are present to God simultaneously, the Alpha and the Omega simultaneously.

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

Wow.

The day before my ordination to the priesthood, my bishop summoned me to his office. He took my hands, and he said, "These hands will soon participate in the Lord becoming Present. This is a holy honor that He has not even granted to the Angels." Make no mistake about it: our true home is Heaven. We were created in the Image of God and with the Essence of God. And like our Creator, the Lógos, we are fully human and fully Divine. In a statement that is at once most horrible and good news proclaimed upon the mountaintops: We shall never die! How we hear that sentence will all depend on how we have lived our lives.

I ministered to a man for many years who was tormented both by the sordid life he had led and his inability to stop living it. He would often strike out violently in drunken rages especially in the middle of the night. His moods were a roller coaster. Then, one day, while sober, he told that he was having the same bad dream night after night. In this dream he sat in a run-down bar in a disreputable neighborhood of Newark, NJ. The pay phone kept ringing telling him to pick up his Cadillac from the dealer. But he could not leave, for an old, diseased prostitute somehow had trapped him there. He concluded in exhausting tones, "Night after night, the same dream. What does it mean? It must mean something!"

Now, I had known this man for decades, known his selfishness, his neglect of family, his chronic adultery, his extreme materialism, and his passive rejection of God. I told him, "That's no dream. That's a Divine warning. You are being given a great gift: a foretaste of the dark kingdom."

He reacted violently saying, "You're crazy!" And he stormed off.

I saw him weeks later in a depressed state. He said, "Well, in any case, the suffering will all be over when I die."

"Over?" I replied. "The sufferings will have only begun."

For all of us, the question of eternal life has never been whether but rather where. And what determines the quality of life after death is our desire. Our desire determines everything. For it turns out that what we have desired every minute and day of our lives — where our daydreams trend, what we are always thinking about — is what we shall have in the end, or better said, what we shall be in the end. For our desires, whether godly or ungodly, are inextricably tied up with the state of our souls. In that sense we will be our Final Judge. And God will ensure that each man and woman will receive what he has always wanted, quite literally, the sum total of all his or her desires.

Those of us who have requited God's kind of love in all of its beautiful humility shall be with God in His humble Heaven. And I love to quote the Western saint who said, "It is nothing but Heaven all the way to Heaven." Saintly life is heavenly life in its joy and abundence. 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, betokening God-with-us at every moment and forever. We marvel at Emmanuel (God-with-us). Some say God dwelt with us for thirty-three years! Yet, this God-with-us will be felt every moment in every place forever. Does not this represent the extreme of God's humility and solicitude?

And this is where we meet Him on the Feast 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

.... and kill Him. And He, that He might display the beauty of Divine descent and humility and lowliness, was beaten and stripped of every vestige of any kind of covering. No, there was no loin cloth, for utter abasement was the goal of the Crucifixion, that He might descend to the final and utmost humiliation.

"Greater love has no one than this," Jesus said, "than to lay down one's life for his friends." And who are His friends? The answer is disclosed in the Passion accounts of the Gospels: almost no one. He was the Friend, the abandoned and nearly alone and naked Friend and hanging on a Cross.

For God's Nature, as we contemplate the Trinity on this eighth Sunday after Easter, is love. Love is the stuff in which the Three Persons of God cohere. And a constituent element of this Divine Fellowship (as we have said) is human. That God should empty Himself (kenósis) of His Divinity in order to dwell with man (Phil 2:7) is a condescension too far to contemplate. That He should really and truly lay down His life for us is a condescension we shall never comprehend. And to admit us into the Holy Trinity, who are made of dust and fall far beneath the Triune God in every respect is a mind-bending condescension. Yet, as St. John Chrysostom has written, every thought of the Most High God that entertains lowly man is profoundly condescending, in profoundly humbling to Almighty God. He must stoop way down to commit this senseless act of love.

It follows that we who are created to be God are enjoined to choose for this Self-sacrificing love. It further follows that, should we decline to take up our crosses, which is the choice for His kind of love, we shall have no part in His Kingdom.

But who among us will deny him- or herself? 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 the essence of Pentecost. For without God, we have no "angels of our better natures." We have only our animal desires and the so-called addictions (which is the medicalized word for possession) which completes our descent. Ironic that God should condescend to become human to show us the way to the Kingdom of Heaven and that we should choose instead to descend into further animality. It is devilish choice writ large upon our culture: of legalized drugs, legalized pornography, mainstreaming perversion, and everywhere treachery?

If One-ness with God is the reason we were born, then let us who embrace this most wonderful gift commemorate the foretaste of the Kingdom of Light, the Kingdom where, Jesus says, He and the Father are One. For the Holy Spirit, of His Own Nature, cannot but depart from stinking animality. We must first turn our hearts, cleansed by penitence, toward God and depart from a life ruled by our basest desires. This is the constant message of our Orthodox faith: to live lives of penitence, and with our eyes now opened see the Kingdom of God. In that instant we will be filled with power and blessing, which we commemorate on this great feast. And here is the intersection between Pentecost and Holy Trinity Sunday.

So exactly what is that power from on high? What is that rushing mighty Ruach from Heaven? It is the power of Divine love. For when God requires a shake-up to reorder our lives, instantly there will be a shake-up. For He dearly wishes that none should perish into a never-ending darkness and vacancy.

Let us, therefore, choose the Light. Let us choose Life with God. Let us embrace the God Who took on human form that He might be embraced. For in those arms we see that He is the Son of Man and the King of the Universe.

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