As we were reminded in our service for the blessing of water this morning, the world began in nothingness, and the One Who Alone Is Being, I AM, conferred being on all things. The world began in chaos, an increate void, and the One Who Alone is Order set it into order. Not permanently, not imperishably, but temporarily.
You know, one of the objections to the Big Bang Theory by editors of the journals Science and Nature was this is was religion, not science. The Theory held that the laws of physics were not eternal but rather temporary and provisional. It held that at the conclusion of the world, they would be no more. When I was at Bell Labs, my boss' boss, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, told me that he regarded the opening chapter of Genesis to be a precise albeit poetic depiction of the Big Bang.
Not permanently, not imperishably, but temporarily. For the world constantly tends toward its primordial beginnings which is chaos. Our well-ordered households naturally return to disorder if we will let them. The Sisters are only too aware of this as they labor tirelessly to ensure the Hermitage is an orderly and holy place. Our cleaned and detailed automobiles return to chaos and ruin if we will let them. Quantum mechanics must reckon with the fact that there are more disordered states of molecules than ordered states. And in classical physics, centuries earlier, Newton wrote that every random event contributes to the disorder of the universe. This was no peripheral thing but lies at the heart of classical physics encoded as one the laws of thermodynamics.
Make no mistake about it: chaos is built into the design of our universe .... we might add, after the fall from grace. Disorder is its master trend and theme. Disharmony is its natural music. And everything created will decay. And dust covers all. And what is dust? Dust is all that remains of everything ever created.
The Hermitage depends upon this. Without this decay in the form of our compost, our farm would fail. Every week, we bring 1,000 pounds of discarded marlin, tuna, albacore, wahoo, and salmon into our organic farm .... at least what remains after they have been trimmed. And magically it disappears along with ground up trees, grasses, and fruits, into a chocolate-colored and fragrant prima materia: compost, which is always the same no matter what went into it. 52,000 pounds a year of Pacific, deep-sea fish (by-product) .... and it disappears, bones and all, into the same, pleasant, rich soil. Amazing!
An idea which has come to dominate in our time is that this is our fate. We come into the world as new creations, we live, we die, we rot, and we disappear. But this, I emphatically say, is not true. And by now, we ought to know better. For during the 1970s CPR was taught everywhere, and those who were resuscitated, reported the same experience: the room or corridor, the door or window, the brilliant white light, the feeling of unspeakable happiness.
In fact, a database has been compiled. By now, I suppose it has recorded millions of cases. But perhaps this database contains only the happy cases. That is, it includes only the cases that have matched the general pattern. And the unhappy cases have been left unrecorded. It turns out that life after death is no longer a belief limited to religion. It is a scientific fact.
As a teenager, I befriended an old man who, when we established a relationship of trust, confided that he had returned from death .... I should add, before the first accounts of "after death" or "near death" experiences began coming into the general culture. He was nearly illiterate and lived an isolated existence in Upstate New York in a little shack. I would help him repair cars. He dug a large trench in the earth. This was his lift. He was, as we say, out of touch with the surrounding world. I suppose that it what attracted me to him. As you can imagine, I was astonished when the story he told me was the precisely the same story now told by thousands of people collected in many books.
I should also mention that years later, when I took a course at Yale studying death and dying, I watched videos of an assortment of people dying but in particular of one man, who was an Evangelical preacher. He wanted people to see him go into Heaven. But this movie, you see, had a surprise ending. For when the time came, he went screaming to his death, reporting the attack of demons.
In either case, the point is made: God's human creatures are permanent. And the many people who have received visitors from the greater life will tell you that their bodies are substantial and pleasing to the eye. One of the wisest spiritual guides I ever had told me, "We will be resurrected in all of our beauty .... whatever that may mean."
No accounts have come down to us of "near death" or "after death" experiences from before the Conception and Nativity of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ. We do know and believe that He was born among the dead and dying — those He had created whom He loved — and He breathed Divine life into them by virtue of His Presence in the Created Order. He was born into the blackest of nights, and He kindled a Divine spark which spread over every field, forest, mountain, and sea, which we celebrate here on the Feast of the Epiphany. He was born among the lost, the muddled, and the possessed and He called them into the path of good and right and onward to the Kingdom of God healing them that they might follow this path. Why, our very time is organized around around Him: before Him: B.C. and after Him: A.D.
Before He came, man was a pathetic, hobbling creature, given over to bestial urges and incapable of understanding even the Presence of the Creator. But with Him and after Him, humanity was restored to the noble lineaments of the original creation — God's blueprint reclaimed, the portrait of mankind restored, (as St. Athanasius has said). And we rightly sing each Christmas, "and the soul felt its worth."
At His birth, mysterious kings from the East, representing the highest powers of human knowledge and discernment, journeyed 800 miles laying down rare and splendid gifts before Him, that they might behold His Divine Countenance. And at His death, a demi-king, representing an emperor, uttered these extraordinary words:
| "Behold! The Man!" (Jn 19:5) |
No man like this ever before, no man like this ever after. The full stature of man!
As St. John the Evangelist remembered,
| Then Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. (Jn 19:5) |
Was the crown of thorns and the robe of costly purple intended to mock? Then this is proof of the stuttering, stammering incapacities of man, for no crown on earth could attain such matchless beauty as the King of the Universe evincing unimaginable nobility, stood in a silence which filled the angels with awe, stooping that He might prop up His beloved human creatures. Is not this magnificence itself .... and far beyond magnificence?
"Behold!" Here is the human soul and mind in its fullness — coming to full stature (Eph 4:15), stretched out upon a Divine frame revealed from on High at His Baptism: God-reduced-to-man, man-become-God, with the consent of the Father: "This is My Beloved Son, in Whom I Am well pleased," sanctioned by the Holy Spirit: "the Spirit of God descending like a dove" and displayed by Him Who Sits at the Right-hand of the Father, taking a humble place among His fickle and dangerous human creatures.
Here is the Creator standing once again before chaos as in Genesis, but this time it is a moral chaos. A nothingness of dispicable life. It is the chaos of the lost. Icons of His Baptism unfailingly depict His mastery over the elements with symbolic creatures in the water:
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The sea saw it and fled;
Jordan turned back .... The mountains skipped like rams, The little hills like lambs. What ails you, O sea, that you fled? O Jordan, that you turned back? .... Tremble, O earth, at the Presence of the Lord, (Ps 114/113:3-7) |
But this time, He has come not to create the world anew, but to redeem it .... which includes pruning or removal lest disease and fungus spread (Jn 15:2). Icons usually include an ax laying on Jordan's shore signifying that
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.... even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees.
Therefore every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut own and thrown into the fire. (Mt 3:10) |
Elsewhere, He will gather His wheat, but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire (Mt 3:12). Elsewhere, the angels will separate the bad fish from the good, the wicked from the just (Mt 13:48-49).
This time He calls His Creation to Divine life .... even the most lost as we have seen in the tribal lands of Gad. For everyone, He goes to prepare a place in the Kingdom of God. He has opened the way ahead to reunion with the Father. This is His "New Creation" which is a moral and spiritual renovation of the world. It appears to us in the form of a crossroads. "Two ways there are," the Apostles would write in their "Teachings." No choice could be more fundamental or consequential: Will you choose imperishable light and life and happiness, or will you choose unending Pandemonium, the chaos of Hell?
"Behold, the man!" He is the Master of the Universe portrayed in human form: our Exemplar, all that we could ever hope to be. He tells us that we share the same Father. He tell us that He is our Elder Brother come to bring us home. But will we go? We must leave off life among hogs. We must sever our attachments to the culture of death. And He awaits our decision. But He will not wait forever.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.