Sermons:

• The Lord Our God is One…or Three?  John 16:12-15,  (see below)
  Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 by Janet in CNY
   

• Hold on to Hope,  Romans 5:1-5, by Rev. Dr. David Rogne                 
   

• Love Poured Out , Romans 5:1-11, by Rev. Randy Quinn    
   

• THE MYSTERY OF SUFFERING LOVE, Romans 5:1-5, by Rev. Rick Thompson
   

• Telling it Straight, Romans 5:1-5, Thomas Hall
   

• Go For It, Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, Thomas Hall
   

• God Almighty, Yet So Human, Illustration by Rev E.V. in England

Skit:

•  Trinity Sunday An opening Skit based on Abbott and Costello's “Who’s On First?" Skit by Rev. Charles A. Woodward

Memorial Day (USA) Resources:

• Remember And Join in Healing The World, 2 Sam. 1:1-4, 11-12, 17-27, by Kay Hereford Voorhees

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The Lord Our God is One…or Three?
John 16:12-15 Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
by Rev. Janet in CNY

The Proverbs passage says Wisdom was created before the earth was formed, before the mountains and the fields. Wisdom is usually portrayed as a feminine figure, from the Greek word Sophia. Some people equate this "Wisdom" with the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit is God, so it cannot be a created being. But if Wisdom IS a part of God, as it must be, because God did all the creating, and has all wisdom and knowledge, then wisdom is not a created being. See how twisted around these studies can be?!

One of my courses at TC3 this past semester was Astronomy. We learned about the unimaginable vastness of space…the emptiness of space…the innumerable stars that are there, and that many thousands of them have planets orbiting around them. Some of those planets may be able to sustain life much the same as our own. I enjoyed the course very much, but it raised many questions in my mind. Unfortunately, these are questions to which there is no available answer. Notice I said AVAILABLE answer. There are answers, but we won't get them until we set foot in heaven. Ralph Milton, author of the weekly edition of Rumors, spoke of stars this week. I quote:

My son Mark is a very scientific type who is deeply interested in astronomy. He does deep space photography, which involves freezing his backside on a high, dry mountaintop, while a computer attached to a telescope takes exposures that go on for hours and many nights in sequence. I admire the process, but don’t ask me to explain it. On his wall, Mark has a poster based on some pictures taken by the Hubble telescope. One frame shows the sky we see with the naked eye - the Big Dipper. In the middle of that Big Dipper a tiny section of seemingly blank sky, about a quarter inch square, is framed. That is then blown up to about a foot square, and it turns out to be full of stars. In the middle of that picture, again a quarter inch square is framed. That is then blown up to an even larger picture, and again, it is just full of stars. Mark also has a book, most of which is written in techie-talk. But there was one paragraph I understood. If you take a thimble full of sand, the grains of sand in that thimble would be approximately equal to the number of stars you can see with your naked eye. If you then filled up a wheelbarrow full of sand, that would represent about the number of stars you can see with modern telescopes. But if you then filled up boxcars full of that sand, and those boxcars went by at the rate of one every two minutes, and those boxcars went by for a week without stopping, that represents the number of stars in the known universe. I can’t get my head around that at all. And maybe it doesn’t prove anything. But for me it is a glorious symphony to the grandeur and mystery of God.

All that we know about these distant stars comes from looking at them through telescopes, analyzing the light rays they emit, and comparing them to things we know here in our own solar system. Since we see light that has been traveling many years to reach us, we are actually seeing the stars as they were years ago when that light actually left the star and began to move toward us. Scientists believe that light moves at a certain speed, therefore these stars are a certain number of years old, usually older than our own system which they believe to be 4.5 Billion years old. All the stars and solar systems came to be because in the emptiness of before space, there was an explosion that caused matter to spread out from the point of explosion in all directions, and that matter eventually gathered together into stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc. This all happened approximately 5 to 15 billion years ago.

Approximately, I say, because it is neither necessary nor possible to be more precise. And the space between stars is so large, they tell us the stars are thousands, even millions, of light years apart. A light year is the distance a ray of light can travel in one earth year, traveling at the speed of 186,000 miles per second. Do the math—in a year that comes to, let me see, 60 seconds time 60 minutes times 24 hours times 365 days, times 186,000…carry the 1, …hmmm … about a gazillion miles, give or take a few hundred yards. And here's another question: Where did the matter come from? Nobody knows. Scientists can't even agree if the matter was compressed into a spot the size of a period at the end of a sentence, or only compressed into a body the size of Jupiter, or maybe just compressed into a ball as big as our entire solar system.

Well, if scientists who make it their life's work to study this can't answer the questions, we're not going to answer them in our short discussion this morning! It is the same with the question of the trinity. We know certain things, but the subject is so vast, so far beyond our sight and grasp, that we cannot begin to answer the questions we have about it. Biblical scholars and theologians have discussed and argued and researched for almost two thousand years, and have not figured it out yet! I was discussing this week's scripture passages with some other pastors. Here are some of their comments: ? Wisdom/Sophia is but one way to talk about the activity of the divine in the world. [continue]