Early yesterday morning I saw a perfect rainbow. The colors were vibrant, and its huge arc was completely visible from pot of gold to pot of gold. What made it unique was that it appeared against a perfectly blue cloudless sky, and there was no sight of rain or storm anywhere. It was so beautiful and moving, that I even woke Paulette so she could see it, and she was happy that I had. While the rainbow is often viewed narrowly as a promise from God to never again flood the earth, the vision that morning moved me to see it as a symbol of all of God’s promises.

Rainbows are created when light is refracted in little rain drops, each acting as a little prism. White light is a mix of all the colors, but when light is refracted, different wavelengths are refracted different amounts so that the different colors appear; hence the colors of the rainbow are ordered by their wavelengths. For this and some other purposes it is best to think of light as a wave, but this presents problems. Waves require a medium; for example, the medium for the waves forming a ripple in a pond is water, and the medium for sound waves is air. For a long time scientists fruitlessly searched for a mysterious medium, called the ether, to carry light waves until the idea was put to rest. Another problem with waves is that they fail to explain the photo-electric effect; that is, when light hits certain materials, electrons are released. In 1905 Einstein wrote a paper in which he showed that instead of viewing light as a wave, the effect could be explained by viewing light as discrete quantized packets, called photons. It was for this paper that Einstein received the Nobel Prize and not for his work on relativity. The upshot is that scientists view light as both a wave and as a beam of particles. There is even an experiment, called the double slit diffraction experiment, which shows that light has both a wave and a particle nature and that these are inseparable. If this seems a little over your head, welcome to the club.

We as Christians have a similar situation; we believe in a Triune God. That is, we believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and we believe that they are very different forms of the One God. Probably the closest scriptural reference to this is Matthew 28:19, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Like the dual nature of light, this can be hard to understand, especially for new Christians. The early Church had similar problems and Constantine called the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) to study the matter. We recite the resulting Nicene Creed on many Sundays during the year. Even though hard to understand, the Triune God gives us more ways to come closer to Him.

By the way, yesterday in viewing the rainbow, I envisioned the pots of gold as God’s unconditional love for YOU and me.

Jim