"And how do we know this?" Carroll asked. "Because we ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which is the knowledge of mortality."

Carroll was preaching, in part, on this year's conference theme: "God's Unfinished Future: Why It Matters Now." Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori celebrated the Eucharist.

This year's gathering, offered by Trinity Church, runs through January 24.

Carroll, a theologian, was a Roman Catholic priest from 1969 to 1974 and was chaplain at Boston University. He is a novelist whose books have been compared by reviewers with the moral fiction of Graham Greene. His memoir, "An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us," received the National Book Award in 1996. He is a regular op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe newspaper and his most recent publications include his tenth novel, "Secret Father" (2005) and two works of nonfiction: "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History" (a bestseller) and "House of War" (2006), a history of the Pentagon.

In his sermon, Carroll said that the gospel reading (John 12:27-36) "has invited us to begin our learning with [the word] trouble."

"The astonished Christian intuition is that in telling the story of Jesus, we are telling the story of God," he said. "That story begins, of course, with the saga of creation."

He elaborated on the Book of Genesis saying that "in six days, God created Paradise" and that it was good because creation was "an overflowing of the Godhead."

"[Meaning] is as much a part of God as the word that I am speaking now to you is part of me," he said. "Indeed, creation is the word of God and in the beginning was the Word."

He equated the word of God to the church, the city, the continent, the earth, those in attendance.

Carroll referred to Shakespeare's King Lear "howling" at the death of his daughter, Cordelia, as "the human lament at death itself."

"All creatures assume that the creation as it is, is finished, except one: you . . . human beings," he said. "The eternal now of paradise was incompatible with human consciousness with its knowledge of the past memory and its knowledge of the future desire."

Carroll said the act of having eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge revealed that as long as there is death, "the human future is unfinished" and that in this knowledge Genesis affirms "that we are like God."

"This is the secret that for a time, Jesus kept from his friends," said Carroll. "Death, the secret that God's future is unfinished."

He said this knowledge makes us "howl" when we think of Iraq, Nairobi, New York City and "cities like it across the globe teeming with injustice" and the deaths of our daughters like Lear's daughter.

Carroll said that "there is no salvation outside of the secret. Jesus is the one way to a finished future."

He asked a series of questions including:

• Will you be left behind?
• What troubled Jesus?
• Why did he die like that?
• Why did he not return as we were sure he would?

"Christianity was born on these questions," he said.

"God has joined us in our grief to reveal that he has always been here," said Carroll.

To listen to Carroll's sermon in its entirety, visit Trinity Institute's website at:
http://www.trinitywallstreet.org/calendar/index.php?event_id=40240

The conference continues January 23 with the Rev. Barbara R. Rossing, professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and Jurgen Moltmann, emeritus professor of theology at Tübingen University in Tübingen, Germany.