Questions to Ponder

PROPERS:          PROPER 12, YEAR C  

TEXT:                COLOSSIANS 1:15-28; LUKE 10:38-42

PREACHED AT ST. PAUL’S CHAPEL, MAGNOLIA SPRINGS, ON SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2022.

 

ONE SENTENCE:        We proclaim a God that is the God of all creation.

 

            In 1953, an English evangelical named John Bertram Phillips published a book that was unlike others he had written.  He had been known as a biblical translator and had published several works of that type.

 

            But in 1953 he published something different – a book to address the world that emerged after World War II. The post-war world was more complex.  Would the old-time religion speak to the complexity?

 

            The book he published that year was entitled Your God is Too Small.  I assume it sought to speak to that more complex world, offering spiritual solutions for that new era.

 

            I think he could not begin to fathom the questions we have today.

 

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            This past week as I exercised at the Daphne YMCA, I did what I frequently do – I listened to a Fresh Air episode.  That is an NPR podcast that originates at the public radio station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

 

            The episode was from 2011, and it featured the physicist and mathematician Brian Greene, a professor at Columbia University.  He spoke about the complexity of creation, and the challenges posed by physics, as explained by Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and the relatively new developments associated with quantum physics.

 

            The two – physics and quantum physics – do not agree.  Physics tell us about how large bodies act in space, and quantum physics describe how the subatomic world functions.  But they conflict is significant ways.

 

            Brian Greene and other scholars are seeking a unified theory which will explain both.  It goes well beyond my ability to understand or explain. I do know, however, that what the James Webb space telescope is showing us puts this subject on the front burner.

 

            Brian Greene was seeking to explain possible ways of viewing creation. He spoke of a multiverse, and various theories about that very complex subject.  He likened our universe to a loaf of bread, representing one slice in that loaf. But, he said, that there may be other universes – like other slices of bread – existing within the entirety of creation.

 

            Other worlds might exist at the same time and in the same space as ours. It boggles the mind. Like J.B. Phillips said, our God may be too small. As St. Paul wrote in his First Letter to the Corinthians, we see through a glass darkly.

 

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            St. Paul wrote more, too, this time to the Church in Colossae:

 

Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers-- all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

 

            The theories that I mention, but do not endorse, today challenge our understanding of the cosmos. Perhaps just like Copernicus or Galileo.  Today’s notions must seem radical to us.  We wonder like Nicodemus: “How can this be?”

 

            Well, like a story I heard from a law student at Ole Miss, “Maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t.” But we should be mindful of this: Jesus posed a whole new way of viewing the world. Jesus told Nicodemus that we “must be born again.” Paul proposed a radical notion about the roots of life. The apostle John proclaimed that God makes all things new. And what could be more radical than rising from the dead?

 

            Is our God too small?  Maybe the context in which we place God is, indeed, too small.  Whatever the truth about creation, we proclaim a God who created it, a God who sustains it, and a God who will ultimately bring it to completion.

 

            It behooves us to sit like Mary at the feet of the master, and be open to the new creation he brings.