10-19-23

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
October 19, 2023
This Sunday, we are going to play around with one of the best-known texts in the Bible, yet one that remains full of new life and new insight. I am speaking of John 3:16, the passage that begins with those well-used words, “For God so loved the world…” As I have said before and will mention again on Sunday, the Greek word we translate as “world” speaks to something a bit larger. The Greek word is kosmon (κόσμον), which is a derivative of the word kosmos, from which we get our English word: cosmos. People my age and older will remember Carl Sagan, who was best known for the line “billions and billions" when referring to the stars. Of course, if he were speaking today, he might need to adjust and say, “Trillions and trillions.” In fact, some say there might be as many as 200 sextillion (which is a billion trillion) stars. Sagan was also the one to introduce many of us to the notion of the cosmos, as it was not only the title of a book he wrote but also a series on PBS in the 1980s. The word cosmos, which really describes all the pieces of an ordered system, is much greater than simply saying “the world.” Though first-century people had a very limited understanding of what was meant by the cosmos, the use of that word was not entirely geocentric (earth-centered) and definitely not human-centered, as we have so often wanted. The church’s censoring of Galileo was, in part, its attempt to keep the earth and human beings at the center of God’s attention. Yet some of that narrowness comes from a very limited understanding of love. Too often, people have perceived God’s love as a finite resource that has them defining narrowly who a worthy recipient might be. Maybe I’m wrong, but the scholar poet who wrote the preface to John’s Gospel, which included the language of the Eternal Word taking on flesh and living among us, appears to magically and beautifully magnify that idea by speaking of a love that ventured into the world as the same love that continues to love even the furthest regions of the universe. This love, according to the first companion letter of John, is inescapably tied to God, for God is love (I John 4). And if God is love, then love is eternal. Of course, if that is true, then the idea of such a love embracing the entire cosmos and everything within it is pretty easy-peasy for the One who is the Source of that love.

Good and Gracious God, you are beyond any measurement, outside any attempt to define or delineate. And any gift you choose to share, including your love, will reflect who you are. In our insecurities and our incapacity to comprehend, we find comfort in shaping you in our own likeness. In doing so, we have depicted you as one who is not capable of transforming the world. In faith, let us release you from this narrow vision for the purpose of glimpsing what was never restrained by our vision in the first place. Amen.