The
passage I just read may sound more familiar than most, and the reason is that I
read the last six verses a month or so ago, when we spoke of the Jesuit priest,
scientist and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin; the passage was right up
Teilhard’s alley. After all, it was he
who concluded that we are all connected, bound with golden threads, and Paul speaks
of a Christ who holds all things together, is at the center of all of creation, and it's not hard to
conclude that what he and Teilhard are speaking of is one and the same. We are all linked in some mysterious way, and
according to Paul, that way is Christ.
As St. Patrick said, in his achingly beautiful Breastplate,
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
The
Celts, isolated away in their Irish fastness, preserved this ancient
understanding of a Christ-soaked universe, a creation shot-through and permeated
with Christ while elsewhere, the very Greco-Roman, neo-Platonic way of
understanding the divine slowly took hold.
An understanding that placed God away way up in the sky, impossibly, ineffably separate and apart from
us. The state of this God could be
summed up by the Omnis—omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent.
I
don't know if Teilhard knew the Breastplate—surely
he did—but he would have immediately understood, because it treads the same ground
as did his dazzling work. But I enjoy
imagining his response, his astonishment at this ancient pre-figuration, or
maybe he would have simply nodded in quiet recognition, saying “Exactly!”
Others
have intuited or postulated this connection . . . Carl Jung comes immediately
to mind. He believed that there is a
“collective unconscious,” a notion to which his one-time mentor Sigmund Freud reacted
with scorn. For Jung, the collective
unconscious explained the phenomenon he called synchronicity, which many of us
have experienced at one time or another.
I myself am not all that sensitive to it, but I've had the common experience
of knowing who it is on the phone before picking it up, especially when there's
a deep connection between the two of us.
But others are more open to it,
having the same dream on the same night as their loved ones, or dreaming about
things before they happen . . . in linear
time, at least. And once again I imagine
Teilhard reacting at this with delight: “Oh ho!
This Jung fellow, he is right! This
collective unconscious is transrational and
atemporal, beyond measurement and time, and I wonder . . . Who do we
know who fits that bill?” And this decades
before Sting decided to write a song about it.
The most recent sign that Paul, Patrick, Jung
and Teilhard weren't just whistling Dixie comes from Quantum Physics, of all
places, and is a result that irritated Albert Einstein so much he called it
“spooky action at a distance.” Quantum
theory says that if two particles are entangled, what you do to one has an
instantaneous effect on the other, even if it's on a rocket ship at the other
side of the universe. This, of course,
is what made Einsteins bust out in hives, because it seems to violate his
theory of Special Relativity by exceeding the speed of light. Just last year, however, physicists
definitively proved it to be true, which no doubt has the old boy rolling in
his grave. But once again, I picture the
ghost of Teilhard chortling in glee. Because it looks like we’re all connected, it looks like he was
right again . . .
But
we don't have to look at spooky action at a distance to see the connections
between us, or at least to sense them,
to see their effects. We are connected,
we are linked by all sorts of things,
all sorts of actions, all kinds of associations. When we eat an ice cream cone we are being
fed by a cow, nourished by the milk, just as if we were her calf. But that’s not all . . . are we not also
connected, are we not also dependent
upon the dairy farmer who milked her? And
for that matter, are we not connected to the grass that fed her, and through that to the sunlight
and water and nitrogen which made the grass grow? And through the farmer, we are connected—dependent,
really—on her parents, who gave her birth and nourished her? Thinking about it, I am
soon overwhelmed by trying to follow all the connections, and come to the
realization that this web is spread over the entire earth and all that is in
it.
But
wait . . . That's not all! There’s
another kind of connection we can talk about . . . Whenever we help someone,
whenever we do for someone, we are connected to them. Call it a connection of care, an intentional
connection of care. And these
connections have become deep in the 78 years of this congregation. Everyone we've helped, every organization
we've supported is connected in this way . . . And we can follow those
connections, if we like . . .
It
reminds me of that movie they trot out every Christmas . . . you know: It's a Wonderful
Life? It’s the one where Jimmy
Stewart’s character is given a chance to see what his hometown would be like if
he’d never have been born . . . and the brother he rescued from drowning is
long dead, and all the people on a ship he saves in the War die ‘cause he
wasn't there to rescue them. Uncle Billy
is a hopeless drunk, estranged from the family because Stewart’s character
isn't around to keep the Building and Loan going. And because there is no Building and Loan,
the entire town has become a hard place, no longer Bedford Falls but
Potterville, named after the evil industrialist who controls it.
A
lot of lives are influenced by Stewart’s character, in both obvious and
not-so-obvious ways. And I wonder: what would Greenhills be of like if this
church hadn't been around? Where would Joanna
Himes-Murphy be if S.O.U.L. Ministries wasn't there, if we hadn't been around to
help get it going, or support it with our donations? And what about all the folks we've given
rides to the store from Winton House?
We're connected to them, and through them it radiates out to their loved
ones and family. And Matthew 25 and
Habitat for Humanity, the list goes on.
All
this is not so we can pat ourselves smugly on the back, saying look what good
Christians we are, but it's simply to point out what a big hole would be left
in this community, and in Cincinnati as a whole, if we hadn’t been here. And our ministry rolls on, with new outreach
planned for the coming year And so in a
few minutes, as we prayerfully pledge for the coming year, I invite you to
think about the connections, both visible and invisible, that bind us to the
community and the whole world, and think about the vital role this church
plays. Amen.
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