The Word, the logos, became flesh—was
enfleshed, as we sometimes say—and came to live around here. Right here, among us, the denizens of
Greenhills, Ohio, USA, the World, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the
universe. But it wasn’t new to the universe, to the cosmos, not by a long shot.
It was there all along, in the beginning,
we just couldn’t see
it. In fact, it was there in the beginning with God, and we all know that was a
long, long time ago. What if our spirits were to take wing like time-traveling
doves, and fly back through time to substantiate this claim, that the Logos was
there in the beginning, maybe we stop at the rise of us, of Homo sapiens 200,000 years
ago, we stop and look around with our spirit-sense, and yup! There it is, right
there where John claims it is . . . and once again we take flight, slipping
through the air, passing through time like smoke through leaves, and around us
we catch fleeting glimpses, and everything of course is running backwards, a
great cloud coalesces around a fiery point and a while-hot ball emerges out of
the sea, and we come to realize we are looking at the meteor that killed the
dinosaurs, and sure enough, there they are, thundering around the plains and
through the jungles and seas . . . we alight for a moment, and dodging a
Stegosaur, we determine the presence of the Word; and how are we doing that,
you might ask, how are we so sure the Word is present wherever we alight? Well,
I can only say that like pertains to like, that our spirits are of the same
stuff—not matter, you understand, but the same . . . essence—as the Word, we
vibrate on the same frequency, a frequency far too subtle to detect with any
detector we’ve
ever invented, and just as birds recognize other birds, trees detect other
trees and rocks other rocks, our spirits, our divine sparks register the spark, in fact our
spirits just barely resist dancing a little jig in its presence, like the one
John the Baptist does in Elizabeth’ womb, when his spirit recognizes the incarnate Word.
Anyway. Our spirits
flutter back through time, dodging flying reptiles, batting away giant
mosquitos—wouldn’t you just know that they’d
be able to see us?—and dive into a sea teeming with fish and then—as the age
gets younger—no longer fish but arthropods, trilobites, then progressively
simpler life forms, swimming in that primordial soup, until zap! a blinding light that
would sear retinas, if our spirits had
retinas, and behold! The first living thing,
and our spirits immediately feel the Word, coiling around and within the
organism like an all-pervading serpent, and once again our spirits are off,
back through the eons, and though we are at a frequency much more subtle than
the material world coming into being around us, we still dodge and
metaphysically wince when volcanoes belch up underneath, or when continents
crunch together like ponderous bumper cars. Our spirits know they cannot be harmed,
but old habits die hard. And through it all, like a background weave, like a
pulsing electric ligament, winds the Word.
We suppose, though our
spirits’ adventures, that Paul was correct
when he wrote that in Christ all things are held together, because our
spirits—reporting back to our hearts—tell us that the Word, the one that was
enfleshed, pervades everything,
and as they keep voyaging back though time, things get more and more
dodgy—thank God our
flesh is not there—and they sense that the Word is in everything and everything
is in the Word . . . and now the Earth is a fiery ball, we’ve seen it go from
cool and green and ocean-covered to molten red, as if heated in a cosmic forge,
and now it’s hurtling through space, racing around a sullen sun, and it comes
apart before our spiritual eyes, back into its constituent pieces, the loose
rock and space dust it was before centripetal force coalesced it, and still the
Word is there, and it is becoming apparent that John was just a bit
conservative, a bit off
in his metaphor-shifting. He likened the Word to light, the light of the world,
as a matter of fact, and it’s a metaphor that certainly had legs, it’s lasted
to this day . . . light, that allows us to see, that illuminates dark corners,
that becomes associated with truth, and those dark corners? Why they’re always
associated with false,
and everybody knows
that false is wrong, it’s bad,
and so things that are dark must be that way, no? The night—the life-giving
darkness, when plants respire, when people are refreshed by sleep—the night must be bad
. . . at night, with the glittery stars and garish, silver moon . . . the
twinkling stars that were to the ancients holes in the firmament, or to the
Aztecs, demons held back only by sacrifice . . . the poetry of John’s prolog
didn’t create this
false dualism, but it certainly helped it perpetuate . . .
But what if we think of
this light as what physics has revealed it to be? What if we think of it as energy, as streams of
photons . . . the light of the Word, the light that is the Word, powers the world, some—like
theologian Father Bruno Barnhart—say it has powered the whole enterprise in the
West, in Europe and the Americas, first the flowering of society and
educational institutions under the church, and then as science and secular
rationality, all powered by what Father Bruno calls the Christ Quantum, that
bursting of energy and creativity release when the Word became flesh. And what
do we know now about light? Is it not both wave and particle? Is not the
metaphor John wrote even sharper, even more apt
today? If light is both-and, so is the Word, who was both with God, separate from God,
and at the same time, identical
with God, the same as
God . . . light from light, light as
light: two natures, God and not-God, all at once.
But our wandering
spirits are further back than that, by some 5 billion years or so, and the
weight of the intervening millennia grows heavy, and now there is only our sun,
which grows smaller and smaller even as we watch, until it is no more, and we
are suspended in the void, and here’s the thing: it is a void, it is empty of matter, but not of the Word, not of the
Christ . . . what? Christ Quantum as Father Bruno would say? Christ Omega, as
Teilhard de Chardin would put it? Perhaps Word is the best we can do . . . but
it’s not Word as we conceive of it today, not a static thing that lies there on
the page, nor is it an assembly of characters that points to an object—or
objects—in the so-called “real” world . . . it is a dynamic presence, always has been, always will be, always changing,
always vital, always new.
Problem is, we often do
not conceive of it that way, everybody kmows
what the word of God is, it’s this book right here, written down anywhere from
two to three thousand years ago, argued about by Roman Catholics and then Protestants and Catholics,
finally settled as to its contents by 70 CE in the former case and 1500 CE in
the latter, and here it is, you can hold it in your hand, see? Certainly not a
part of us, certainly not dynamic in any way, and if it was made flesh, as our
passage would have it, it certainly isn’t that way now . . .
And our spirits have accelerated in their flight
. . . ten billion years ago, twelve . . . we see the accretion and scattering
of whole constellations under gravity’s inexorable weight, and still there is
the Word, wound through and around everything, all the nascent stars and wobbly
solar systems . . . and are there other life-systems to which this
Christ-Principle, this powering and empowering evolutionary engine is central?
It is not for us to know at this time, but someday perhaps we will . . .
Fifteen billion years
ago, sixteen . . . things are getting packed, now, much more compact, and we
are swept along toward a discernible center, and galaxies and interstellar dust
are zooming at super-hyper-dooper-sonic speeds towards that center, and right
before the crash we close our metaphysical eyes, and . . . we are back in the
present: I suppose there are some places—or rather, some times—even our spirit selves
cannot penetrate, and if ever there was such a space-time, the Big Bang would
be it. But John assures us—and I have to take his Word for it—that the Word was
there in the beginning, and that implies even before the Bang, and that everything was created through the Word, everything
was created in the
Word, and that Word was there when it all happened, in the beginning, and that
means before the
Big Bang when literally God only knows what was there, or even if there was a there.
The Cosmos burst into
being with a Bang . . . all of a sudden there was space, all of a sudden there
was time, and seventeen-odd-billion years later, here we are, like all created
matter, trapped in
space, bound up in
time. Except . . . except that part of us that is divine, the divine spark, as I call it. In
our journey through time, we discovered that John wasn’t exaggerating when he
says things are created in and through the Word. Paul wasn’t whistling Dixie when he says in this
Word all things—all
things!—hold together. And today, do you want to see this Word? Do you want to feel it? Hold out your hand
and touch the back of the pew in front of you. Run up to a tree, rub your hands
over the bark. Heck, plant your feet in the Greenhills streets, ‘cause the Word
isn’t just on the
street, it’s in it
as well.
And one more thing: if
you want to experience the dynamic
Word, the ever-changing,
ever lively Word,
you don’t have to sit with 2000-year-old writings and wait for the Spirit to
make them come to life—although that’s not a bad thing to do, everything has
its place. But all you have to do is look at your neighbors and family and
friends, and really be present,
really listen to
them, and you’ll see the Word shine through in everything they do. Amen.
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