God as Expanding Container of All

6 Easter a         May 25, 2014    

Acts 17:22-31       Ps. Ps. 66  

1 Peter 3:13-22     John 14:15-21   

Lectionary Link            

  Sometimes when we read the Bible we can be led to some misreadings if we try to visualize with spatial verification the perceptual cosmology of ancient times.  This perceptual cosmology involves a flat earth, a dome sky over which the sun and moon and stars pass each day as they pass under the flat earth each day to return again on the dome sky screen above.  And if you could take a trap door through the top of the domed sky, you would arrive at the abode of God in the “highest” heaven.

  One can appreciate the perceptual truth of the past; in fact we still embody this perceptual truth of the past every time we say the sun rises and sets.  But those ancient perceptual truths have to be internalized to interior heavenly space to have significant spiritual significance for us to today.

  And we can find other biblical models and metaphors to evoke insights for us about the reality of God in our life.

  One of my favorite metaphors comes from a phrase which the writer of the Acts of the Apostles attributes to St. Paul when he was trying to evangelize the Athenians.  Athens was perhaps the intellectual center of the World.    The Hellenistic culture was spread worldwide by the conquest of the most famous student of Aristotle, Alexander the Great.  The remnant of the Hellenistic culture was still present in the Roman World of Jesus and the early church, as a common Greek dialect remained as the lingua franca of the world and this Greek, left over language, became the language of the New Testament.

  The phrase which St. Paul reportedly borrowed from the Greeks to make contact with the philosophically minded Athenians is this:  In God we live and we move and we have our being.

This is a phrase which I would like to explore as providing us with some significant insight about God.  In our day of the pragmatic requirement of truth, sometimes theology and statements about God don’t seem to have any pragmatic value or function.  What difference does an insight about God have for you and me today?

  In God we live and move and have our being.  I think to understand this is to have our lives and life actions altered and changed forever.

   In this view of God, we can understand God as the ultimate Container.  God as the ultimate Container means that everything else is contained and is interior to God.

  But this container is not a hard and firm and static container.  It is an ever expanding container.  God as the greatest Container of all is also an expanding Container.  Why is it necessary for God as the ultimate Container to be an expanding container?  Because everything which exists within God has degrees of freedom which contributes to the actual expansion of the fullness of the divine.  And it has to be this way if we want to embrace a notion of genuine freedom.

  If God is not an expanding container whose boundaries are somehow fixed, it would mean that God would know the future and the possible as actual.  And that would mean determination and predestination; If God knows the future as a present time actual, then such knowledge would implied a fixed universe.  The entire universe might as well be a robot.

  But an expanding God who contains all actually is being affected by how all free beings are acting.  So, our prayers do actually make a difference.  It does matter what we do.  This view of God honors a genuine freedom in this world.  And which of us doubts genuine freedom?  It is so genuine that at times it seems quite obvious that the bad guys are winning.  Freedom is genuine because there is present at the same time so much conflict and competition between human systems and the systems of nature.  Why else would lighting strike cause fires which burn homes and earthquakes sometime have massive destructive effects in human populated areas?

  This massive expanding Container of God within whom we live and have our being, can be so expansive that we can seem like impersonal fragments within such vastness.

  But the Gospel of John gives us the personal touch of the divine.  Who is Jesus?  He is God in human form contained by his Father.  The Son is contained in the Father and the Father is evident in the Son.  We are not rattling around in a massive impersonal bucket of bolts.  We posit a Personal Containing Parent within us from whom we have come.  If personality is what we regard to be the very best of humanity, then for God to be greater than we are, God at the very least would have to be hyper-personal, or personal to the superlative degree.  And so Jesus came to show us that we are personally contained by a very great parenting Personality, indeed, in whom we live and move and have our being.  And this Parenting Personality has not left us orphans.

   The writer of John’s Gospel understood that the life of Jesus was an announcement to the world that we are not abandoned by an unknown and aloof super-impersonal Being.  We are contained by a great Energy of Creativity and Freedom.  We are inspired by God who is pure freedom and pure creativity to use our freedom and creativity in the very best possible way, because you know what?  Our freedom contributes to the future state of an expanding God who responds to our freedom.

  Indeed we are not omnipotent in our freedom, but our freedom is very significant.  And this is the pragmatic truth of living and moving and having our being in God.

  People who are committed to other views of God will say, that if God is expanding then God cannot be perfect because a perfect being does not and cannot change.

  Let us redefine perfect as that which is greatest and the greatest can change as a genuine response to freedom.  And God’s greatness and perfection does not suffer, since God does not have a significant rival; God’s only rival is the Divine Self in a future state.  God’s greatness of the past is only compared with God’s greatness of the future.

  This notion of God helps us to embrace our true freedom in this world.  The great Containing God tries to lure us to excellence, love and justice, even as we have the freedom to resist the lure of God.

   In God we live and move and have our being.  This is a very pragmatic and vital truth for you and I and it can deliver from the cruelty of fatalism.  We are only partially determine; let us embrace the partial freedom which we do have with a new determination, because as we live and move and have our being in God, we in some small but significant ways, determine the Divine Self.  And that is the excitement that you and I can know from this Gospel of being sons and daughters of God, with spiritual DNA.  Amen.