Lent B March 10, 2024
Numbers 21:4-9 Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10 John 3:14-21
It is said that Einstein's once opined that the most important question in life had to do with a belief in a friendly universe.
Indeed, what do we project upon everything, everywhere, all at once? Do we project a God involved in the universe with a divine presence, diffusely immanent and omnipresent? Is divine omnipresence a friendly presence? How could we know?
Is the universe but God throwing the dice resulting of an infinite play of probabilities and giving all probabilities a degree of freedom, such that communities of freedom can unite to do collective evil or collective good?
The biblical witness and the Christian witness perhaps frames the Einstein question in a different way with a bit different language. The biblical witness like the articulation of everything is necessarily anthropocentric because as language users we are limited to human experience. But we also believe to be human means to partake of the sublimely human and touch the horizon of a deeper connection of all things, the connection we name as the divine presence, which contains us and always engenders a future.
In the biblical witness we posit a divine presence which is the residing place and the cause of the presence of everything, including us. And we believe that the great Presence responsible for our becoming, made us good, so that we might be on the path of becoming better. The lure for us becoming better is the lure of the Presence of the One we have come to call Love.
We deal with Einstein's question of a friendly universe by the belief that God is love. The one who is love is able to make other beings who have the free capacity to also love and be loved. The act of creation is a love act, and the continuous renewal of everything in time is the labor of the sustaining love of someone who wants every being to become continuously better or part of comprising a better surpassing whole.
One of the most quoted words of the New Testament is from our appointed Gospel. "God so loved the world...." So, such an expression is a belief that an omnipresence God is loving everywhere, and what could be more friendly than that?
Einstein, in knowing the potential misuses of scientific discoveries, thought that a friendly universe issue was important as it pertained to the morals and ethics of how we use our science and technology to treat each other. We know that we have not been enlightened in the practice of friendliness toward each other so as to give everyone an equality in the pursuit of happiness and well-being. Believing that human beings are mostly unloving and not perfectible in love might make us act as though selfish behavior is the central motivation of life.
If we, like the writer of John's Gospel, believe that God is love, how is such to be known and experienced? Why does it often seem like God is love is the unknown secret of the universe?
The biblical writers often write about the failure of people to be loving toward God and toward each other. The people of Israel, who are presented as God's experiment in bringing love to the world, are shown to be people who continually failed to represent a God of love. The proliferation of the failure to love can seem to be the prevailing trend of life itself.
How does the biblical witness deal with the continual failure of people to love God and each other? The God who has and will out live all and yet include every other being, is seen to be the best of parent. God is seen as one who has the duration to forgive and give endless chances for amendment of life to people.
The God of love gave exemplars within human community of how people are supposed to love and be loved. "God so love the world," that God gave a specific divine child of love to show his brothers and sisters the life of loving and being loved. Jesus is the example of God not giving up on us and showing us the tolerant loving forgiveness of our parent God who always believes we can get better because we are made in having a genuine freedom to chose in the direction of love.
The Gospel questions for each of us today include: Do we believe that God is a loving presence everywhere in this universe? If so, how can we and others know? We can only know by experiencing love from others and passing that love on to others.
And if we believe that God is love, how should we live? Following Christ, we should always chose love and try to speak and live lovingly with our lives. Amen.
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