How We Are Held

How We Are Held--August 24, 2016

"And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." [Philippians 4:7]

There is a lot I do not understand about gravity... and yet all the while, gravity is doing its work on me.

I mean, I have a grasp of the most basic ways that gravity visibly affects my day to day life—like the fact that I do not go floating off into space when I get out of bed in the morning, or that when my clumsy hands let go of the butter knife at dinner, I know it will always fall to the floor rather than hovering in mid-air.  But the deeper things about gravity—like how gravity can bend light, or whether gravity comes from particles or waves, and things like that—I have no clue about.  I’m just going to own it.

For that matter, somewhere else in the Milky Way, gravity is pulling clouds of gas together to form a new star, and the pressure and force of all that matter being pulled in toward a center point is shocking it into a spark of fire and light, changing the very heart of a new sun for some future world I will never see with my own eyes. And yet, despite my ignorance of the details of this field of physics, gravity continues to do its work on me... and the stars... and everything, changing us all by its pull.

In other words, I am still held in place by gravity right now as I write, even though I do not fully understand gravity, how it works, or how we are held. Gravity doesn’t need my intellectual assent or approval to do its thing; it just keeps a hold of me and stubbornly refuses to let go. Thank God.

Now, because the list of things of which I am ignorant and uninformed could fill a city full of libraries, I could say the same about things like electricity, or the tax code, or the endocrine system, and on and on.  There are lots of things I do not understand, but which keep on doing what they do regardless of my level of comprehension. 

This is a humbling thing to realize, but it is also reassuring—it is a reminder that, on the one hand, the universe does not need my approval to keep on humming (nor does God need my approval to keep it humming), but on the other hand, I need not fear that the world will fall apart just because I don’t know how it all holds together.  Gravity, you might say, passes my understanding... even while it is changing me.

At the same time, two other truths need to be spun off here:  for one, just because I don’t understand how gravity works doesn’t mean it isn’t real (obviously). And on the flip side, just because gravity keeps operating with or without my understanding does not mean that there is nothing to be learned about gravity.  Even if I don’t know everything about it, it doesn’t mean I can know nothing about it.

Paul says that the peace of God is very much the same.  It is real, but it is beyond the grasp of our comprehension.  Like gravity, you can be held by the peace of God without really understanding how you are behind held together or why you are not having an emotional meltdown at the moment.  The peace of God does not come from your ability to see the solution to every problem on the horizon, or your charisma, charm, or good looks. The peace of God is not even dependent on your ability to wrap your brain around it.  Just the opposite, really: to hear Paul tell it, it has the ability to wrap itself around your mind:  “the peace of God…will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus,” he says.

The peace of God, then, is very much like those moments in your early childhood when being held made things okay.  Whatever it was that had frightened you or made you start to cry might still have been “out there”: the older brother or sister who was picking on you, the crack of the thunder, the suspiciously monster-shaped shadows on the floor of your bedroom at night, or whatever.  But being held had this way of making things okay, even if the source of the anxiety was still around to be dealt with… and yes, even if, logically speaking, nothing else had really changed by the placing of parents’ arms around you.  But still somehow, being held that way brought a world of difference—maybe because the embrace is a sign that you were not alone, and that whatever monsters or lightning bolts were out there would have to contend with those strong arms first before they could touch you.  Such is the power of a mother or father’s love.  It is like gravity—it has this irresistible power to hold us and keep us... even if we do not understand how it does what it does.

This is a real relief for the followers of Jesus: we may not understand how we are given the clarity of mind and peace of spirit to make it through those times when everything else seems shaken.  But just because we do not understand how we are getting through does not mean that it’s all in our head or a trick of our imaginations, at least not if gravity and electricity and the endocrine system are also real.

The peace of God, then, is a mystery, in the sacred sense of the word.  And as the old definition goes, an enigma is something so confounding that you cannot say anything about it, but a mystery is something about which you can never say enough, but which you can say something about.  So without going into things beyond our grasp, Paul just says that the peace of God will hold us, will keep us, will guard us, while at the same it goes far beyond anything we can dissect or diagram or predict.  But it is real.  And it changes us.

And at the same time, like we said about gravity, just because we don’t know everything, and maybe can’t know everything, about it, it doesn’t mean we can’t say something about it.  The “something” you can say about God, and the peace of God, before you reach the point where our words fail, well, that is called theology, and its place is the same as the study of physics or biology or history.  Knowing physics isn’t what makes gravity work, but it is still worth learning what we can say about gravity.  And the same with God and God’s peace:  our mental grasp of what God is up to does not save us (in other words, nobody is saved by theology), but it is still worth seeking to learn what we can about how God holds us.  We can, for example, say that the peace of God is not the same thing as sticking our heads in the sand to avoid having to think new thoughts, meet new faces, admit we were wrong, or be real about the very real heartache, unfairness, and just plain meanness in the world. The peace of God is not the same as saying, "You won't have to worry about money anymore since you are a Christian, because God makes those worries go away by sending you extra income in proportion to your faith!" The peace of God is not the empty promise of the cookie cutter life to give you fulfillment in your days. And it is worth recognizing that, as Paul does all this talking about "peace" being given, he was chained to a Roman soldier awaiting trial and sentencing when he wrote it.  The peace of God does not come from having everything on your life's wish list--rather, it comes to us often when we are most glaringly feeling it unfulfilled.  It comes without our explanation for why it is there, and it calms our hearts often without us realizing that our hearts are being calmed while it is happening.

So for starters today, it is enough to face the day knowing that God does hold us, and that God will hold us, whether we understand anything more about it or not.  We will be held today.  Thank God.

Lord Jesus, let us know you as fully as our feeble minds can bear today, but hold us beyond even that in your peace.