All Holy Ground--August 7, 2019
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being was life, and the life was the light of all people." [John 1:1-4]
We are going to have to come to terms with two things: first, that Christ (here called "the Word" by the evangelist John in a particularly poetic mood) is somehow one with God; and second, that Christ (the same Christ who is one with God) is also present in and through all of creation.
And that sure sounds like John is saying that the whole world--indeed the whole universe, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here--is steeped in the very presence of God and put together in the power of Christ. The whole world. All of it. Every nook and cranny. Every dark corner and coal mine. Every sun-baked desert and melting glacier. And every human heart, too.
Both ideas--the idea of a human being (Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ and the Word) being somehow one with the Almighty and Eternal God, and then the idea that this Christ is somehow present to all of creation, in all of its messiness--are mind-boggling and scandalous. We could spend hundreds upon hundreds of pages probing at those mysteries--and in fact, Christians have spend an awful lot of time and paper and thought on the first of them. Indeed, what we have distilled for us into the handful of paragraphs we call the Creed was the product of a lot of arguing, thinking, praying, and the occasional slap from Saint Nicolas himself (true story!), all of it over the mystery of how Christ can be one with God and yet also distinct. Christians have been talking about that mystery with the convenient shorthand, "The Doctrine of the Trinity," for a long, long time now, and at least in the tradition I come from, we recite a summary of that doctrine every Sunday as part of our weekly worship. So even if we still don't quite understand it all, at least a good number of Christians have spent a good bit of time ruminating on the idea that Jesus Christ is one with God.
That doesn't mean we don't need to talk about it any more, but it does mean that that particular mystery has gotten a lot of press over the years.
But the other, the perhaps less-considered mystery, still calls out for our attention and consideration. John the Gospel-writer also makes the claim that Christ touches every point of creation--that there is nothing in all the universe that doesn't bear his fingerprint, so to speak. And that does something very powerful to our view of the world, if we dare to let the idea seep into us. It means that, in a very real sense, it's all holy ground. Everywhere you step, you are both in the presence of God and in the handiwork of God. There is no place you can go where God isn't, and there is no face you can meet which is not made in the image of God. And because, as John the Gospel writer goes to great lengths to point out, Christ Jesus (the Word) is one with the living God, then there is no human being, anywhere, who does not bear the stamp of God's craftsmanship or the family resemblance to Christ somewhere.
That means Respectable Religious people bear the image of God... and so does the hot mess who has never darkened the doorway of a church but has walked in and out the door of rehab plenty of times without ever quite giving up their addiction. It means that the bald man who was your childhood neighbor is made in the image of Christ... and so is the woman who wears a head scarf, came here from across an ocean or two, and doesn't believe the same things you do about Jesus. It means that your town, your state, and your country are masterpieces of God... and so are the lands to the south, north, east, and west. It is all, irrefutably and inescapably, the creation of the God who made all things through Christ the Word. So whether a person or a place meets with my person approval or not, they are already a creation of a God who takes ownership for all of it, the whole shootin' match we call the universe.
That doesn't mean we are all perfect peaches--just the opposite, actually. But despite the fact that every one of us is a hot mess in some way or another, and despite the fact that all of us constantly fail to live up to the fullness of love and creativity that God intends for us, God doesn't disavow making us or disconnect us from Christ who is the source of our life. Our very existence is evidence Christ hasn't given up on us, and in fact, longs for us to see that we bear the image of God.
For that matter, even though we collectively do a rotten job of taking care of the world that God has entrusted to us, it doesn't stop being God's creation. That's actually a pretty big idea to consider, because it means that even though God is apparently willing to risk that we will wreck the place, God still loves and claims ownership of this world, this life, and this day. The Scriptures do not give us permission to shrug and say, "This is our world to do with as we please," and then in the same breath say, "and God will just stop the wildfires we set or make some more turtles to replace the ones we've killed." No, in fact, God bears all the terrible things we do the world in which we have been placed--and the people who live in it--and still God claims ownership over the world, even while we are wrecking the place. When we do wreck things, though, we should be honest--we are wrecking a world made by God, through Christ, filled with the Spirit. We should be clear: the world we either care for or wreck, is holy ground, through and through.
Every face bears a family resemblance to Christ's face.
Every place bears the telltale scorch marks of the presence of divine fire like Moses taking off his shoes before the burning bush from which God spoke.
The Bible itself tells us so--so to take God's Word seriously is also to take God's world seriously.
Now, go step out into the world that is steeped in the presence of Christ--and live in it today, among other people today, like that is true.
Lord Jesus, reveal your face to us in the world around us, and in the faces you send across our path today.
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