The Speed of Light--Nov. 1, 2021

The Speed of Light--November 1, 2021

"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever." [Hebrews 13:8]

One of the hardest things to learn in this life is just how unreliable things really are, including the things we were told were unchanging and permanent.  

Maybe especially those things.

We watch our loved ones grow up... and grow old.  The arms that seemed invincible and strong enough to carry our little bodies grow frail and breakable.  The minds we looked up to in awe once grow dim, forgetful, and cloudy.  The people we counted on always to be in our lives move out, move away or move on.

Even the big structures we assume have "always been there" have a way of changing on us. When I was growing up, there seemed to be this unspoken assumption that the Cold War alignment of the world had lasted for so many decades that it would endure forever... and then walls came down that had seemed permanent and changed our old picture of the world.  We found our assumptions of invulnerability shaken again on a Tuesday in September in 2001, too, and that felt like the world-as-we-knew-it had been changed yet again.  I can even remember the public outrage when Pluto was deemed no longer to count as a major planet but only a "dwarf planet" just a few years ago, and it was on display again: people were upset because the thing they thought was unchanging and solid turned out to be changeable and fluid.  People weren't upset about Pluto because they had strong astronomical evidence to contradict the conclusions of the scientific community--they just didn't like having their picture of the cosmos upended.

I can remember, too, as a high school student, how we went from learning about constant numbers like the pull of gravity and ironclad Scientific Rules like the Law of the Conservation of Mass early in the school year, to discovering Einstein's Theory of Relativity changed everything.  It literally felt like the world I had been counting on to be solid turned out to be slipping through my fingers.

Even the way our faith changes over time can feel scary, too.  As a kid growing up in church, I had all the flannel-board Bible stories in my head, and the childhood certainty of seeing things in only black-and-white.  People were heroes OR villains, saints OR sinners, and rules were clear and ironclad like the Laws of Science.  But growing up--and growing deeper into learning the Scriptures--meant discovering that Jesus had a way of breaking the rules a younger version of myself assumed were necessary for stability.  I discovered, by listening to the voices of Scripture, the paradox in all of us--biblical characters and people all around me every day. We are heroes AND villains, saints AND sinners, dead AND alive, believing AND doubting, all of us.  It was a necessary change for my faith to come to maturity... but it was hard discovering that even my picture of God wasn't as unchanging as I assumed it would be.

It can be really unsettling for all of us to have all these things in flux in our lives--our relationships and the changing circles of our families and friends, our understanding of the world, and even our faith.  Understandably, we want to reach for something that seems familiar and comfortable and promises us same-ness, whether or not it is true.

It can be hard, then, to know what to make of a promise like this one from Hebrews.  I mean, the words are absolutely beautiful: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever." But when we've lived through so many other things that we thought were fixed points and discovered they were unreliable or moving without our realizing it, we can be a little gun-shy about trusting this promise.  How can we put our trust in Jesus as constant when we've been burned before by voices that promised us they would never change but then bailed out on us or let us down?

It's times like these that I find myself turning back to a gorgeous song of Julie Miller's.  She sings these words:

"Time and space are relative
Einstein said, back when he lived
The only thing that doesn't change
Makes everything else rearrange
Is the speed of light... is the speed of light.
Your love for me must be the speed of light."

The science nerd in me (who had been let down by all those other constants turning out not to be so reliable) resonates with that idea: there is a reality that we can rely on--and yet, it makes everything else rearrange.  Like Einstein discovered the constancy of the speed of light, and made everybody rethink their old understandings of the universe at the same time, the presence of Jesus is our constant who throws all of our old assumptions up into the air.  Jesus does indeed remain the same--yesterday, today, and forever--but seeing that will come at the cost of realizing that all the other things we had counted on for stability are not so reliable.  Our family arrangements change, and so do our circles of friends.  Our work routines shift, and so do the institutions we build those routines on.  Our understanding of our place in the world... or even the solar system, is up for debate.  But Jesus remains fiercely faithful.

So here's the truth for us today: Jesus remains the same... even while the world around us, and all the other pieces of it, keep moving and shifting.  The constancy of Jesus can't be co-opted to guarantee that nothing else in your life will change--rather, it's Jesus' fierce faithfulness that gives us the courage to look all the other changes in the eye and acknowledge them without being overcome by fear.

Jesus is like the speed of light that way--he doesn't change, but recognizing that will change everything else about the way we see the world.  

Let's face a changing world with courage, knowing we are held by an unshakable love.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to hold onto you even when the world around us and our perceptions inside of us keep changing.