Jeremy Duncan: God doesn't exist, at least not in the way you and I do in the universe. God is the space between us that allows the universe to exist at all. And faith then is about slowly learning to trust that it is that same divine relationship that makes our existence possible. It is that relationship that then forms, guides, shapes, holds all things together in love. We begin this season called Eastertide.
And this is, again, a fifty day celebration that helps us take Easter Sunday and move that into a new Monday morning in our lives. Easter's not a one time shot. At least it shouldn't be. It's the start of a new story for all of us. And so Eastertide is that season where we wake up in the light of resurrection, hopefully, motivated to the good than we have ever imagined possible.
And so, as a first conversation in the light of resurrection, we are starting a new series this morning called the miraculous. And we're gonna talk about miracles in a sense, but really what we wanna look at, what we wanna talk about is how miraculous life is all around us all the time. Today, we're gonna talk about the miracle of the universe. Next week, we'll talk about how we narrate miracles in the Bible. We'll talk about serendipity, coincidence, and surprise, and finally, the miracle of love.
But all of this is intended so that we can live into the miracle of resurrection that is all around us all the time. However, before anything else, let's pray and then we'll jump into our new series. God of all that is, source and sustainer of every breath, every atom, every unseen connection. We pause now, not to escape our world, but to notice it around us. To notice that we're here, held together in ways we barely understand, loved in ways we often overlook.
In this season of resurrection, wake us up again, not just to the idea of new life, but to the miracle of life already unfolding around us. When we have become numb, which make us curious. Where we become cynical, make us attentive. Where we have perhaps assumed the ordinary, would you teach us to see the sacred? Remind us that nothing is random, nothing is wasted, and no moment is outside your grace.
To stretch our imagination and open us to the wonder that we are part of something vast and beautiful and still being made new around us today. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Today is all about the miracle of the universe. And we're gonna cover small stories, when God began, the big bang, and finally, how it all holds together.
So strap in. We're going on a bit of a journey today. My hope is that by the end of this today, this message is really gonna land with a few of you here in the room. And for those that it doesn't, that's fine. We'll just be gracious with each other along the way.
Deal? Alright. First though, let's start small. This past week was Holy Week. And during Holy Week, each year, we open the church for the stations of the cross.
It's really kind of a neat little moment in the week for us as a staff team because holy week is so busy. Like, we got Palm Sunday and child dedications and then Good Friday and Easter Sunday services to prepare. All week. We're prepping the room, and we're putting out chairs. We're writing sermons.
We're getting ready. At the same time, I think we also want to be able to slow down long enough to experience that story for ourselves. And so the stations of the cross are this small little quiet respite for a couple days during Holy Week, where we open the church and we welcome the community. Sometimes, we even get to sit and chat and have a coffee with you as you come through. But on Wednesday last week, I came in, I came down to make myself a lot coffee in the lobby, and there was a little girl, maybe four or five, going through the stations on her own.
And she had one of the coloring pages that we had made available, and she had colored that in. And she saw me in the lobby, so she came up to me to show me her drawings. And I said, that's wonderful. And she said, very confidently, I might yeah. I'm an excellent artist.
And so I responded, I can see that. And then without missing a beat, she added, but I'm not very good at math though. However, I do know what four plus four is. So I played my part. Was like, okay, what is it?
She said, eight. I said, that's right. Do you know what four plus two is? She thought for a second. She said, I don't know that one yet.
I said, I bet you could figure it out. What's four? And then count two more. So she paused for a second, thought about it, and she said, six. I said, that's right.
I think you're pretty good at math too. And then she said, I guess you're right. I'm an excellent artist, and I'm very good at math. And then she ran off to rejoin her mom. Now why am I starting with this story in a sermon about miracles in the universe?
It's because I think often our imagination of miracles begins and ends with the idea that a miracle is when God supernaturally suspends the rules around us, when God interferes with reality in a way that doesn't make sense. Maybe God sticks a finger and draws a line in the sand that wasn't there before. Maybe that happens. But I would suggest the moments that actually alter the trajectory of our lives, encounters that change how we think about ourselves and what's possible in the universe, those are more often born of moments that we would likely call mundane. Now, am I arguing this encounter changed this little girl's life?
No. My self importance is not that grandiose. She probably forgot about it by the time she got back to her mom. What I'm saying is that there are all kinds of moments in my life that have felt miraculous to me, but only in looking back. Because I realized that they made me see my world in fundamentally new ways.
They opened my perspective or they brought me into some kind of new experience. What is the point of a miracle if not to shift the window of possibility in our lives? And yet, by any stretch, by any external evaluation, none of those moments, at least not in my life, could ever be declared decidedly special at all. Certainly nothing miraculous. I wanna suggest that's a category error.
We tend to think of the miraculous when something goes off script. Part of what I wanna argue today is I think it's miraculous that the script even holds together at all. Every conversation you enter, every breath you inhale, every time you hold a ball and let it go and you watch gravity do its thing, all of that is a miraculous set of relationships that sometimes we become too numb to notice. I think part of recovering the miraculous in our lives, learning to live in resurrection, is that expanding our definition to include all the ways that God holds all things together. And to talk about that, I want to go back to the beginning.
By that I mean the very beginning. Because in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and empty and darkness was over the surface of the deep and the spirit of God hovered over the waters. So God said, let there be light and there was. That's Genesis one verses one to three.
We're gonna talk about cosmology here in a second. I wanna notice a few things in this story. First, you've probably heard this a million times before, and that's kind of part of the problem. Because we know that the opening line of the bible should not be in the beginning. In fact, in the footnotes of the latest version of the NIV, there's a little asterisk in verse one.
And down at the bottom of the page, it will say, or when God began to form the heavens and the earth. And actually, my favorite English translation right now, the NRSV UE for updated edition, has gone ahead and flipped the two lines. It's in the beginning that's now relegated to the footnotes. And the reason for that gets a little technical on the language side. Quickly though, the first word of your bible is Bereshit, in the beginning, but it appears to be in the construct rather than the absolute state.
And all that means is that it is part of a construction which is dependent on the clause that follows. So think of it as in the beginning of the period when God created. Second reason gets a little more complicated and it's related to comparative mythologies. We know Genesis, the creation stories there follow older creation myths, primarily something called the Pneuma Elish and the Atrahasis. And we know that the ancient Hebrews were living and writing their stories within a particular cosmological milieu.
And that milieu said, the gods were angry and violent. And we humans had been created out of their frustration and their war. So, in the Atrahasis, humans are created essentially as slave labor for the gods. They don't want to do their job anymore, and so they mix the blood of a murdered god with the clay of the earth. And over in the Enuma Elish, dry land is created for humanity when Marduk kills the chaos god Tiamat and then uses her body to push back the torrent of water.
Well, Genesis comes along, takes both of those stories and says, nuh-uh. The world is not born of death. The world is the generous creation of a good God. The land beneath us is not a murdered husk. It was God's spirit that fluttered over chaotic waters to bring forth dry land.
And humanity, we're not death and dirt. We're created from divine breath animating the material goodness around us. The the point of Genesis is an overturning of more ancient cosmologies. We owe our existence to divine creativity and relationship, not to destructive violence. However, to make that point, Genesis plays with the themes and the structures of those familiar myths.
And lo and behold, when we translate the opening line of Genesis, when God began to create, that lines up very nicely with the opening nine of the Enuma Elish. Reinforcing that essentially Genesis is one big critique of the predominant religious paradigms of its day. It is an alternative imagination of the world. Which leads us to a third reason we want to change this iconic opening line in the bible and this one is purely cosmological. See today, we have a concept that we call ex nihilo, and that means out of nothing.
And the idea is that God can create anything, even a universe out of nothing. Now, if you're God, that seems like a thing you could do. Certainly not questioning whether God can create ex nihilo, but that is a much later philosophical innovation. It's not what Genesis is talking about here. In fact, in the very ancient world, the common wisdom was that everything had always existed because everything was part of a cycle.
And I'll quote from Thomas Cahill here. This is his book, The Gift of the Jews. He says, on every continent, in every society, we have been given the same advice that wise men as diverse as Heraclitus, Laozu, and Siddhartha have given their followers. Do not journey, but sit. Compose yourself by the river of life.
Meditate on its ceaseless and meaningless flow, and all that is past or passing or to come until you have absorbed the pattern of all that has come to peace with the great wheel. You with your own death and the death of all things in this corruptible sphere on and on. In other words, everything has been and everything will be again. And what that means is that Genesis is not talking about the formation of the universe out of nothing. That wasn't even a question they were asking yet.
Universe wasn't even a concept. Genesis is speaking to the formation of the world as they experienced it. So you could think of it this way. Genesis doesn't imagine a time before creation. It starts with creation, being shaped and formed, guided by the creative instincts of God.
And that is really interesting when we compare it to how we think about creation today. See, we all know about the Big Bang Theory. Right? A mediocre, though surprisingly popular sitcom from the late aughts. There is also another Big Bang Theory, a theory originally proposed by a Catholic priest.
In the early twentieth century, Georges Lemaitre was a Belgian priest who went to study astrophysics at MIT. And in the twenties, a number of physicists, including a guy named Einstein, might have heard of him, they were starting to realize that the idea of a static universe just didn't math out. Well, Lemaitre, back in 1927, wrote a paper that went ignored for a few years, but it used general relativity to describe an expanding universe. Well, in the nineteen thirties, this caught on because a guy named Edwin Hubble, who would eventually have a space telescope named after him, he was producing some of the earliest, farthest reaching images of space all from his own backyard with a telescope that he built. And, those images did in fact seem to confirm that distant stars and galaxies were moving away from us.
And so with that kind of largely established in math and in observation, Lemaitre then started to wonder about the next logical question. If the universe is expanding and it's moving out, what doesn't that mean that originally, sometime long long ago, perhaps in a galaxy far far away, it all started somewhere? Alimetra would write another paper in the thirties calling this theoretical origin point the primordial atom. It was other later physicists who would pick up on this and expand on it. They would speculate about how this hot dense core of all matter and energy would explode out into a universe.
And this was based on the fact that we can see the universe expanding rapidly in the first few moments. We call that inflation. And then we can begin to see it settle down and expand more slowly into the universe we see today. Hence, the name the Big Bang. Now, today, we continue to refine this theory.
It's changed a lot. Our newest best understandings of the universe are that actually the rate of expansion is increasing again. So somewhere around thirteen point eight billion years ago, the universe rapidly expanded in the first few milliseconds. Then it slowed itself down for another eight billion years or so. And then for some reason, dark matter and dark energy and things we still don't really understand, it started expanding outward again at an increasing rate.
What's fascinating though is that today cosmologists tell us we can measure the universe all the way back to 10 to the negative forty three seconds after the beginning. That is an infinitesimally small amount of time we call a plank. Smallest measure of time in the universe, where beyond which all of our theories about how anything works absolutely stop working. If you wanted to put that in religious terms, you might say, we can talk about when God began to create, but we have absolutely no language to describe anything before that. And look, I'm not presenting this as some kind of apologetic to argue.
Oh, see? The Bible understood cosmology before we did. That's not my intent here. That's certainly not what the writers of Genesis were thinking about. Remember, universe wasn't even a concept then.
In fact, Lemaitre himself, who remember was a priest, once summed this up when he wrote, as far as I can see, such a theory like mine remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental being. But for the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God. That is what fascinates me. Because our religious sensibilities tell us we can't really speak of God before creation.
And our cosmology tells us we hit a wall in reaching back before creation. I think Lemaitre says it more plainly than we might even realize. What if it is our imagined familiarity with God that's getting in the way? Pete Holmes is a comedian, a good one. Sometimes where our best theology comes from, by the way.
But he has a bit where he says, we are all like characters in a novel trying to figure out the author while we're still in the novel. So imagine Aragorn and his elfish friend Orlando trying to understand JRR Tolkien from within the world of Middle Earth. Like, can they ever see all the way to a professor at Oxford University writing a novel from the gates of Mordor? Part of what I like about that as an image is I think they absolutely can learn a lot about Tolkien from within the world of the Lord of the Rings. Right?
Like, you can get a sense of him from his story, how it unfolds. You look at what drives the narrative, how the story pulls together in the end. I think you do get a sense of the author. And in that sense, yes, the characters might actually know something about their creator. And yet, the idea that they could reconstruct our world from theirs is absurdly clarifying for me.
I'm a character in a story that God is writing. I can observe divine fingerprints in the story as it unfolds around me. I can even understand something of the nature of my author expressed around me. But as Lemaitre says, any aspiration at familiarity with God is as absurd as a character composed of letters on a page trying to comprehend the living, breathing universe that you and I inhabit. Now as a Christian, I, of course, also believe that God entered into the story with me.
So, God has given us Jesus so that everything we need to know about the divine can be seen in his life. Jesus shows us what God would look like on the page with us. And, that means we can indeed know what it means to live lives that flow with rather than against the universe that's been created for us. But, even that is God expressed inside the story. It is divine self disclosure within the confines of our limitations.
In other words, I believe I can discern God from within the story. I can follow the way of Jesus in my life. I can choose a path that counts on grace to draw me closer toward the divine origin of all things. I can even experience the inexhaustible love that is God in tangible ways, but I can still never peer outside the universe as it's written to fully comprehend God as God. It's beyond me.
Perhaps you could say this, I could draw within a Planck's width of God, the smallest distance possible in the universe, and there would still be an infinitely wide fundamental category difference between myself and the divine. Because I exist and God doesn't. Now, hear me out. I'm not abandoning my faith in front of you in real time here. It's not a crisis.
I don't need an intervention right now. At least, I don't think so. I'm actually exposing the core of my faith, which is that I think everything that exists is created in God. I think everything that exists is created by God, which is why I am with Paul when he says, all things created, all things at heaven and on earth, things visible and invisible, even things like thrones and rulers and authorities and powers. Absolutely anything that has ever existed has been created through God and for God.
And therefore, God, specifically, he's talking about Christ here, is before all things and in Christ all things hold together. But what a passage like that says to me, when I read that not only are all things created by God, they are held together in God. Sustained by God is how some translations will render this Greek word, When I read that, what I realize is that God is not another thing in the universe with me. God is, in the words of Paul Tillich, the very ground of being. Maybe we could even say this, God is the name we give to what we experience as existence.
See today, you and I, we know this. We're made up of cells. Right? And all the things around us, including those cells are made up of molecules. Those molecules are made of atoms and those atoms are made of protons and neutrons surrounded by a swirling cloud of probability that we call an electron.
Thing is though, we know we can even go smaller because protons and neutrons are made up of quarks. And quarks are still a thing. They're a little bit of the universe, but they interact with what we call bosons, and those aren't even things at all. At least not the way we like to think of things. Bosons don't exist as matter in the universe.
They're more like excited fields of energy, and yet they are what carry the relationship between the smallest particles in the universe. In doing that though, they make existence possible for the universe. See, there's a boson called a photon that carries the electromagnetic force between electrons, and sometimes it looks like light. And there's a boson called a gluon that carries the strong force between quarks, and it will hold them together in the center of an atom. It's the strongest force in the universe, by the way.
We don't know why it's contained in the center of an atom, though. There's something we call w and z bosons. They carry what we call the weak force. They're would allow the universe to evolve. They can rework a quark, a thing that exists into a different type of thing that exists inside an atom even while the strong force holds them together.
But the point is, the very idea of being a thing, the concept of existence itself is just a continuous line of relationships all the way down until all that's left is actually nothing but the relationships. When you get small enough, things don't exist anymore, just relationships. Organisms are interdependent. Cells are interconnected. Molecules are strings of atoms, and atoms are collections of particles.
Those particles are groups of quarks, which are waves of bosons, which are just relationships of energy that glue it all together. There's absolutely no point in the universe, no matter how big or small you want to get, where anything that exists, exists on its own. And my argument is that God does not exist at any one of those points along the chain. God is the name we give to that which holds all of it together. And I don't mean this in a God of the gaps kind of way, like we don't understand this, therefore God.
What I mean is that from everything we do know about what it means to exist, from the gravity that we are using to send Artemis two to the far side of the moon and back, to the cosmology of the big bang, to the quantum dynamics of particles, to the lives that you and I get up and lead every single day, all of it is defined by relationship. And everything has everything to do with everything else. Which means the most important thing in the universe isn't in the universe. It's the relationship that sustains all of it. A relationship that somehow existed on the other side of creation.
Like, before there was a universe, in a reality that you and I can't even begin to imagine, but one that we describe with words like father and son and spirit. Words that use images we know from the world around us to reach toward an imagination of God, not as a being, but as the very relationship from which all existence blooms. See, maybe I can say it this way. God doesn't exist, at least not in the way you and I do in the universe. God is the space between us that allows the universe to exist at all.
And faith then is about slowly learning to trust that it is that same divine relationship that makes our existence possible. It is that relationship that then forms, guides, shapes, holds all things together in love. And the real miracle then isn't when the rules break, the miracle is that the rules exist that things are at all. That gravity exists. That the strong force holds within an atom, that you are here breathing molecules of oxygen right now, that you are matter that can think and feel and speak in love.
You are a little bit of all of the relationships that comprise the universe, and you get to know about yourself. And that means you get to choose your steps in the world. You get to decide to love. You get to kneel in front of a little girl and tell her she is smarter than she realizes. You get to use all of the relationships of atoms and cells and quarks and personal history that comprise your self awareness within the universe to better the relationships that comprise someone else's self awareness in the universe.
I say this without a hint of sarcasm. That is fantastically miraculous. Because the same reality that holds quarks together inside an atom, the same reality that stretches galaxies across billions of light years is the same reality holding this moment together in your mind right now. All of it is just relationships. And that is what we're talking about when we talk about God.
The ground of being that sustains and holds all things. The ground of being that enters the pages of the story with us to speak to us. The ground of being which shows us there is no such thing as an end to relationships, which means there is always resurrection because the universe is a miracle of love all the way down. Look, I know this message went in directions you probably didn't expect when you came to church this morning. I get it.
Ancient mythologies and big bang cosmologies are rarely on the docket for Sunday. But here's my question. To you as we begin this Easter tie together, as we reflect on resurrection and the miraculous that is around us all the time. If the universe really is held together by love in relationship, and if God is the name that we give to that which sustains all of it, then where in your life right now is there an ordinary relationship or a very simple moment or an overlooked memory? Really anything that is sacred that you have stopped noticing for how truly incredible it really is?
And what might change in your universe if you started treating that like the miracle it was all over again? Because maybe, just like the universe, it's the smallest relationships in our lives that are actually what hold all things together. And maybe, how we treat the very least of those relationships can slowly come to define our connection to the divine and our awareness of this universe around us. Let's pray. God, we live in the midst of a miracle.
A universe that holds together, that's sustained by relationships, that we can look at, and we can understand, and we can measure. But if we get all the way down, there's nothing there. There is just relationship, connection, and in the form of our faith, love. And so, Gam, we ask that in all the language we use to describe you, language drawn from our experience of this world around us, we would always hold a little bit of humility to know that you are bigger, you are grander, you are more present in and around us than we can possibly even begin to imagine. But that awareness of how we can't fully comprehend you can still motivate us to use the relationships that comprise our experience of the world to make this world a little bit better.
More like the love that sustains. Toward the connection that defines. That we can love. We can accept. We can learn.
We can be curious. We can enter into this story knowing that in the end we are being drawn back to the very concept that holds our universe together. And that with our actions, our choices, our words, our relationships that we enter, we can contribute to the universe moving back towards the center of its founding. May the very smallest choices that we make feel miraculous to us in the way they contribute to a story that is bigger we can even see. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.
Amen.
Jeremy Duncan: Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials CommonsChurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk
Jeremy Duncan: to you soon.