High Risk! High Stakes! Earth is in the Balance.

The Cosmic Christ

SCRIPTURE READING: Colossians 1:11-20

About 100 miles from Ephesus in the River Lycus Valley, there was a growing philosophy very attractive to Jew, Gentile Christians, and Greek. It included two basic dualistic assumptions about matter.

1. Spirit alone was good. Matter was essentially evil.

2. The universe was created out of this flawed matter.

· A good spirit god could not work with flawed evil matter.

· Therefore matter was created by a descending series of emanations.

Hmmmm. Well. How silly you think. But----

· How many Christians have read and believe the “Left Behind Series” in which a horrific end comes to evil earth and a relatively few chosen ascend to a spiritual place?

· Current day politicians have been quoted as saying: “It doesn’t really matter what we do to the earth’s resources. Jesus is coming back and we’ll all be gone”.

A philosophy: Spirit alone is good, matter is essentially evil.

A letter is written: A great soaring, organized hymn of praise. A letter is written: A grand doxology in which the two worlds of matter and spirit are inextricably entwined, woven together in a matrix of the tangible and the intangible.

Enter the Cosmic Christ!

1:16) The beloved Son is an agent of Creation.

1:17) The beloved Son is the super glue that holds all things together.

1:20) The beloved Son is the instrument of reconciliation

The Gospel writers already knew the historic Jesus, now they were developing cosmic hymns to the cosmic Christ. The Gospel of Mark begins with the baptism of Jesus in which the whole sky opened up and a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved son, I am well pleased with you.” That’s a cosmic event. Then Jesus is driven into the wilderness where he wrestled with Satan – the dark force – and wild beasts and angels came to succor him. That’s cosmology. The story of the crucifixion is set in a cosmic context – an eclipse of the sun, and the death of the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The Gospel of John begins with the assertion that Christ is the Word, the Logos, the indwelling divine reason within all things. The Cosmic Christ is in the soil, in the rain forest, in the body and pain of the world. The Cosmic Christ is there wherever anyone encounters the prisoner, the hungry, the homeless, the sick.

Matthew 25:40 – “As you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.”

The heavenly orientation is worked out on earth. For in Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. This is completeness. This is full revelation. Nothing is left out. Nothing more is necessary. We are caught up in the cosmic scope of the Cosmic Christ: the counter cultural Cosmic Christ who touched lepers, talked to women, ate with sinners, wept for his friend, raged against the institutional religion that made everything too hard; the earthy practical Cosmic Christ: “See that widow”; “Watch the seed planter”; “Ahhh the harvest”; “Throw your nets on the other side of the boat”; “Why are you afraid – storm be still”; and after his execution, “Come and eat – the fish are cooking.”

We must take a Biblical loop back around Genesis 1 and 2 where we encounter “hadam.” “Hadama,” a Hebrew play on words, like saying the “human from the humus”. In the culminating act of creation, the Lord God, Creator of the universe, is forming the human from the dust of the earth – breathing the spirit of life into this human, and the creature became a living being. In the culminating act of creation, we are created in the image of God. Let us reverence our divinity and our responsibility as co-creators. Our earliest creation story involves matter and spirit. The heavenly orientation is worked out on earth.

Next Sunday, the first Sunday in Advent, we begin to prepare the way for remembering the incarnation, the enfleshment, of God in a Jewish male baby. Let us not keep this a children’s story. He is the image of the invisible God. He is the manifestation of God. He is the manifestation of what humanity is supposed to be. He is the fullness of God who is pleased to dwell in him. The heavenly orientation is worked out on earth.

We inherited an earth that is hospitable toward us, with the right levels of ozone, oxygen, and water, and healthy DNA in our bodies and reproductive systems. There were 19 billion years or so of history and God’s creative activity before we appeared.

Modern Cosmology – the scientific study of the universe as a whole – no longer sees the universe as an infinite changeless arena in which events take place. (Newton) The universe is an evolving, expanding being. Its origin is the oldest of mystery.

In the early 1900’s Edwin Hubble made the startling discovery that our Milky Way galaxy is not alone. It is just one of many galaxies, or “island universes” as Hubble dubbed them, swimming in space. A century later with new equipment the mission has surveyed tens of thousands of galaxies – some are 13 billion light years from earth. The entire universe is still in the throws of creation.

If humans can come to understand this emerging scientific cosmology, we may see from what we know of the early universe that we are actually part of an extraordinary adventure. With this mind-expanding imagery, this cosmology gives us a new cosmic perspective, a powerful source of awe, and a potential source of meaning in our everyday lives.

Matthew Fox states that the New Cosmology is the opposite of fundamentalism. It’s about trust: trusting nature, including human nature, our dreams, our bodies, our imaginations. It emphasizes creativity rather than obedience. Above all, the New Cosmology sets the human agenda within the context of the cosmos rather than the man-made world we’ve been living in since the enlightenment.

Wendell Berry: “Perhaps the greatest disaster of human history is one that happened to, or within, religion: that is the conceptual division between the holy and the world, the excerpting of the Creator from creation.”

Dear Ones, this little (as planets go) rather insignificant planet is our home planet. In all that we have seen and discovered, there is none like it. Go to the NASA web site and see the pictures. This watery, beautiful, blue home planet is our home planet. Every step we take is on holy ground. “For in Christ all things were created in heaven and in earth….Christ is before all things, the one in whom all things hold together.”

High Risk! High Stakes! Earth is in the Balance.

Sermon preached by Reverend Robin Reed at First Congregational United Church of Christ, Appleton, Wisconsin on November 25, 2007.