Divine Grace Happens

To those of you who were present, I apologize that this is not yet the complete text of the message I delivered. I spoke of some things that I hadn't written down and I am going to have to wait until next week for a recording of the service so I can transcribe the rest of the message I offered. I have also not completed my citations or bibliography for this sermon and I will be doing so during this coming week. This is what I had before me.

Divine Grace Happens - Delivered at First Congregational Church of Murphys, CA on 10/17/2010.

Deut 4:4-9

Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Eph 4:4-6

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad. (barukh shem kevod malkhuto le’olam va’ed.) Hear, Oh Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. (Blessed is the name of his glorious majesty forever and ever.)

The Hebrew word echad that defines Adonai in the Jewish Shema prayer can mean a unity, rather than a singularity. In other words, the oneness of God, in this Bible verse in Hebrew, can be interpreted as being a oneness that unites all of the various and diverse parts of itself, just as the human body can be described as being a unity composed of various parts such as arms and legs and hands and internal organs, etc. So God could be considered a unified oneness that is, nonetheless, composed of any number of parts.

I think that Paul’s description of God in the letter to Ephesus leads to a similar conclusion. The Greek words eis theos kai pater panton have been translated almost invariably as “one God and Father of, or above, all.” But the term panton really denotes a sense of something that is “altogether,” or the sum of all its parts. The same word panton is used in the two following phrases, epi panton, meaning “over all” or "over altogetherness," and dia panton, which is “through all” or "altogetherness." But the final phrase is en pasin which means “in everything” not “in all.” Pasin is a much more comprehensive word than panton and has more of a cosmic connotation. A more direct meaning of this verse might be something like, “There is one God and father (the Greek is pater so I'm staying with "father" in my translation.) of all that exists, who is over all that exists, through all that exists, and permeates the entirety of the cosmos.”

I know this has been pretty technical but I needed to show that there is this concept in the Bible that God is not just “out there” somewhere, either watching every little thing we say and do and tallying up our brownie points, or just kicking back and occasionally sticking a toothpick in to see if we are still only half-baked. The idea of God’s nature that I think is shown in these two well-known verses is that God is fully present in everything that is.

If, as Paul Tillich said some fifty or more years ago, God is the “ground of all being,” then this idea of God being the “one,” the echad, or the altogetherness, panton, or even cosmic everything, pasin, is more than just a mystical metaphor for God; it is a reality that is actually physical in nature but which we have simply not yet found a way to demonstrate empirically. Physicists are just realizing that we are still unable to perceive about 90% of all the matter that must exist somewhere in the universe. This missing material is called “dark matter” and the principle that may animate it is called “dark energy.” We know it must be there because we can take measurements of some kind that show it’s missing. But it is absolutely invisible to us with our current methods of perception.

I actually find that somewhat comforting. We mighty human brainiacs are still unable to explain more than about 10% of reality which leaves plenty of room for us to play around in and discover and imagine and create.

Last week I talked about the story of the original sin in the Garden of Eden and I suggested that our fault was not so much disobedience to God’s commandments as it was a choice to go seek our own knowledge and to form our own perceptions and opinions about all we can discover for ourselves. This has a tendency to lead us away from God and from full union with God as the source of all that we can know about our universe and ourselves. This separation from the source of our knowledge illustrates the very definition of sin which is: that which separates us from being in full relationship with God. In other words, we become so seduced by the knowledge we can discover about everything for ourselves that we forget God and not only that God is the creator but that the Divine “breath” or spirit, if you will, permeates everything and gives not only form but soul to everything that is.

I’d like to clarify right here that the soul of a thing or being is not the same as Spirit. Spirit is the spiritus sanctus, the Divine Breath. In Greek the word for “wind” is anemos. Then in the Latin anima, the wind or breath, is the animating principle of all life. When the ancient philosophers talked about the anima mundi they were referring to the “soul of the world.” The Spirit is that which animates life. It is the life force, if you will. The soul, on the other hand, is that mysterious non-physical form of a thing or being, or at least one of those kinds of matter that we cannot currently perceive, which is animated by Spirit. Finally then bodies, or physical manifestations, are animated by souls. It is clear when something or someone dies that some sort of animating force has left it. From the moment the animation leaves a body that physical form begins to break down. It loses cohesion and it is literally life-less. It is generally thought that the soul is what has left the body. So what then is the soul, really? And where does it come from?

Well, if you were following my linguistic exploration a few minutes ago you know what I think, already. I think our souls are all just chunks of whatever it is that God is. The Creation account in Genesis 1 tells us that we are made in the image and likeness of God. What if what we are, incorporeally, is just little pinches of God-stuff? We already know that we share in our very cells some of the same molecules that made up stars billions of years ago.

One of the foremost theoretical physicists of the twentieth century was David Bohm, who applied the majority of his time to something called quantum field physics. Barbara Brown Taylor was a working minister and college professor when she encountered David Bohm’s work and wrote the following about his impact on her theology:

…in [his] study [David] caught a glimpse of reality in which the universe neither occupies space and time nor contains many different things.. Rather, he says, it is one interwoven thing that takes time and space seriously but not too seriously -- perhaps by treating them as idioms that the universe finds necessary in order to communicate itself to observers.


I have no more than a glimpse of his glimpse, but what it suggests is that the universe has a memory that predates the Big Bang. Back before that explosion sent energy racing every which way at speeds faster than light, there was the egg of the universe in which all places were one place and all things were one thing…. The beauty of this reality I have no image for was its unity, its total coherence. Mind, matter and time were not different yet. They were all floating in the same yolk. Then the universe was born and the one became many. Quantum particles became planets, galaxies, clusters and superclusters. Atoms became blue-green algae, toads, palm trees and swans. Space became here or there, as time became then or now.


But deep down in the being of these things remains the memory of their being one, which makes them behave in ways that torture scientists. Space and time are not separable. Light is both particle and wave. A particle way over there responds instantly to a particle way over here, as if each could read the other's mind.


If I understand my glimpse of Bohm's glimpse, then our mental torture comes about only because we insist on conceiving reality as many when it is truly and deeply one. All appearances to the contrary, "the universe remains as it was in the beginning, when all places were one place, all times one time, all things the same thing."

Rupert Sheldrake is one of the world’s most innovative biologists and writers and is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory. During the 1990s he collaborated with Matthew Fox on a series of forums in which the two discussed reality and the meaning of all life in the universe. One of Sheldrake’s most interesting contributions to this conversation is the idea that the theory of the “field” has replaced the concept of the “soul.” For instance, the anima mundi, the soul of the world, of ancient philosophy has only within the last few centuries been replaced by the earth’s gravitational field. Sheldrake and Fox like the idea of “field” as a metaphor for the soul because fields are fluid and permeable, they contract and expand, they respond to other fields and attract each other. Their animating principles are largely those of habit, but they also seem to be influenced by the apparently random, surprising and sometimes even whimsical workings of the divine breath blowing through the universe, or the spiritus sanctus. Of course, Matthew Fox’s favorite aspect of fields is that you can play in them.

Fox’s most important contribution to this conversation, as far as I am concerned, is his knowledge of the writings of the Christian mystics like Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhart. The most fascinating consensus arises between these three visionaries which is that they all declared the human body to inhabit the soul. They all considered the soul to be the dwelling place of our bodies. This means, most emphatically, that our souls are not limited to the confines of our bodies! Fox and Sheldrake talk about our perceptions as occurring not inside our brains, as cognitive psychology suggests, but that we actually encounter each other, soul to soul, energy field to energy field, somewhere outside these bone Baggies we call skin. So our souls could actually be considered the fields of our beingness; which our philosophers and theologians might consider to be some form of the divine energy, and scientists and theoreticians are only just exploring in quantum physics and referring to as the creative and utterly unpredictable vibrations of the universe.

Last January I attended the Earl Lectures at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. The title of the lectures was, “Spiritual Beings Having a Human Experience.” I really like that phrase because I have long known this about us, that we are not human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience. We are spiritual beings; that is, our most fundamental essence is animated by the life force we call Spirit and it is not only “immaterial” in so far as we understand the nature of matter but it is also indestructible. Why? Our souls are made of the same stuff that God is, of course. But now, finally, we come to the big question, what is God “made” of?

Well, we already know! We declare it all the time; God is…Love. Yep, our souls are composed of that substance we refer to as love. The life force itself is love, as well. Whoops! Wait a minute! We already determined that Spirit and soul are not the same thing. But Love, God’s very being-ness, is like light which is both particle and wave. Love is both the substance of our souls as well as the life force which animates the souls of not only people but all living things and even those objects we consider inanimate. Love is the force that binds everything in the universe together. This makes sense if we think of all matter as some sort of physical expression of God’s self, which is love.

In our single-minded insistence that this planet and our short lived little bodies are the extent of what is really “real” in the universe we often consider love a weaker force than fear, out of which come anger and hatred and all of the other states of being we deem so destructive. But love is the very medium in which we exist, just like water is the medium in which a fish lives and air is the physical medium in which our bodies exist. Love is the spiritual equivalent to gravity, only greater and more suffused. We actually exist in a suspension of love, like amoeba in a drop of salt water. Our souls float around in love and bump into each other and join up with each other and split off from each other, growing and shrinking, depending upon how well we nourish them, and these bodies we imagine are so solid and so relatively powerful in comparison to that which we cannot perceive with our five major senses, are just the tools our souls use to express themselves in the material world.

Now, ordinarily we keep our souls fitting pretty closely to our physical bodies but the mystics tell us that our souls are actually infinite “fields,” just like love is an infinite field, and that we can actually “grow” our souls. What sort of things, do you suppose, might be so nourishing to our souls that they would grow?