"Something To Consider"

Many of us who grew up in the church don’t realize that we’ve inherited a pretty blurry cosmology: We understood God to be usually male, separate from our world somewhere up there in the clouds, who stands back and judgmentally observes the goings on of our universe and humanity’s faults and failings. This no longer works as we evolve in our understanding of the universe, its creation and how the spiritual and physical world are connected as one. Jesus of Nazareth, referred to as a Jewish Rabbi in the Christian New Testament explains it very well in the gospel of John 14: 20 “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”  Or in John 14: 11  “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.”

This old view of the created order has gone a long way in perpetuating the idea that we are isolated from each other and from God and that there is something inherently wrong with us and the world. Christianity’s adherence to a Greek philosophical idea that the physical world of matter and the spiritual world of spirit are separate.  This has perpetuated a split between “God-talk” and science.  We now know today that the word God is just a word, a name we have accepted that describes for humans the creative energy where everything both physical and spiritual find it’s origins.  Psalm 19: 1 “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”  Once this creative force reviled its power {the big bang} or the clap of its hands if you like to use a metaphor, the first Atom was created.  Note the spelling, it is not Adam, but either way, matter and spirit were somehow ingeniously created at the same moment in space and time, science does not yet know how, it only knows that it happened.  The rest is universal history.  Over the centuries there have been many myths created by many cultures to explain how the universe and humans came into the picture but one thing for sure is it all took place through an Atom.  Science and Theology are not at odds over creation, we just need to begin to deeply listen to both perspectives. Let us not remove the mystery, myth and metaphor as they to have there place in our story.