What do you think—does life exist only upon the planet Earth, or is life also out there in some other galaxies somewhere? We have not found it yet, not as far as we can tell. You know there is no purely scientific reason to assume the existence of life elsewhere. Just because it’s here does not require that it be elsewhere.
So then, when we confess in the Nicene Creed that God created “all that is, seen and unseen,” and then also that the Holy Spirit is “the Lord and Giver of life,” are we saying that God made the whole vast universe but maybe chose only to put life in one small planet in the orbit of a minor star at one end of a third-rate galaxy? Really? Of course that’s not unlike God having chosen David from all the more likely sons of Jesse, indeed from all the other persons living in the world that day. But even if it makes sense Biblically that doesn’t make it easier to believe.
It is strange that life should be so rare, because the necessary elements of life are widespread in the universe. All you need is for the five elements of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur to start forming compound molecules, provided that some of the oxygen and hydrogen are already formed into water, H
But that’s the trick, because to do that, those elements have to go against the Second Law of Thermodynamics and have to counter the natural resistance of entropy. So life would be that force, that drive, that inexplicable drive that seems to want to form those compound molecules, and keeps forming them into ever more complex structures until you get to ant colonies and blue whales and the human brain. That’s life, so extremely simple, and yet so rare.
We don’t know how this drive arose within the universe. The laws and theories of astrophysics do not predict it nor account for it. We can make our guesses only when it comes to our own planet. Scientists suggest that this drive must have spontaneously self-generated a couple billion years ago in earth’s primordial soup. Okay. But if that happened once why doesn’t it ever happen any more? Right now absolutely everything alive has inherited its life from a parent or progenitor. So then to get life going did some spark come from the outside? We have not been able to replicate such an event in our laboratories. Life is all around us and we still can’t explain it.
Life distinguishes the planet Earth. You could argue that life is that system which distinguishes our planet from the other planets. Life is very much more than just those five elements forming compounds; it’s all the profusion of protein-building and DNA-constructing and organic creativity and evolutionary invention and then bacteria and then eye spots and then orchids and spider webs and hummingbirds and camouflaging octopuses, not to mention singing and dancing and wine-making and love-making. All that is life; only with life do we get all that. And only on this planet?
Science tells us that for all this to exist it took exquisite fine-tuning of the energies and elements. One tiny difference since the Big Bang here or there, and none of this exists. Is that fine-tuning just coincidental? Was it God’s guiding hand? Was it the Holy Spirit who touched the spark of life into those five elements to give the inner drive to form new compounds? Whatever it was, apparently that first spark is all it took, because once it gets going, life asserts itself. Well, it has to, because it must assert itself against entropy—life is that which swims upstream against the press of entropy.
You can see how strong this opposition is by how quick and irreversible is death. You take your last breath, and in no time all your cells go out. Once they go out that’s it, they’re dead, and no force in the world can ever turn them on again. Your wonderful body becomes that awful thing we call dead meat, and all your once-living proteins are now only food for other living things. And yet—and yet a seed, a little dry mustard seed, can hold its life in suspension for many years. Such a mystery.
Life can be cut-throat and unforgiving. Life is as fragile as it is powerful. Life has to assert itself to stay alive. Life gambles, life experiments, life invents, life evolves, life adds variations, life adds order in opposition to entropy. Life is driven to grow and develop and expand. Like a seed within the ground. The farmer scatters it and then sleeps and rises and counts on it to have its way.
So the parable of the Lord Jesus is not coincidental. The life that he talks about in his parable is not just a homey example. It’s not that organic life is just neutral and you can add spirituality onto it. In the Bible, even ordinary biological life belongs to the Kingdom of God and is in the providence of God and under the sovereignty of God. You don’t have to be a six-day-creationist to believe that life on earth is in God’s purpose, and you can accept the whole theory of evolution and still believe that God ordains it and desires it, and you can fully go along with modern science and believe that God is the source of life and the Lord of life, and that what life serves in all of its mystery and majesty is what God wants it to serve. You can believe, not unreasonably, that the drive that’s in life is the drive that God has given it, and that drive is part of the parable. Ordinary biological life on earth belongs to the kingdom of God.
But if life asserts itself there is a problem. The inner drive is a problem in the case of our species, which is unique among all the species because of our strange self-awareness. We assert too far, and we come to think of our lives as our own. We decide that the main purpose of our lives is self-realization and our operative stance is self-validation. These things have their place, but as every sin is the perversion of a virtue, so these natural assertive drives in us become rebellious and idolatrous and demonic. We want freedom from everything but ourselves. Selves get selfish. And destructive.
But if we think of the planet as God’s garden, that it belongs not to us but to God, and that God has put us in it as stewards to serve God’s purposes and not our own, then we find that confining, like we’re the zookeepers of God’s vast zoo or the servants on some planetary Downtown Abbey. We don’t want to be servants, thank you very much, and we assert ourselves against the rule of God, or if we’re religious we say that we are loyal and yet we keep side-stepping the rules of God. And the cost of our invention and creativity is dwindling biodiversity and accelerating desertification, not to mention our constant violence and inhumanity to each other, and what war shall we start this week?
The assertiveness of life within our species is a terrible force unless it’s countered by the fear of God. Fearing God. Modern people hear that as a negative. Well, that’s as it should be. There should be some negative in your relationship to God. There is part of you of which God is your enemy and rightly so. God is your death as well as life. Your fear of God is the sensation of the vast disparity between yourself and God, who finally does say that you must die. Your life force which is so precious to you must go out. And yet it’s in love that God says that, that God spares you from the awful possession of a life of your own that will go on forever and ever in infinite assertion. It is a loving who God takes back the gift of life from you, even when you struggle to hang on to it.
You are choosing to not live for yourself. You are choosing the offer in the Epistle by St. Paul, who says that "Jesus died so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them." You’re handing your life back to God, all your assertion and your right to life, and yes, from the outside this looks likes servanthood, but this service is not servility. In fact, it gives St. Paul a new kind of assertion, and twice he says that he has confidence. You can feel his drive and energy. You can be just as assertive and creative, but in the project of your own conversion. That’s the Christian offer that I remind you of again this week. There is no proof. But try it.
Because you don’t have to maintain your own Christian life. If you’re in Christ, boom, "there is a new creation" anyway. You don’t have to force it any more than the farmer can force the seed within the ground. God has planted mustard seeds within you that will grow up and branch out within you to give space and shelter within you to all the various birds of your peculiar personality. Because your life belongs to the kingdom of God. God is taking that force of life in you, which was given to you at your birth, God is carrying your life into the new life of the world to come. If that new life will have even greater mysteries, it will still enjoy the familiar certainty of God’s love for you.
Copyright © 2015, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment