Hebrews 1:1-3a; 2:5-8a, 10-12; October 6, 2024; World Communion Sunday
—
“Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways.” – Hebrews 1:1
Long ago, about 14.7 billion years from this day, the building blocks of love were spoken into existence.
In wavelengths and energy, in hydrogen and helium. The first ancestors of creation, the fabric of the cosmos.
And along the lengthy process of our cosmic expansion, rocks became worlds, and solar systems spun into gravitational rotation.
All majestic and wonderful, though many inhospitable, more intolerable, and fewer yet inhabitable.
But in an interstellar burst, sent across the universe, a new word was spoken, saying, “Let there be light” – and from which our sun, planets, and a third world called Earth came into being.
And then there was silence, or more appropriately, eruptions that went unheard. Which gave way to billions of years of long whispers rising above complex experiments of microbial sequences.
And from this petri dish of primordial soup, we eventually came to be. Our neanderthal predecessors and our human ancestors, evolving with eyes and ears and a mind to understand, so to see, hear, and believe that the voice from long ago was yet still speaking, though now through burning bushes, and rainbows and whirlwinds, as the Spirit guided quill to vellum, and scrolls into parchment.
And through these Holy scriptures God chose to speak again, finding favor in us, promising that a son to be conceived would leave the realms of glory so to walk and live amongst little old us; to share in common our mortality, to suffer and die, so that we who would also ache and perish, might one day rise with him in a new world to come.
And for a long while we believed that. And approached that world with new purpose and meaning. And there was congregational expansion and spiritual formation.
But as time passed, and the ink has become dry, we’ve become more deaf and dumb, imploding from within; from the self-inflicted wounds of keystrokes; in blips and bloops, tweets and tocks, in 1s and 2s, blacks and whites, reds and blues.
And so, we remain, here alive and kicking. Divided and dividing. And deluding ourselves into believing that the voice from long ago is now no longer speaking, for in 2024 we hear only our own rumblings, and trick ourselves into thinking that it is far too dark for there to also be light.
But we are wrong.
—
In subterranean chambers, measuring 17 miles in circumference lying 575 feet underground, there exists a magnificent research facility known as CERN, home to the world’s largest and fastest supercollider known as the LHC, aka, the Large Hadron Collider (so pictured on our bulletin cover).
Smashing particles at a speed approaching light, scientists in 2012 there found evidence of the now famous Higgs Boson. Nicknamed “The God Particle” (or “the goddamn particle” due its elusiveness), scientists discovered that without its existence, none of our particles would have any mass at all. Which means no stars, no planets, and no us.
…In other words, they had to smash things together, for them to suffer and die, in order to discover a deeper meaning…
Now, the LHC took over 10 years to build and cost nearly $5 billion. And it was built to look for varying ways to answer questions from long ago of why we are here, and how it all works. In a search for a unifying field that can hold it all together; that can help explain both sense and order.
And I’d wager we built it (and build such things like it) not just because we are interested in scientific inquiry and understanding, but because we are dissatisfied with the answers and evidence that we have found elsewhere.
Especially in this world today where there seems to be an absence of order and a depravity of common sense. Where evidentially there is less progress and even littler peace, and where the promises of hope are drowned out by bombs and flash floods, as Mother Earth conspires with Human Nature to seemingly destroy us from within.
But here’s the thing, my friends; we who would despair are told that, “In these last days God has spoken to us by a Son, whom God appointed heir of all things, through whom God also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.” – Hebrews 1:2-3
By his powerful word.
A unifying force then, an elementary particle of love, that can help explain how all of this works and why we can still find purpose even when it feels like life doesn’t have any.
For after all, we must remember that it is often in darkness where God’s light shines brightest.
—
“Now God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels. But someone has testified somewhere,
‘What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals, that you care for them? You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor, subjecting all things under their feet.’
It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”
– Hebrews 2:5-10
Perfect through sufferings.
God, being ever and always mindful of us, from long ago and into eternity, allowed for a son, God’s son, to leave the realm of glory, from the safe confines of Heaven, to walk and live amongst us here. In human form. Where he would experience both suffering and death so that we might all find a deeper meaning.
Jesus could have stayed where it was light, with angels adorned in garments of radiance and white, but he elected to lower himself to get down in the muck with us here, to have communion with the world, to have communion with us humans who emerged from mere soup, and who are destined to one day return to that soup, or dust, as it were.
And he did this, my friends, so to unify us; so to bring us together, so to bridge our gap, and shore up our divides, so that we might all remember and rehear the voice which still speaks to us, just as it spoke all things into existence long, long ago.
“What are human beings that you are mindful of them?” the psalmist asks and Hebrews quotes.
Apparently, everything, my friends. Everything.
For in the incarnation and humanity of Jesus Christ, God was revealed to little old us. The exact imprint of God’s very being, the fabric of everything.
So that through Christ we wouldn’t need a particle accelerator (as cool as that is) to explain what this is all about.
But that through him, we could trust that God gets us. That God loves us. And that God has destined us for a relationship with Him, so that even through fits and starts, distance and alienation, division and isolation, we might always believe that God is pulling us back into orbit, back towards center, and into rotation around the Son, God’s Son, who gave up the realms of glory for our lowly human gravity.
So, thanks be to God and Praise be to Christ. For even in 2024, amongst the heavy burden of decay and ruin, his light shines still.
And his word speaks still.
And will so, out of love. And love always. To the end. Amen.
