Where is God?

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Christmas I, Year B, 12/31/23

Readings: Isaiah 61:10-62:3 (Clothed with the garments of Salvation), Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7 (Adopted by God), John 1:1-18 (In the beginning was the Word)

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

Where is God?

When you think of him where does God reside? 

Hold onto that first image that comes into your mind. 

For me it is the cosmos. In 1977, NASA launched a probe known as Voyager 1 to study the outer reaches of space beyond our solar system. As the probe traveled further and further out into the abyss of space, its camera was turned around to take one final picture of our solar system before it faded into darkness. The image that resulted is a famous photograph known as The Pale Blue Dot. In this image, the sun’s rays can be seen beaming down through the great expanse of interstellar space, and caught shimmering in one of those rays, is us. A pale blue dot barely the size of a single pixel. This miniscule dot is the smallest self-portrait of all humankind in our earthly habitation ever recorded. The scale of the portrait is staggering. It’s truly impossible to wrap our mind around how small our worldly existence is compared to the vastness of the universe, of which this picture itself is only a minute fraction.

Somewhere, perhaps everywhere, in the darkness surrounding this pale blue dot of ours is where I imagine God residing. I, like many, imagine the vast expanse of heavens beyond our planet to be the dwelling place of God for a number of reasons. First, because frankly, it can be hard to imagine that God is truly here with us on earth at times. And second, because of passages from scripture such as today’s Gospel known as the prologue to John. The prologue to the entire Gospel of John begins with these truly cosmic words:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

How John chooses to begin his Gospel is a far cry from the small and cozy nativity stories in Bethlehem that we have heard told in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels throughout the past month. It’s a fascinating literary and theological choice that John made to begin the good news of God’s arrival on earth by zooming way out to set the scene in the context of a world far bigger than the small one we are most familiar with.

And what John reminds us of is true. God is far bigger, larger, and more expansive than even our most sophisticated technology is capable of capturing. God may even exist entirely outside of the material world as we know it.

But the Gospels also tell us that something else is true about where God resides. The God of the cosmos, who created heaven and earth, and who dwells in some otherworldly realm where he is praised eternally by cherubim, seraphim, and the whole company of saints departed – also dwells with us. Not just in a vague and metaphorical sense, but literally, in the flesh. This is the paradox and miracle of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus, the incarnate Word, dwelt with God at the dawn of creation, even before time itself existed. Long before this pale blue dot of ours existed, another far brighter light shined in the darkness. And this light was, Jesus Christ, who was God, and was with God. 

Then, this light, being born of the Blessed Virgin Mary, took on human flesh and dwelt with us, so that we might know that God had not left us alone in a great expanse of mystery.

John’s Gospel of a Christ that is cosmic and Mathew and Luke’s Gospels of a Christ that is earthly are two sides of the same coin. These two understandings of God as being infinitely close and infinitely far are not antithetical, but are a perfect compliment to one another, which is why John’s cosmic prologue prefaces his version of the incarnation.

Because of John’s prologue we can understand with greater clarity what actually took place in the incarnation of God in Jesus. You see, the incarnation is a pivotal point in an unfolding story of humanity’s relationship with God that began long before we were even conscious that God had a relationship with us.

This story of relationships mirrors the trajectory of human life itself and begins in holy darkness before the dawn of creation. In the beginning everything was in perfect harmony and wholeness within God. We can imagine this as a state of being that is similar to being in our mother’s womb, where all of our lives began. In the womb we were perfectly content and utterly surrounded by a love we didn’t even know existed. That love held us, fed us, and nurtured every part of our being.

Then, when we were born, our mothers continued to care for us, guide us, and be with us, just as God cared for and accompanied Adam and Eve in the garden when our world was birthed into existence.

Eventually, however, as we grew and learned and became more conscious of the agency we were given to choose between good and evil, those choices complicated our lives. It’s a paradox that the very free will which allows us to choose to love God and one another is the thing that also allows us to make choices that alienate us from the love that once held us so fully.

This chapter in the human relationship with God is akin to the growing pains of adolescence that follow us into adulthood and cause us great distress and isolation.

As our awareness of the world and its difficult choices grow larger, our awareness of God’s presence with us can grow smaller and smaller, even sometimes to the point of feeling utterly abandoned by God.

This is the point of the story where the incarnation becomes everything. God, like human parents, wanted us to have the freedom to choose the life that was best for us, but also knew that we would fall short of that life through our choosings.

And so what God did to remedy the pain and loneliness that would inevitably come from our choices, was to find the most beautiful way to show us that that primordial love of the mother’s womb still encompassed us.

John reminds us that God did this from before the very dawn of creation, even before we had the opportunity to feel the pain of existence in the first place. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

As we reached a pinnacle of our heartache and despair and alienation from love, God then sent the Word to dwell among us. God sent his Son, who was with Him from the beginning, to “take for himself the garment of our mortal flesh,” as Isaiah poignantly writes, in order that we might know that God was there to rescue us from our isolation. (Is. 51:6) 

Just as we, like the Voyager probe, were fading further and further away from our habitation in God, the Son of God was drawing closer and closer to pull us back to safety.

The incarnation is about us being rescued and gradually drawn closer to that state of prenatal belovedness in the womb of a God who is infinitely far and infinitely near. You see, I don’t see that darkness that surrounds our pale blue dot as emptiness at all. I see it as like that womb which holds and protects us as we are reborn into the primordial love that held us from the beginning.

God sent His son to live and die, with and for us, so that we could be reminded that God had adopted us too as beloved children. You see, we were never alone on that pale blue dot, and we never will be. God resides on that dot. God resides outside of that dot. And the love of God’s incarnate Word, Christ Jesus, will be with us on this dot, from the beginning til’ the end of creation.

For in the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Amen.