“Why does it say, ‘I won’t
lose anyTHING he has given me’?” a classmate asked in the Sunday School class
this morning. “It seems like it should
be ‘anyONE.’”
We were reflecting on the
story in the Gospel of John in which Jesus describes himself as “the bread of
life.” In the course of his sermon on
the subject Jesus notes that, “…I won’t send away anyone who comes to me,” but
then expands that theme to acknowledge more.
“I have come down from heaven not to do my will, but the will of him who
sent me. This is the will of the one who
sent me, that I won’t lose anything he has given me.”
It’s a wonderfully wide
embrace; one that ought to puncture and start letting the air out of the
various prejudices we have erroneously assumed God props up as vigilantly as have
the rest of us. “Whites, but not blacks.”
“Protestants, but not Catholics.”
“Christians, but not the Jews who gave us spiritual birth, or Muslims,
our spiritual siblings.” “Straight
people, but not those LGBTQ+ folks.”
“Us, but not them.” “America
first,” which might make political sense but is ultimately as spiritually blind
as it is relationally naïve.
As I pondered my classmate’s
good and observant question I thought about the old adage that “history is
written by the victors.” At least those
who consider themselves victorious.
Which reminded me of Galileo and Copernicus before him (this, alas, is
the way my mind works, even in Sunday School). Theirs is a sad and tragic story, not simply
because of the harsh and despicable treatment they received, but because despite
what the science books attest and the astronauts observe, those ancient
thinkers never really convinced the rest of us.
We still blindly and arrogantly believe that we are the center of the
universe — racially, religiously, ethnically, sexually, geopolitically…
... even humanly. We like to believe that we are the big “it” —
as though the sequence in Genesis’ first account of Creation was in order of
importance. Lowly light, up through
critters and crawlers, flowers and flyers, until God finally worked God’s way
up to the really important stuff; the crown jewel of it all: us.
But of course that’s not what it says.
What Genesis actually says is that God looked back over everything
made and declared it special. “Very
good!”
Everything.
And so it makes sense, when I
think about it, that the will of this One who made it is not to lose
anyTHING. Not merely anyONE, but
anyTHING. We seem to be the only part of
God’s creation unconcerned about and completely content with the prospect of
losing the mountains and the trees, the aquifers and the streams, the air and
the birds that flutter on its breezes, the soil and the billions of life forms
contained in every teaspoon of it. Or,
as the old hymn poeticized it, “rocks and trees and skies and seas…” You know,
all those THINGS out there that aren’t human.
All that stuff that isn’t us.
But the tear contained in
every drop of rain is God’s knowing lament that we all survive together, or we
don’t survive at all. I suspect that the
sun — firstborn of creation and orbiting anchor of all that subsequently came
to be — chuckles in bemused amazement that we (the caboose in the creative
train) ever thought of it any other way.
