April 6                                                                   John 11:1-45

Who is God?

The second question from the Baltimore catechism of my youth, after "who made me?" was the question "who is God?" The answer struck me, even at that early age as curiously circuitous, answering the second question with the first. Nevertheless, I've been searching and thinking about this question pretty much my entire life. Then one day I was listening to Bishop Knisely talk about "particle theory", and a curious idea began to frame itself in my mind (where else?) What if God meant precisely what the bible tells us? That is that God is, in fact, everywhere, in us and around us at the same time. What if we've been looking for God, to paraphrase the song, in all the wrong places?

What if God is a particle, or rather, a huge cloud of the most seemingly insignificant particles... the most minute particles... the most difficult to see particles in the universe. Every bit of matter and energy consists of these particles, indeed, cannot exist without them. Incorporated in each of these is the very DNA of the universe.  Humans each get one. WE call it our "soul". We can't see it, but we feel it. We can't touch it, but it touches us.  It is God in us and us in God.

Jesus, perhaps, was made entirely of these particles. Contained in that human form were the particles of Abraham and Moses, Elijah and Job, David and John the Baptist.  Our own particle is drawn to him like a magnet, and there is a charge within each of these particles that draws one to the other. When we pray earnestly together in this church, our particles converge to create a force for goodness that can change each of us, and occasionally the world.

When we die, hopefully our particle joins the cloud of particles that IS God, IS goodness in the world, the souls of all the faithful departed that envelopes the universe and protects it.

So... to this Gospel of John.  This theatrical Jesus notwithstanding, what's going on behind the scenes here. Lazarus dies. Watch Lazarus' infinitesimal particle, his soul, leave his body and fly off to join that cloud of all the faithful departed. But before he can join that cloud, Jesus draws him back. See how that tiny spark returns to the tomb, reenters Lazarus' body and reignites the life in him.  He sits up... swings his feet over the edge of the cold, hard stone and just dangles his legs, waiting for the his redeemer to call him out of the tomb.  His feet are asleep, his shoulders ache.

"Hmmm?" Should I remove the shroud?"

"No" says Jesus, "It'll ruin the effect".

I am obviously not a theologian; this is just a rather absurd idea. To me, though, no more absurd than a world without God, without Jesus calling us to him, redeeming us over and over again. So, as James Taylor once said, "If it helps you to sleep..." well then...

Fred Mason