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In the name of God; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
We make meaning in our world in lots of different ways. That’s something we talk about at RELATA. When I preached two weeks ago, I talked about making meaning by using frameworks to understand the world. We have frameworks that we carry with us from childhood that shift, grow, and change as we shift, grow, and change. Occasionally, as we grow older, we have disruptions, experiences, or relationships that cause us to rethink our frameworks. That is all part of being human.
One framework that we all share in this place is the liturgical calendar. It is a spiritual practice that guides us through the seasons of the church year. We go from Advent into Christmas and Epiphany. We move from Lent into Eastertide and Pentecost. Then, we take a break and settle into Ordinary Time, or the green and growing time, until we start the whole cycle again. These seasons provide a predictable rhythm to our common worship life as well as our days.
Now, stay with me here. I’m going to give us the 30,000-foot view before zooming in. In Advent, we prepare for the birth of Jesus, and in Christmas and Epiphany, we celebrate the incarnation of God in flesh. That’s Jesus! Lent is a time of introspection and denial as we seek to empathize with Jesus in anticipation of the Resurrection. And here we are today, sitting on the edge of Eastertide before it gives way to the Feast of Pentecost next Sunday.
The beauty of cycling through these seasons year after year is that while they do not change, we do. Each time we encounter a new season, we are different than we were the year before. We are different because life never stands still. Each year brings with it new insights and revelations, as well as new pains and sorrows.
When Easter Day came about this year, I found myself in a new place. The idea of the Cosmic Christ had sparked my imagination, and I briefly touched on it in my sermon at the Easter Vigil. In this season of Easter, I have always struggled to make sense of the resurrected Jesus. The transition from the historical man we journey with in Lent to the resurrected Jesus of Easter always causes me to stumble.
Each Sunday in Eastertide, we hear stories of the disciples struggling to understand what has happened, trying to make sense of this earth-shattering disruption. In the resurrection, their frameworks are blown to pieces, and they are left sifting through the rubble of the way they understood the world and how it has all changed completely. For whatever reason, the way it made sense to me this year, my 45th time cycling through the 50 days of Easter, was the Cosmic Christ.
The gospel appointed for today from the Gospel according to John is a tough one. It is the end of a section called the Farewell Discourse, in which Jesus is preparing the disciples for his death and resurrection. This small section at the end, the part we heard today, is often called the High Priestly Prayer. That makes it sound theologically sound and important. But in reality, I find it to be convoluted and confusing. One article I read this week called this passage a “word salad,” which made me laugh out loud.
Eugene Peterson’s contemporary translation of the first few verses goes like this: “I’m praying not only for them but also for those who will believe in me because of them and their witness about me. The goal is for all of them to become one heart and mind—just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, so they might be one heart and mind with us. Then the world might believe that you, in fact, sent me. The same glory you gave me, I gave them, so they’ll be as unified and together as we are—I in them and you in me. Then they’ll be mature in this oneness and give the godless world evidence that you’ve sent me and loved them in the same way you’ve loved me.”
How are we to make sense of these poetic and convoluted words from John’s Gospel? And furthermore, what are we supposed to make of them with regards to our life of faith and how we choose to act as Jesus’ disciples in our complex modern world?
In this sermon, I want to expand your thinking around Jesus to include the Cosmic Christ because it has helped to shift my framework, and perhaps it will help you too. The historical person of Jesus is of primary importance. He was both fully human and fully divine, and his life continues to impact our faith and practices in significant ways. But the Cosmic Christ is a broader concept.
The idea of the Cosmic Christ goes all the way back to creation. In the beginning, when God created the world, God infused everything with a divine spark: rocks and water, plants and organisms, animals and people. From the Big Bang through evolution, God is ever-present in the beauty of all created things. Think of Creation as the first incarnation, that is, the enfleshment of Spirit. This is the presence of holiness in all things. This is the first chapter of Genesis when God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the light inside of everything.
Another incarnation is Jesus—God in flesh. This is the man who walked the earth in 1st century Palestine. It is his life, his death, resurrection, and ascension. And the next incarnation is us. That’s what Jad wrote about in his letter inside the bulletin today. He says, “Our faith is as much about the process as it is about the ultimate ends. Put differently, our faith is based on a fundamental act of translation: the divine word ‘spoken’ into the human language of flesh. And that salvific act of transforming the radically foreign into the humanly familiar doesn’t stop there; Jesus didn’t stick around after the Resurrection to evangelize to us as some immortal missionary—Jesus built the Church, the second incarnation of the body of Christ.”
The incarnation is a much larger event than we typically consider. It is Jesus, and it is so much more. We are part of the incarnation. You are part of the incarnation. Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. This is the logos—the capital W—Word of John’s gospel. John’s prologue starts like this: “In the beginning was the Word (logos), 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.”
This is a sacred cosmology, the Cosmic Christ—the universal first Incarnation that was and is and is to come. This is Christ, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. In today’s passage from chapter 17, Jesus is praying for all of us. He is praying for Epiphany Parish, as we believe in him because of the witness we read about in scripture and the witness of those who have taught us. Jesus is teaching us about the oneness inherent in us—the body of Christ—another incarnation.
The goal is for all of us to become one heart and mind—just as the divine is present in Jesus and all of creation, the divine is present in you. When we recognize the belovedness, the divinity inside our own souls, we can’t help but share that with the world around us through our love and actions. When we are “mature in our oneness,” to quote the contemporary translation of verse 22, our very lives serve as witnesses to the truth and to God’s love.
The Christ Mystery is not a one-time event that happened long ago in 1st century Palestine in a world we can barely imagine. The Christ Mystery is an ongoing process throughout time—as constant as the light that fills the universe. It started with Creation, continued in the person of Jesus, and lives on inside us today. When we step into this oneness with maturity, we can’t help but see Christ in everything. You’ll see it in the faces of your loved ones, in your co-workers and friends, in the soulful eyes of your dog or cat, in the beauty of spring flowers, or the sun setting over the mountains.
The Universal Christ becomes inescapable. And at a certain point, you even see Christ in those who are most different from you, the people with whom you don’t agree about anything, the people whose life choices are incomprehensible— even them. So as we leave this place today, still lingering in the light of Easter and looking ahead to Pentecost, may we carry this expanded vision of Christ with us. May we allow our frameworks to stretch and bend in holy ways, shaped by the truth that Christ is not confined to one moment in history—but is alive in creation, alive in community, and alive in each of us.
Let us step into the world with open eyes, ready to recognize the divine spark in every face, every leaf, every breath. And may that recognition shape how we live, how we love, and how we bear witness to the One who holds all things together.