Imago Christi
We once thought the earth was stationary and the heavens revolved around us. It made sense of what happens in the dome over our heads, day and night, and it would still make sense if all we went on was the sky.
Humans abandoned this perspective a long time ago. When they have a reason to think about it, most today imagine the sun is the still point of our solar system; that the planets circle a fixed sun.
Yet now we know even the sun is moving at enormous speed. Like a comet, it hurls along the outskirts of our galaxy, ripping through space at 720,000 kilometers per hour.
And the earth? Along with the other planets and their moons, we spiral in a vortex around our star, held by its invisible magnetism, spinning through space in precise paths around a fiery ball traveling at an inconceivable pace.
A couple of Saturdays ago, I stood in the chapel at Kensington Church, serving Eucharist to a man and woman as they became one flesh.
There we were, standing still, even though everything is moving.
A vast power is ever at work, giving us the illusion that we are not moving when we—and all things—are actually in constant motion.
There is an energy we cannot comprehend.
The One who holds all these things together—the expanse of ever-moving space and time—chose the humility of a feed trough for a nursery, then chose to be still in a particular place and time, bound by the laws of the universe he handcrafted, bound in flesh, nailed to a tree by our evil, bleeding to death for the life of the world that rejected and yet rejects God.
This is the energy the gospels describe as Incarnate Love. The cross is not a power that the world knows; it’s a powerlessness that overcomes all other powers.
Somehow in a mystery this One, this Jesus—the very image of the Father and the human God intended all humans to be—shows us that in stillness and surrender the real power that holds the swirling galaxies in their courses is a voluntary powerlessness, the deep humility of a dying manservant who is also Lord of the heavens that are always on the move.
In our stillness, at the altar, a stillness made possible by constant energy, the wedded couple and I remembered Christ’s sacrifice, the surrender that sustains all that is made. Bread. Wine. Body. Blood. God. Man.
And so the bride and groom in that still moment by the altar in the chapel taste and see the God who’s self-sacrificial love creates, energizes, and preserves, who serves all things by a radical love, and calls those made in his image to participate in his divine humility by losing their life in order to gain it.
A few days before the ceremony, I was sitting in my car in our driveway, and to my left, hovering and landing, sweeping from blossom to blossom, a team of bees were at work around a Russian Sage, serving their queen and colony, and me and you, and the entire ecosystem, like they do, their lives a small participation in the great Love that lays down its thrice-corded life in powerlessness.
Here are the bees, in orbits circling their microcosm, serving the flowers, serving life, serving us.
And so it is with everything. Sacrifice makes the world that is founded by the Three whom John calls a singular Love.
Yet somehow we imagine in our conceit that this Love does not exist, even with all this moving mystery, great and small, that is here to serve our existence—the stars in their courses, the bees who tend to our gardens.
No wonder that all of this seems so distant from our idea of love. Does this have anything to do with larger turnouts at wedding receptions by those who skip the ceremonies, where in stillness the sacrifice of the invisible God made visible makes demands on our definition of love?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In