Wednesday, January 02, 2013

A Dixie Cup of God

By Jim Palmer

‎(Even though publishers get upset when I post large excerpts from one of my books... well... I do it anyway. You know what they say, "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission.")

"But, then I came across one particular verse from the Book of Hebrews which ended up starting a domino effect that dismantled my notion of Sky-God, and ultimately led to the discovery that Jesus and I shared the same essential nature. In the first chapter of Hebrews, a description of Jesus reads, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3 ESV).

Yes, it sounded quite poetic, but what exactly did this mean? In what specific way was Jesus “the radiance of the glory of God,” or the “exact imprint of his nature”?

God is “spirit,” not human. This means that God has no gender, ethnicity, race, vocation, socio-economic class, political party, religion, culture, or family heritage. Since this is so, there must be some other part of Jesus—other than his human characteristics—that made him “an exact representation” of God’s being. How was Jesus the man an exact representation of God the spirit? I know what it is to be a man (I think), but I’m not clear on what it means to be a spirit.

“Spirit” is one of those words that Christians freely toss about, although its meaning is not very well defined. Defining “spirit” is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. First, I tried to define it for myself by using other words. I checked the thesaurus, which supplied me with synonyms such as “life force,” “essence,” and “energy.” But, the further I dug, the more abstract “spirit” became—which might explain why I had never explored it thoroughly. Concrete: Good; Abstract: Bad. This time, however, I made myself keep going.

The description of God as spirit seemed to depict God as a spirit being. In other words, God was analogous to energy; a formless life force that filled the entire universe. God wasn’t a Jupiter or a Zeus up in the sky; God was more like the particles of energy that underlie everything.

Wow! This was starting to sound like a Star Trek episode! “God, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Palmer. His one-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new realities, to boldly go where no sane man has gone before…” What was next, a Borg invasion?

And yet, it was all starting to line up. In Psalm 139:7, David asks, “Where could I go from your Spirit? Or where could I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139:7). The point being—nowhere! There is nothing that exists outside God. And if there is nothing that has an independent existence apart from the energy that is God—the essence of everything—if you remove the God-part of anyone or anything, it would cease to exist. As I saw it, there were only two options—Option One: God, Option Two: Nothing!

Continuing to research the theory of God as energy, one specific line of a Wikipedia article jumped out at me: “Any form of energy can be transformed into another form, but the total energy always remains the same.” Hmm. This got me thinking about God and creation. I had always thought that God created everything out of nothing. It might seem that way, but this is only because we can’t see the something from which everything was made. We can’t see God, spirit, or energy. So, it would probably be more accurate to say that God took of his energy and formed it into a variety of different things. Every blade of grass, every raindrop, every animal, every human being, every biological microorganism, every molecule of wood that forms the chair I am sitting on right now—at its essence—is God!

Following the white rabbit, I came upon a principle of quantum physics that supplied a helpful analogy. Quantum physics asserts that the whole is present in every part. And furthermore, that every individual part is a genuine expression of the whole, and yet, no one individual part is the totality of the whole in itself. I thought about how the ocean illustrates this truth. I can go to the beach and scoop up ocean water in a Dixie cup. The water in the cup contains the same properties as the entire ocean, and yet obviously, that cup of water is not the entire ocean. In the same way, as spirit or energy, the whole of God is present in every part.

Which means that, in essence, everything is a Dixie cup of God.

Uh-oh. I recalled a professor from back in my seminary days warning us against the idea that everything was God. But, it made complete sense to me. How could anything exist outside God, if God is the energy that gives all things life and existence? With this being true, I could see how every single thing in existence would be sacred because it was made from the energy that is God. For me, this took away the dividing line between secular and sacred. If everything was a unique expression of the energy of God, then no one and no thing could truly be separated from God—for how can God be separated from himself? Again, the Wikipedia entry came to mind: “Any form of energy can be transformed into another form, but the total energy always remains the same.” Whether the energy that is God is organized into the form of a blade of grass or a human being, it is still the same energy—it’s still God!"

- Jim Palmer, Being Jesus in Nashville: Finding the Courage to Live Your Life (whoever and wherever you are)