Reading: Jeremiah 23:23-29
Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord. I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, “I have dreamed, I have dreamed!” How long? Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back—those who prophesy lies, and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart? They plan to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, just as their ancestors forgot my name for Baal. Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat? says the Lord. Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces? Reflection The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a time of great upheaval and excitement across the West. This is the time known as the Enlightenment, perhaps better labeled as the Age of Reason (see Meic Pearse’s outstanding history book of the same name) because it was a time when people championed rationality and reason above all else. Science, the observation of the natural world, was originally a task undertaken by theologians. Isaac Newton is a great example of this, being as much a theologian as he was a scientist. But during the Age of Reason, people began to separate out faith and science, looking for an understanding of the natural world as far away from any conversation of God as possible. People started to become Deists, those who believed in the existence of God, an almighty creator or authority, but who were unwilling to claim anything further about this deity. People began to seek out what Peter Gay labels as “Newton’s physics without Newton’s God.” It was around this time that the Christian apologist William Paley coined the now famous analogy of the watch and the watchmaker. He argued that the intricacies of all creation, the mechanics of physics, the complicated workings of biology, the reactions of chemistry, all point to the existence of a creator. All creation, the wheeling of the planets, the growth of trees, the passing of the seasons, is like a great and complicated watch which God, the divine watchmaker, set in motion. This argument was originally meant to bolster belief in God amidst a growing class of intellectuals who no longer believed in a God. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. While this analogy still champions belief in God, it reduces God to mere provenance: God sets the universe in motion and then steps away to let it “do its thing.” We are still living out the ramifications of the Age of Reason and it is into this particularly agnostic culture that Jeremiah’s words resound: “Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak faithfully.” And the faithful word of God is this: “Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord.” Despite what philosophers have extrapolated from scientific findings, our God is not a God far off. Our God is a God close by, a God who fills heaven and earth. God is not some watchmaker who set the universe in motion and then stepped away from it. God is rather at the center of everything that has ever been created: the base of all creation is the atom; the heart of the atom is the nucleus; within each nucleus lies protons; inside the proton is quark; and within the quark, is God. God—the heart of all creation. --Jim Vitale Prayer We thank you, God, that you are not far off, but near; you are closer to us than we are to ourselves. Remind us always of your closeness. Amen.
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