March 15, 2015 – John 3:14-21
John 3:14-21
Jesus’ Theory of Everything – The Theory of Everything
Fourth Sunday in Lent – March 15, 2015
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
The Theory of Everything is a recent film that is about the famous physicist,
Stephen Hawking.
More specifically it is about his first marriage to Jane Wilde.
Near the beginning of the film we see their courtship and the beginnings of an
invitation to love.
In an early conversation, they discuss religion.
Jane, studying medieval Spanish literature,
is a devoted Anglican, a member of the Church of England.
Stephen, studying physics at the University of Cambridge, is an atheist.
“What do atheists worship, then?” she asks.
And Stephen responds, “A single unified equation that explains everything in the universe.”
Stephen essentially devotes his life to a search for that equation,
although unfortunately we don’t really get much real science or physics in the film.
Which is a shame.
In his career, Hawking, now 72, overturned much convention thinking about
the cosmos, the universe we inhabit, and how we think about it and about time.
What we get in the film is a very conventional story about the triumph of
persistence over adversity, as Stephen must deal with the consequences of
onset ALS or motor neuron disease.
Early in his relationship with Jane, he is diagnosed with the disease,
and discovers that it will eventually rob him of all voluntary muscle movement.
He is given a prognosis of 2 years to live.
But with Jane’s help he learns to cope with his disease and becomes a
highly regarded scientist with a brilliant career as well as a celebrated author of
popular works on science such as his 10 million selling A Brief History of Time.
Much of the film focusses on the Hawkings’ marriage and the difficulties involved for Jane
of being Stephen’s caregiver, wife, mother to their three children, as well as trying to
work on her own academic career – all as Stephen’s disease progresses and
he is able to physically do less and less for himself.
As he is confined to a motorized wheelchair and loses the ability even to feed himself,
he appears to become more and more proudly and stubbornly independent,
refusing all help except his wife’s.
Which is all great – unless, of course, you happen to be his wife.
As you watch Stephen seek more and more seek for the theory that will
explain everything in the universe, what you see on film is the thing that undergirds and
makes it possible for him to even contemplate devoting his life to that search:
the love of his wife for him.
That appears to be something Stephen can’t understand in one of his equations:
early in their relationship, after he is diagnosed with ALS, he warns her against
getting involved with him.
So she simply says to him, “I love you,” to which he responds, “That is a false conclusion,”
as if love were subject to the precepts of logic or the rules of an equation.
Later, when Stephen’s father warns her against marriage to Stephen, she again says,
“I know I don’t look like a terribly strong person, but I love him.”
The intelligent, educated Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night looking for answers.
He has seen something happening in Jesus that he can’t quite explain.
He sees healing and love and celebration.
He comes genuinely looking for answers as Jesus has entered something into the
equation of the universe that Nicodemus hasn’t previous encountered.
And so he asks Jesus in confusion, “Where are you from?”
To which Jesus ultimately replies with the most famous verse in the whole New Testament,
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
that whoever trusts in him should not perish but have fullness of life.”
Martin Luther called this verse the Gospel in a nutshell,
for it spells out that God’s defining characteristic is love:
a self giving love that is willing to suffer and even die for the benefit of the world.
That’s what God is.
A personal, loving force that invites us into the same relationship of love,
as sons and daughters, as Jesus has with God: a relationship of receiving this
this self-giving love in vulnerability like a child, and
passing that self-giving love on like a child who apprentices to
his or her parent’s work.
That is what eternal life or, better, fullness of life, looks like.
Receiving a love that is willing to suffer for the sake of the beloved.
And passing on a love that is willing to suffer for the sake of the beloved.
That is what life in Christ looks like.
That is kind of what Jane Hawking’s life looks like in the film.
She receives a love in her life of faith that she passes on that enables Stephen to live and thrive.
And it seems to me that a Theory of Everything will be incomplete until it takes account of
the fact of that love, the existence of that love which no equation can grasp.
Stephen only seems to be able to think of God as a first cause for the beginning of
the universe, or as a “divine dictator” as he calls God.
But that is far removed from the God Jane – or Jesus – worships.
Jesus never has any interest whatsoever in God as an impersonal force that set off a
series of events that led to the universe: that is just not God for Jesus,
or at least anything remotely important about God for Jesus.
Rather, Jesus’ life is centred in a God who is actively, currently loving the universe
and everything in it right now and whose love is making all things new right now
and whose love is healing right now and whose love is seeking justice
for the vulnerable right now and whose forgiving is setting
people and relationships free right now.
The famous last sentences of A Brief History of Time are quoted by Stephen in the film:
Why are we here? If we ever learn this it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason. Then we would know the mind of God.
Apparently the real life Stephen Hawking thought about leaving this sentence out,
but left it in realizing it would ultimately double the sales of his book,
which it ultimately probably did.
For God so loved the world.
The word “world” in Greek is “kosmos.”
For God so loved the cosmos, is what Jesus says.
Every galaxy, every world, every star and every nebula. Every beach and every storm.
Every person, man, woman and child.
In John’s Gospel, the word “kosmos” doesn’t just describe a world of pretty rainbows and
butterflies and light.
It describes also a world of darkness and conflict and violence.
God loves the whole cosmos and in love is willing to suffer and die for it in Jesus
because God wants to redeem and restore all of it.
God loves the light parts of you and God loves the dark parts of you.
God loves the great things about our congregation and
the not so great things about our congregation.
God is willing to suffer alongside us and with us and for us in love and with love until
even our unlovely bits become lovely.
God is willing to love us even in our unloveliness so that
we too can love others in their unloveliness.
For that is the equation of love.
Why are we here? To love.
Jane Wilde was a student of medieval Spanish literature.
I don’t know if she studied the great medieval Catalan mystic and poet and theologian
Ramon Lull.
But surely she knew him and read him.
In his little masterpiece, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, he writes this:
They said to the Lover, Where did you come from?
And he answered, “I come from my Beloved.”
They asked, Where are you going? And he answered, “I go to my Beloved.”
We are on a journey in this life from love to love – for love.
The thing is, there is a personal dimension to life alongside the scientific natural one.
And they can hold hands and live together quite naturally.
The great irony in the film is that even as Stephen seeks an impersonal scientific
explanation for everything in the universe, the personal dimension right alongside him.
makes his life and that search possible in the Christian love his wife has for him.
That love has a wider compass than his theories and equations.
At one point, we hear Jane give a perfectly concise and accurate explanation of
Stephen’s theories to a guest: she has taken the trouble,
this student of medieval Spanish literature, to understand his physics completely.
That is a measure of love.
But Stephen does not, apparently, take the trouble to understand her faith completely.
These two great realms of human experience, science and religion need not be at odds.
For they have different aspects of study.
As the great physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne –
who was a colleague at Cambridge with Hawking – has said,
Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. There is more to wisdom than science. It cannot tell us why we are here or how we should live. Science masquerading as religion is as unseemly as religion masquerading as science. I will continue to believe that God who created one or an infinity of universes in love and forgiveness continues to ask us to create, to love and to forgive.
(jcpqandr.blogspot.ca/2011/02/stephen-hawking-on-god/html?m=1)
A couple of years ago I spoke about John Polkinghorne’s tea pot analogy for
the relationship between science and religion.
If we ask why a tea kettle is boiling, says Polkinghorne, we can most certainly give a
valid scientific explanation: a closed electrical circuit meets with resistance in the element of the hotplate, which conveys heat to the bottom of the kettle, which in turn causes the water molecules in the kettle to move more and more rapidly, until eventually their motion becomes sufficient to push the vapour pressure of the water higher than the atmospheric pressure and – tah dahhhh!!!! – the water boils!
But another correct explanation for why the kettle is boiling is simply this:
because I have invited someone over for tea.
This is a personal explanation for why the tea kettle is boiling and stands perfectly alongside
the scientific one.
If one way of explaining why the tea kettle is boiling is to say that I have put it on in order to
host someone for a cup of tea,
then one way of explaining the cosmos is to simply say that
the cosmos is an invitation to commune with the creator and with
the rest of creation.
So the scientific and personal or religious explanations of reality need not be in conflict,
but can complement and stand alongside one another.
Hawking couldn’t – and can’t – see that, even though in the film it appears to me that
God was standing alongside him all along in a very personal way, in love,
allowing him to live and even flourish and do his amazing work.
His theory of everything has simply not accounted for, well, everything.
So what’s my theory of everything? Here it is:
The cosmos is not just an equation waiting to be solved – although it is not less than that.
The cosmos is not just something to be wondered at in awe –
although it is not less than that, either.
The cosmos is something to be loved, actively loved, suffered for, and even died for,
every moment of every day: to be cared for, and blessed, and restored, and healed,
and loved – it and every person and animal, plant and rock, tree and river,
field and forest, sun and moon, and planet and galaxy in it.
That is my theory of everything.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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