From our centering prayer video this morning, we learn about the Big Bang nearly 15 billion years ago. Scientist Neil DeGrassi ends with how big he feels as he looks and connects to the night sky and realizes that his atoms were forged in the fires of the Big Bang. The scientific explanation of the cosmic story inspires wonder in him, but I want to tell a refinement of the cosmic story, full of wonder, but one that is not against science but one that not many scientists include. There is the cosmic incarnation story embedded in the story of the creation and the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of life on the planet Earth.

A Franciscan theologian in the 13 the century John Duns Scotus claimed that the Incarnation was the first thought of God before creation. God’s Incarnation was intended before the Big Bang. That is when God actually decided to incarnate, materialize in the universe and to expose God’s vulnerable and unconditionally inclusive love for us and everything in the universe. God self exposes God’s self in Christ’s incarnation in Jesus.

We tell the story of Christ’s incarnation with Mary’s pregnancy and the birth of Jesus. But that story goes back 15 billion year ago. In the preface poem of John’s Gospel, we read, “all things came to be through him (this Word)” (John 1:3); that the Incarnate Word became human out of love, not primarily to make up for our sin but because of the infinite and unconditional love God had for creation.
In today’s scripture of the Letter to the Colossians, the hymn declares that Christ is “the first-born of all creation” (Colossians 1:15). Early Christians sang their faith convictions that Christ is the reason for creation and has a primacy in the story of the universe. The atoms of Jesus were also forged in the fiery furnace of the Big Bang. Divinity entered the atoms forged in the Big Bang.

The story of the universe is also the story of God and the utter availability of God as the incarnate Christ. Jesus is both the Incarnate Human One and the Eternal Cosmic Christ at the same time. The incarnate Christ is God’s active power and energy in the unfolding and evolving the universe.

This morning we heard an ancient hymn of a particular community in Asia Minor. One of the creative movements in the Christian movement’s reflections on Jesus as God’s Christ is their reflection that understood Jesus as God’s prophet of Wisdom and after his resurrection as Jesus Christ as God’s incarnate Wisdom operative in creation. The Colossian hymn affirms that Christ is the firstborn the dead, “that he is in everything so he might be pre-eminent,” and “in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and “through him to reconcile all things, whether on earth on in heaven,” and “making peace on the cross.” Christ, “the fullness (pleroma) of God is linked to creation, heaven and earth, as well as to the fulfillment and end of that creation.

The community, from which the Colossian hymn originated, recognizes that through Christ’s death and resurrection, the transformation of creation has a specific direction intended before the Big Bang and accelerated in the fleshly incarnation of Christ in Jesus. The incarnation of God with the fleshly and material reality of the human Jesus tells us much about God’s love for us and God’s creation. And the resurrection of Christ reveals the intended completion of the universe from the Big Bang. There was a strong conviction of the post-Easter community that what happened to Jesus on Easter morning would happen to them, all life, and the entire universe.

One of my favorite theologians Karl Rahner taught me so much how God’s grace is available to us and surrounds us and is in us. Rahner writes, “When the vessel of his body (Jesus) was shattered in his death, Christ was poured over the cosmos, he became actually, in his very humanity, what he had always been in his dignity, the very center of creation.” His divine atoms spread in time past, present, and future in the whole expanding universes, in the billions if not trillions of galaxies of the universe. He was now the cosmic Christ.

In the resurrection, Jesus becomes God’s agency of transformation for a new fulfilled, divinized, and transfigured creation; he is interconnected and interincarnated with all life and the Earth and the entire infinite cosmos. Easter affects everything alive and dead, the Earth and the complex web of interrelated processes and life, and the cosmological processes of the universe, past and present, into the future. The Colossians hymn ends with the mind-expanding vision: “he is the first born from the dead, so that he might come to have a place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell…” (Col. 1:19-20) God has never stopped loving, dreaming, and creating through the Christ. God intends to reconcile all life, all the universe with the fullness of God—where God will be all in all.

In the nineteenth century, the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, with a deeply Franciscan mind and heart, referred to a similar notion to the Colossians’ verse: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” For Hopkins, the “dearest freshness” in all creatures has to do with the cosmic Christ who “fills the universe in all of its parts.”

The cosmic Christ is in every human being, in every form of life, and the life processes of the Earth, and cosmic fulfillment of the universe where God is all (pleroma) in everything. The Cosmic Christ determines each creature’s being and unifies all that is, bringing differentiation and union in the universe. Christ is found in the least of my family. It includes humans, nonhuman animals, nature and the planet Earth and the whole universe. We are interconnected and deeply connected to the cosmic Christ.

My students viewed the video the Journey of the Universe, which I also aired at church one Sunday. It was produced Brian Swimme and Mary Ellen Tucker, a student of the Catholic priest, geologian, and Earth lover Thomas Berry.

Berry noted three principles operative in the journey of the universe;

 Differentiation is the primordial expression of the universe.

 Subjectivity: A capacity for interiority increases the unity of function through ever greater complexification of being.

 “Communion” of each reality of the universe has the capacity of living in communion with every other reality. The universe is a communion of subjects.

The cosmic incarnate Christ is operative in all these evolving principles. Christ is birthing God’s body, the body of Christ, in all creation through ever complexification and the directionality of evolution and cosmological processes. Christ is reconciling all into God’s fullness. When Thomas Berry speaks about the universe as a communion of subjects is speaking about the continued work of the cosmic Christ and the Holy Spirit to divinize the universe, to bring the fullness of God into all.

We no longer have a world of inherent value, no world of wonder, no untouched, unused world. We think we have understood everything. But our human actions indicate we have not. Berry says, “To wantonly destroy a living species is to silence forever a divine voice.” We have been silencing the voice of God, the incarnate Christ in suffering and groaning of the Earth.

All of creation, has been obedient to its destiny, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “each mortal thing does one thing and the same … myself it speaks and spells, crying ‘What I do is me, for that I came’” (When Kingfishers Catch Fire). Wouldn’t it be our last and greatest humiliation of our human arrogance of being above and exceptional that we listen more closely to Jesus’ words that the “first being last,” (Matt. 20:16). And we realize that all other creatures have obeyed their destiny unblinkingly and with trustful surrender to God. And we have not in our pride, greed, and belief in human exceptionalism over all other creatures.

The late Thomas Berry called for an “ecologically sensitive spirituality.” He writes,

The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.

Berry argues,

Our children should be introduced to the world in which they live, to the trees and grasses, to the birds and the insects and the various animals that roam over the land, to the entire range of natural phenomena.

 In using this term “living” in speaking about a tree as a living being and in speaking about the Earth as living being, we are indicating that some of the basic aspects of life, such as the capacity for inner homeostasis amid diversity and the diversity of external conditions, are found proportionately realized both in the tree and in the comprehensive functioning of the planet.

Berry notes that we need to create an Earth language to connect to nature and the web of life. It is an ability to pay attention to nature and life as plant and nonhuman animals around. Each plant and each creature bears something of the freshness of the incarnate Christ in unique ways, not as distinct but connected together as a communion of life, united by the cosmic Christ who dwells in all creation as God’s spoken love to all of us.