love that was concentrated in Christ is the Good News for all the world to hear. It was lived out in a real Jesus in a real place among real people at a particular point in time. But, after the Resurrection, his energy of love was passed to those who believed to be spread by his Church across the centuries and across the world. “You shall receive power,” said the Risen Lord, “after the Holy Spirit is come upon you; and you shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”
Yes; “God so loved the world.” This rescuing love was meant for the entire human family. How often it has been translated: “God so loved the good people; God so loved the people to whom Jesus came; God so loved the western world in which his Church took root.” But we cannot throttle the universality of this glorious text. He didn’t give his Son in order to add another religion to the repertory of the human race. His love was not directed exclusively to the kind of people we might find congenial. It was the world for whom Christ came to live and die and rise again, the Cosmos with its kaleidoscope of races, colors, languages, affluence, poverty, ideologies, and clashing hopes and fears. It is this universal appeal of God’s love in Christ that this Pope is symbolizing in his travels and his pronouncements, and that we today experience as we share in a Worldwide Communion with Christians from every continent and island.
The world. Every time that word comes up on my typewriter I pause. For it seems to appear too often. And I hear a voice whispering: “Beware of abstractions. Beware of generalities.” It is so easy to talk glibly about the world that God loves, and neglect to fill it with real people—your next door neighbor, the kid playing in a garbage-ridden street just a few hundred yards away, the beggar on the steps of a European cathedral, the refugee child on the frontier of Cambodia, the boat people. So let me turn to this other word in our text. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” That “whoever” focusses the love of God on one single human being, as if for the moment there is no one else. That whoever is you.
There’s divinity in this famous text—but there is also an intense humanity that embraces each one of us just as we are, just as John Paul II broke away from the crowd and the speeches to hoist a little girl into his arms. Have you noticed how often the Gospels tell of Jesus singling out one man, woman, or child, as if he had come to heal them alone? As we receive the symbols of God’s universal love in Christ today, surrounded as we are with the whole worldwide family of his Church, and by the company of the saints in heaven, can we also hear the voice that says: “God loves you. He has given his Son so that when you respond, you will not perish but have everlasting life”? “Whoever believes in him”—this isn’t a question of twisting our minds into some theological affirmation. It’s the kind of response made by a lover to the beloved—“I believe in you.”
We are a vast multitude at this Table today, visible and invisible, and we share a communion with one another. But there is also the moment when there is no one else—just you and the Lord whom you receive with the bread and wine, and your intimate, personal communion with him. “God so loved me” is the word as we take and eat this nourishment of eternal life.
Then we go out—not to revel in a private possession of this energy of love, but to reflect it wherever we go and whatever we may be doing, and to whomever we meet. One day last week I caught these words from the Pope and with them I close: “Keep Christ in your heart, and then you will see his reflection in everyone you meet.”
The Gospel in the Galaxies: What Message for Mars?
Editor’s Introduction
Over forty years have slipped by since David Read preached this sermon in the wake of the launching of Voyager II. The reference to Mars in the sermon’s title would seem to have been intended figuratively. In any event, the space craft, according to Wikipedia, is currently beyond the limit of the solar system. Long past Mars, it is flying at the speed of 19.4 kilometres per second.
Voyager II includes recorded information about our mathematics, chemistry, geology, and biology, as well as samples of our music. Nothing, however, is said about the faith convictions of the human family. This is what prompted Read to frame his own “Message for Mars.”
David Read doesn’t presume to speak here on anyone’s behalf but his own. Indeed, he encourages us to compose our own letter for Mars, or for anyone out there in space beyond our tiny family here on earth. What he offers in this sermon is simply one person’s attempt to communicate with anyone living beyond our planet in our unimaginably vast universe. And the message Read offers is unapologetically informed by “the one who fills the whole wide universe” with the presence and love of God.
The Gospel In The Galaxies: What Message For Mars?
A Sermon preached by David H. C. Read at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on October 23, 1977
Text: “God has placed everything under the power of Christ and has set him up as head of everything for the Church. For the Church is his body, and in that body lives fully the one who fills the whole wide universe.” Ephesians 1:22, 23 (Phillips)
Readings: Psalm 139; Ephesians 1:15–23 (Phillips); John 1:1–9
“The whole wide universe.” Even as we worship here this morning in this corner of the city, a spacecraft is humming on its way to the planets and beyond. At the end of August “Voyager” was successfully launched—“a bottle cast into the cosmic ocean” someone said, because, for the first time, a message was sent to the galaxies to be read by any conceivable sentient, intelligent beings who might pick it up.
Such things are taken so casually nowadays that I don’t remember hearing a single comment on this unique event, far less a debate about what should be included in such a message. Perhaps most people feel that the odds are so long against the possibility of there being any astral civilization within our reach and of anyone finding and being able to interpret the message that the incident should be shrugged off as a romantic gesture designed to tickle the imagination. I may indeed be the only one to worry at all about what we are conveying to these hypothetical neighbors in outer space, but I confess that the contents of that capsule set off a train of thought which I want to share with you this morning in the light of our Christian convictions. I’m really asking what you feel is important to tell whoever is listening in the “whole wide universe” about our experience as temporary residents on spaceship Earth. Suppose the message is picked up and deciphered by some super-sophisticated being engaged in happy research in a civilization superior to ours—or perhaps caught up in some planet-shattering “Star Wars”—what would you like him to know about us, our aspirations, discoveries, hopes, and fears?
I checked again on the content of this capsule and confirmed my impression that there is a curiously missing factor. There is nothing whatever to indicate that human beings on this planet have any kind of religion, any belief in a God who is responsible for the existence of “the whole wide universe,” or conviction that we have a destiny that is located in another dimension than that which can be explored by the instruments of science. The capsule, I am told, contains information about our mathematics, chemistry, geology, and biology, but there is no mention of theology. Some magnificent music is included, but none, apparently, that relates to the great statements of our faith. It looks as if the American principle of separation of Church and State has now spawned a new one—the total separation of Church and Space. It may well be that the authorities who determined what this message should be were terrified to include something that might turn out to be too Catholic, too Jewish, too Presbyterian, too Episcopalian, or too Baptist for popular consumption, and so decided to eliminate religion altogether. But surely the end-result is to convey to these Martians (or whoever) a seriously truncated view of the deepest concerns of our human race. The major religions of the world are estimated to claim the adherence of more than two and
