November 3, 2024

Entropy, the Internet, and the Wisdom of Disobedient Love

While everyone is anxious about what will happen on Tuesday (and for the next four years), I thought I’d extend our perspective this morning to the slightly longer view – say, about a billion, billion, billion, billion years.  Cosmologists are divided on what will ultimately happen to our universe (in fact, they can’t even agree on what the universe is).  But most agree that its fate is tied to its total mass and energy.  To put it simply, if the total mass of the universe is great enough, the whole thing will stop expanding at some point and re-collapse on itself; if the mass is just right, it will reach a steady state; or if it’s less, the universe will keep expanding and end in an entropy death.  The key ingredient in all this is really gravity.  There may be some mysterious “dark energy” at work counteracting the gravitational force of all the matter out there, but simply put, it’s gravity that will hold us together, if we are to be held together.

So what has this to do with Ruth, Naomi, and Jesus? – I thought you might be curious.  I’ll get to that in a minute.  But first, I’d like to say a few words about the Internet.  It is astounding to step back and look at our world, and how dramatically it has changed in the last ten to twenty years.  The magnitude of this change is illustrated while waiting for a table in a restaurant.  Just glance around at all the other people in the waiting area.  Virtually every single one of them has his or her face buried in an electronic gizmo of one sort or another.  Some are pulling up music to listen to, some are using two fingers and expanding menus or maps or something, some are texting or tweeting – by the way, as I was writing this, the spell-checker in my word processing program didn’t recognize “texting” as a verb (there’s an idea of how fast things have changed).  In an extremely short period of time, we humans have become “pods” in a global web of connections, ideas, reactions, images, and fads.  There are now regular segments of news programs dealing only with how the political candidates are using the Internet, and what people are tweeting about them.  This global, electronic collection of loose, sporadic thoughts puts me in mind of the myriad atoms, planets, and galaxies in the universe, all connected in some mysterious way at the quantum level, and yet all bouncing along through time according to their own particularities.  So here’s my question – and it has everything in the world to do with Ruth and Naomi, and Jesus – where’s the gravity that holds together this universe of ideas called the Internet?  What is it that might keep us all from flying off, each into an isolated world of his own making, until our culture finds its end in a communications entropy death?

Here’s my thesis for the day: there is a certain gravity to ancient wisdom – a gravity that may just be essential in holding our world together.  In our culture of instantaneous computerized stock sales and YouTube videos that claim some kind of instant authority, the Bible seems more and more like an irrelevant relic from a dusty past that’s completely disconnected from reality.  But we break the bonds of the force that ties us to our ancestors at our peril.  Truths that have stirred the imaginations and touched the depths of souls for generation upon generation accumulate over time a certain weight.  Times change and, like the galaxies that travel through the vast realms of space, the circumstances and trajectories of our lives and cultures keep moving.  Like the inflating universe, we humans keep expanding our awareness and our capabilities.  But if we are to survive in the long run, we cannot outpace the gravity of truths that abide through the millennia.

And that’s where Naomi and Ruth and Jesus come in.  In the story of Ruth, her sister-in-law, Orpah, and her mother-in-law, Naomi, it’s easy to see nothing more than a quaint tale from ancient Israel about some women who fell on hard times.  But this is a legend whose specific gravity in relation to timeless, divine truth is massive.  It’s about good and bad decision-making, and how sometimes good is bad, and bad is good, and there is a good that surpasses all others.  Naomi told her daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, to leave her and return to their home while she undertook a perilous journey to another land.  At first they both refused, saying that they would go with her, but when she insisted, Orpah made the “right” decision, the obedient decision to go home as she was told.  But Ruth disobeyed.  She refused to leave her mother-in-law, and in words that have echoed down the millennia, she said, “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.  Where you die, I will die – there will I be buried.”  There has perhaps never been a more beautiful statement of disobedient love than those words.  Ruth made the “wrong” decision, the disobedient decision, but her disobedience was trumped by a greater good, her indomitable love.  True, pure, unshakeable love supersedes all other ethics, and can transform misery into hope.  And that’s the truth that sits in the heart of this story like a great boulder, bearing sufficient gravitational mass to keep a distracted, twenty-first century life from spinning out of control.

Jesus knew the weight of this ancient wisdom.  When he was asked about the bottom line, asked to boil down all the revered laws of Moses to that which is most important, he said, in essence, love God and love your neighbor at least as much as you love yourself.  He said that nothing was more important.

There is so much that seems more important in our world.  Accumulating, achieving, creating, being entertained, (and, of course, in this election season, winning).  But, tethered as we are to our IPhones and Androids, I fear we are losing touch with one another under the guise of being more intimately connected.  I fear that we are losing ourselves in an electronic world of our own making, and therefore losing our grasp on each other.  Our culture increasingly tells us that in order to be relevant we must bury our minds deeper and deeper in this web of ideas and images, and that the highest good is whatever notion we might post online, and the most dependable word is the latest thing that a friend “liked” on Facebook.  The people of our nation, and increasingly of our world, are marching obediently to the orders of this new mandate.

But not here.  I thank the Almighty for this body of disobedient people.  Not that no one here has an IPhone or a Galaxy S IV (I’ve got my own), it’s simply that there’s something different in this community of faith than in the world at large.  It’s actually a linguistic coincidence that the measure of the magnitude of gravitational force and the celebration of the Eucharist in the Catholic church are both called “mass.”  But I like it.  In fact, in some ways I kind of wish we called our worship “mass.”  Because there is a gravity about what we do here.  By your presence and participation in this counter-cultural movement that is our church, you are declaring your allegiance to a higher ethic, a nobler value, a more enduring truth, you are affirming that some ancient wisdom found in a dusty old book indeed has value beyond reckoning.  By coming together month after month and breaking bread in the name and memory of Jesus you are affirming the priority of faith and of the tie that binds us together as children of the Most High.  By joining hands and hearts as the body of Christ you are contributing your weight to that timeless force of indomitable love, love that is the greatest rule, love that is the highest ethic, love, even in disobedience, that holds the universe together.