Et Alii: We're all in Relationship

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/090617.cfm
COL1:1-8
LK 4:38-44

No matter how often the injuries of life trip us up — mental, physical, or emotional — God takes each as an opportunity to heal and repair us with particular attention to the details. Is that really true? Does he care about every detail of every thing and every body, all at the same time? 

I believe so. Yes. While we’re probably focused on our individual injury, God is focused on all of them. Why does God allow it? Why would he bother with such an enormous and inconvenient use of his time, and why do we have to put up with it?

That question doesn’t make us petty, or superficial, or self-centered. Our problems are real. We need to begin, I believe, understanding that a truth of what we see tells us both about God’s capabilities and his mission. The resources God must have at his disposal, plus his intention to be both aware of and involved in the most minute details of our lives, sounds like an absurdity. If he has this ability, though, how can he care enough to attend to our itty bitty selves, and everybody else's too? What motivates him to care for everything all at the same time?

Something doesn’t make sense. Which is it? God’s power and love, or our limits of understanding him?

Start with our one relationship. If we faithfully want to record God’s activity in our lives, even if only pretending that God is there with us, we have to ignore skepticism and incredulity to keep at it. I submit, if we do, we will experience his presence without fail. By taking a full account in such a way, we will become aware that God is with us every minute. It's unavoidable. 

I don't apologize to those who have tried this and failed. Try again. Ignore your skepticism and incredulity. Maybe you'll need to rinse and repeat a few more times than either of us expect.

In any attempt to prove our interactions with God, using journals, map apps, videos, instagram records, along with the paperwork trails of receipts, texts, contracts and emails — all providing tactile proof that shows where God intervened to both be with us and to heal us — the effort on our part will surpasses the actual minutes available to us. 

In other words, we don’t have enough time to capture the actual time that God spends with us, because he’s always there. We'd simply be recording our life in real time. While I'd suggest not being too obsessive about our recording of a minute by minute acceptance of God's presence, there is a lesson in the attempt. The good news is that we'll be recording the longest running conversation in our lives. The bad news is that we'll run out of both media and production time to properly capture just one day.

Multiply that single impossibility — that God attends to each of us in a constant relationship — multiply that times the current population of the earth; and then, factor in the lives of everything from whales and elephants down to gnats and ameba. There is no math for that kind of relationship management. The magnificent presence, prescience and power of God overwhelms any and all calculation. 

If you did miraculously manage to concoct a proximate formula that estimates God’s relationship activity to the living on earth, add to it all of creation’s lives since the beginning of time. That necessarily means we need to include God's concurrent relationships in heaven. We might say that God doesn't attend to the eternal lives of those who refuse his relationship, but that would only reduce an impossibility of relationships into an impossibility minus another impossibility. We're still left with an impossibility. Unfortunately, for calculation purposes, there is more. We must also consider the gazillion galaxies and their presumed bits and pieces of life. Somehow we  also should add these to the God relationship formula. Holy cow! There is surely no proper math for that overwhelming notion.

The God relationship formula, unimaginable as it is, can probably be translated as an alpha or numeric representation similar to the infinity symbol, the symbol for Pi, or the Möbius strip. There is no real number or conclusive accounting for any of the physics or math behind these symbols. That's why a symbol is so helpful. So, I've come up with a slightly familiar representation for God's relationships with creation. A lingual code. There is a phrase similar to et cetera (etc.) that might be appropriate. It is "et al." Et al is actually short for Et Alii, the neuter form in Latin for "and others." So, for grins let's describe God's unlimited, constant, indivisible relationship capability as Et Alii, a sort of infinity code representing every single created being relationship with God within and without space and time.

I submit that quite a few of our friends and family find the premise of Et Alii simply too bizarre to except. They are not wrong. That “too bizarre” estimation forces us to decide. We're either stupefied to our knees, or incredulous at such a ridiculous idea. Et Alii refuses to leave any one unattended by God. We believe it, or we don't.

But, again, which is it that doesn't make sense? God’s actual unlimited capability or our limited ability to conceive of God's capability?

In today’s Gospel, some commentators have concluded that a long series of events in scripture actually happened in one day. That thinking puts all of these following things into one string, a 12-18 hour period from morning to evening: Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount; the healing of a leper; meeting the centurion and healing his servant; teaching in the synagogue in Capernum; and finally, ending up at Peter’s mother-in-law’s house for dinner (our reading for today). These happened, perhaps, in sequence. One single day.

Whether true or not, the serial nature of Jesus’ life, from one setting to another as presented by Luke, follows the tracking of a single human life lived, reported as one event after the other. Jesus’ days, like ours, were filled with the standard odd mix of harmony and cataclysms. In this one day's case, lots of people eating and lots of people diseased. He feeds them, and he heals them. This one day's worth of God's attentiveness puts God into our existence as an incarnated man for a purpose. God has lived a life like ours.

Jesus constantly tells us through scriptural accounts that his incarnation, God becoming human, includes a specific set of only 33 years or so where he lived with us two millennia ago. Jesus’ life, like ours, fits as one piece of a giant puzzle of life. He lived like an average Joe one minute, and a famous celebrity the next. He preached to rapt audiences in synagogues and on hillsides; and he lived a scorned life, eventually crucified like a criminal. Incredibly, everyone finds familiarity with Jesus through some part of his reported life.

We have a substantial record of Jesus, backed by witnesses. There’s nothing in history like it. Nothing. Nowhere. Yet, all we have are several dozen days of those 33 years. His life, though fabulous and amazing, fits into a very revealing scriptural record. As the four gospels tell it, and as Revelation finally concludes, there are not enough pages to account for everything the Jesus did in his life. 

As we read in today's scripture, though, we know that Jesus came to us for a purpose.  “I must proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God, because for this purpose I have been sent.” (LK 4:43) 

The myriad levels of significance we can make about that statement by Jesus centers upon an amazing piece of information. There is a Kingdom of God, and we’re both invited to it and expected to be there. Jesus showed that he could fix people, astound crowds, and successfully take upon any challenge from worldly powers. The point, however, for his incarnation was not to prove he was God, but to announce the Kingdom. His humanity and divinity is presented as a permanent, immortal transformation that announces a Kingdom, with him as its King. Jesus wasn’t just king for a day. He’s our guy, forever.

Everything that happens in all of time focuses on that one great thing — God has a Kingdom that includes us. He built the universe, and then joined it. The purpose for him joining with us? He’s bringing all of creation, which includes us, together into a holy Kingdom. 

Once we accept and no longer dismiss as impossible the awesome power of the creator and almighty God, we step into a this new reality of eternity. Grasp hold of Et Alii and the incarnation as best we can simply by allowing it to be true. If true, then everything else should be answered within and from that truth. 

We are now back to the question of injury. What is it for? Why does God allow it?

We are each suffering some sort of injury almost daily. It might simply be the realization of age. Yet, each injurious moment is simultaneously countered with a healing, albeit often with screws, hugs, and medicinal therapies. Though we ultimately suffer a slow disintegration, we are also being spiritually restored by God into an eternal life. How and why is this happening? Because God wants us to become like him — holy, unblemished, whole, and eternal. We are cured and formed from this life through our individual recognitions of his presence. The only way to ignore this incredible reality is to refuse to accept God as intensely involved in every aspect of our lives. Next, we must deny that God would choose to become one of us, specifically in the person of Jesus Christ, as a proof of his love and commitment to our restoration.

To accept these companion realities, we ultimately place ourselves within the context of God’s purpose — that God wants us to join him. The invitation to the Kingdom awakens our yearning for such a God. Our relationship awareness to God conversely offers us an invitation to join him in the Kingdom. The consequential purpose for each of our lives patterns the life of Jesus, in both the sufferings and the joys. As Jesus suffered to fulfill his purpose, so must we. We are part of the restoration project.

We are, then, finally aware of our brothers and sisters as an eternal who are with us in this impending Kingdom. We live out this purpose of suffering by also finding joy together. God draws us together to him. We physically and spiritually belong to a community that not only includes God himself in it, but calls us into an unbelievable holiness and kinship of brothers and sisters with God. This joy of beloved folks gathered together invokes a most comforting and fabulous testament to our restoration in eternal life.

No one can believe such a reality, unless that reality is unmistakably true.

We understand our injury opportunities when we recognize that God orchestrates a masterful matrix of this and that, participating at every moment and in each moment of time and space. We can’t imagine the cosmic reality, but we can project its certainty. It is the most incredible of imaginations to place Jesus, God making himself human, within the context of this creation as one of us, on a path to all be together with God in a Kingdom of holy ones.

Injuries and illness along the way represent opportunities for God’s proof to us of restoration, and our death the ultimate proof of his and our resurrection; or  — we are just tiny spits of life, too cruel to love, and too sad to love anyone else.

Some of us will not allow God the freedom to restore the universe in his own time, with he as the Holy Spirit holding many subsequent and sequential conversions all at the same time. We have schedules and plans that were prepared without allowance for interruption and delay. These two things are the descriptions of injuries. Interruption and delay travel like far flung bowling balls. Our anger and frustration will not reset the pins that injuries knock down. Who is doing it, then? Who is constantly re-ordering the universe? 

Do we really believe that only the short-lived lives of people is what holds our world together and repairs it? If we do, we miss God’s opportune interventions, and we only see our schedules and plans in conflict with a randomly and chaotic nefarious force of absurdity. We praise each other for confronting chaos, when in fact it's God's walk with us that does it. We might initiate the hug, manufacture the medications, or drive the screws into the broken bones. In truth, we are willing, practicing participants in grace and mercy. We are active relationship witnesses to the power of a loving God.

I say, let’s presume our injuries and illnesses are opportunities for God to love us and bring us together. Our joys and jubilations are reflections of the constant reality that awaits us. We are being formed by everything that happens to us into a holy, whole, unblemished and eternal life, because our unlimited Et Alii God loves us beyond our imagination.