Embryonic Gods

Propers: All Saints Sunday (Hallowmas), AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you.”

That’s a line from American mythologist Joseph Campbell, the man who inspired Star Wars, among other things. Folks tend to like this quote because they think it means that we make it all up, that we invent our own heavens and hells and gods. And certainly we have a tendency to fashion gods in our own image.

But Campbell was a deeper thinker than that. He believed in the psychic unity of humankind, that we were all, on some level, living out the same mythology. We were all, in our own way, together making the heroic journey home. And God, he said, is the mystery that transcends all categories of human thought, even being and non-being; God is the mystery of the ground of our own being. And really, that’s how Christians speak of God, how all classical theists speak of God.

So when he says, “All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you,” he’s not saying it’s all fiction. He’s saying that we have analogies within us, mythologies within us, that put us in touch with the ineffable mystery of reality, of existence. The gods and heavens and hells are not within you because they’re fake. The gods and heavens and hells are within you because you in fact are in God; the One in whom we all live and move and have our being. Nothing could be more real than that.

To say that God made us from nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is to say that God made us from nothing other than Himself—for there is nothing other than Himself. In order to create us from nothing, God would first have to “make room” for the nothing, and even then that nothing would have to subsist in Him. Our deepest nature is divine.

The Bible speaks of this in many ways. Genesis says that we were fashioned in the Image of God, enlivened by the Spirit of God. Paul speaks of Christ as the new Adam, who is in us even as we are in Him. Our bodies, he says, are temples of the Holy Spirit, houses of God on this earth. James calls this the implanted Word of God.

All of these analogies boil down to the notion that our souls, our essence, the deepest truest level of our being, is grounded solely in God. He is our root and our font. He comes down from above; He wells up from within. We are in Him, part of Him, made one with Him. That’s what Baptism is about. That’s what the Eucharist is about. That’s what the life of this community is all about.

It’s not that “I am God”—this ego known as Ryan Stout—but that God is the ocean in which we swim, the womb in which we grow, the mind in which we are thoughts. We go astray, we seek our own way, we try to be gods apart from God, and this is sin and death. But we come originally from God, we are sustained eternally in God, and we return ultimately to God. He is our destiny: our Father, our Savior, our Life.

This is fully revealed for us in Jesus Christ. Jesus is not some Frankenstein, some monstrous stitching together of antithetical natures: the human and the divine. Rather, Christ is fully human—the only fully human being—precisely because He is fully and truly God. His divinity shines perfectly through His humanity, like light through a spotless crystal pane. The Father is revealed in the Son, God in Man.

“In Christ we have an inheritance,” writes the author of the Epistle to the Ephesians, “having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things … He has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” This community, this assembly, this Church is the Body of Christ, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. You and I and all of us have this inheritance, this destiny.

And we have it by grace, pure grace. We have it by the love and the self-sacrifice of Jesus, who suffered at our hands and for our sake, thus to conquer sin and death and hell by filling them up to bursting with the light and life and love of God. All of this salvation has already been accomplished, in eternity, outside of time as we know it. It is simply here below, where time is still spooling along, that we see the drama perpetually play itself out, dying and rising anew in every generation.

Our job as His saints—which is to say, as sainted sinners, sons of God, and “little Christs” for the world—is to stand together as witness to the eternal reality of our redemption, our salvation, our resurrection, to the people here in time, to our neighbors, to lost and wayward souls whom God is ever calling home. And this is no small task.

People today think that our identities, our deepest essence, flows from blood and soil, or from purchases and politics, or from fortune and fame. And that’s horse dreck. Your deepest identity, your soul, is rooted in the divine, in the ineffable mystery and glory of being beyond all words, beyond all categories, suffused in infinite love, in the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. You are truly a child of God.

No-one and nothing can take that from you: not poverty, not prison, not shame, not derision, not even sin and death and hell. Nothing can snatch you from the loving and crucified hands of He who went to hell and back to bring you home in Him. Human dignity, the incalculable value of every single life, cannot be summed up by economics or politics or net worth. You are an intersection of infinities: of heaven and earth, time and eternity, above and below, within and without.

There is more to every human being than we could ever know. We don’t even really know ourselves. The person whom we think we are—the selves, the egos, which we fashion by degrees and accomplishments and travels and jobs and opinions—that’s not really you. That’s your idea of you, a character you play. But deep within, in solitude and silence, we sometimes touch the soul. And it is infinite, it goes all the way down, precisely because it is grounded in God, the Image of God.

That’s who you are becoming and were always meant to be. That’s who you are in eternity even now: you, my brothers and sisters, are Jesus Christ, made one with Him in Body, Blood, and Spirit. That’s who God sees whenever He sees you: His Son, His Image, His child. And He loves you as He loves Himself, and as He loves us all. The distance between God and Man, between Creator and Creation, has been eradicated in the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ.

Your destiny is theosis, deification. Your destiny is to become an immortal saint of God. In truth, you are already a saint, already and not yet. You are both the seed and the harvest, the acorn and the oak. You exist in tiers of time: as yet a sinner here below, while exalted with Christ in eternity. You were always already in Heaven. And I know that’s a little heady. I know it gets a little mystical, sounds a little fantastical, so that it might seem disconnected from this world. After all, when you wake up tomorrow, you’ll still have bills to pay, mouths to feed, duties to fulfill.

But I want us to think bigger: about ourselves, our lives, our loved ones, our neighbors, even our enemies. I want you to know and to truly believe that each of us comes from God and is returning to God, that even the worst of the worst have a soul. And when life, as it so often does, grows overwhelming and stressful and painful and lonely and everything you’ve ever known and loved all seems to fall apart, I want you to stop and to listen and to breathe. “Be still and know that I am God”—within you, around you, above and below and beyond.

Your worth, your value, your inheritance was guaranteed a very long time ago: in the moment of creation, in the mind of eternity, in the waters of our Baptism, at the Table of our Lord. You will always have a home in Him, a future in His grace. That cannot be taken from you. That cannot be withheld from you. And it cannot be hoarded by you. We are inundated by His grace, drowning us, raising us, birthing us. And we cannot do otherwise but let it flow through us out to others and to all.

This is the Feast of All Saints. Today the Church is an icon of what all the world will be: sinners sainted by grace, little Christs in the making, embryonic gods. You with one foot in eternity—“the first to set our hope on Christ, [that we] might live for the praise of his glory”—are to reach out and to rescue those swept away by the tumultuous river of time.

Reach out and rescue, reach out and rescue, until every single child of God is brought into the Body of Christ. “Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, [and] the last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

And so we shall all be His saints.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.