Isaiah 43:18-19
Don’t remember the prior things; don’t ponder ancient history. Look! I’m doing a new thing; now it sprouts up. Don’t you recognize it? I’m making a way in the desert, paths in the wilderness.
Philippians 3:12-14
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
Walt Disney
We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
The history of humanity is a story of movement. From our single-celled birth, through our evolution into modern humans and adaptation to every climate on the planet, human existence is about moving from one physical place to another, from one mindset to another, from one paradigm to another. Forward momentum sets humankind’s trajectory.
Technically, momentum is a physics term used to describe mass in motion. It can apply to rocks and rockets, people, planets, galaxies, and entire universes. Momentum is what we see when a rocket thrusts its way out of the atmosphere or when we push a toy car. The force of our push moves the car forward—quickly at first—then, ever more slowly as the energy… runs… out.
The Big Bang, God’s great explosion of creative consciousness, set in motion the galaxies, a multidimensional panoply of parallel universes, and the laws of Newtonian and Quantum physics. Everything exists because of God’s initial push, and the force of that cosmic thrust continues to expand our universe into the outermost reaches of reality.
For most of my life, scientists used this framework of an expanding universe with decreasing momentum at the fringes to describe our reality. The Big Bang was the initial explosion that got things moving. As it pushed material outward, that material slowed down because the energy of the Big Bang dissipates the farther away stuff gets from the initial explosion.
An explosion only moves material so far, after all. To keep things moving forward requires momentum, even in the vacuum of space. Rockets don’t just shut off their engines once they breach our atmosphere. They still need small bursts of thrust to move, otherwise, like our toy car, rockets, too, will eventually stop moving.
So, imagine our surprise when we discovered that at the far reaches of the universe, the stars, planets, and all the other macro- and microscopic matter of reality, are moving forward faster than they first were. For centuries, scientific observation suggested our universe would be, like our toy car, slowing down as we explored farther and farther into the deep recesses of space, away from the impetus of the Big Bang.
Turns out—not so much. Everything seems to be moving faster as it gets farther away from its primary power source.
How to explain this, when the known laws of physics demand that an object in motion stops moving when it runs out of momentum?
Well, if we consider that energy is internal and not external, that matter at the furthest reaches of space is moving faster makes more sense.
And, in fact, God is our eternal, internal, power source. We were never pushed out of, and away from the Big Bang, we carry its energy with us. God’s energy drives us from within. We are perpetually in motion because we are driven by God’s engine of creation. We are driven.
In the beginning, God didn’t merely push us away from God’s self to see how far we could go before running out of energy. God is not a child with a toy car. Instead, God continually energizes us from within, forever thrusting us forward, rocketing us toward the fringe.
God’s divine propulsion system energizes our entire universe. Understanding God as our eternal, internal energy source, then makes it easy to see why things move forward at an increasingly faster rate near the fringes, even though we mortals expect things to be slowing down.
We’re surprised by the discovery of fast-moving objects where there should be little or no motion only because we all experience Newtonian physics every day, even if we don’t know who Newton was. Quick reminder: Newton described the most fundamental laws of physics: throw something in the air, and it falls back to earth. Push something, and it moves until it hits another object or runs out of energy.
Because we live in a world with these physical laws, it seems illogical to us that objects could do the seemingly impossible: pick up speed even long after the energy that initially set them in motion has fizzled out.
We’re only confused by this because we mistakenly think that matter is being pushed instead of driven. Our power source is intrinsic to our being. God is always powering us to the edges.
God moves us to the fringe because it’s at the fringe where new things happen. Change rarely comes from the center. Like the Black Hole in the middle of our own galaxy, insatiably devouring and incinerating everything that gets near it, the center is where things go to die.
Change, though, comes from the fringe. Energy for movement into new things comes from the edges of what we understand, never from being sure we know everything. God pushes us away from that comfortable center and rockets us toward the fringe, where unexpected and marvelous new things occur.
For example, 2000 years ago, the Jesus movement operated around the fringes of Judaism. Judaism itself first developed from the fringes of Canaanite, Jebusite, and other Semitic religions. Today, our ongoing civil rights work moves at the fringes of immoral and unjust systems designed to prevent just the sort of societal change Jesus insisted we must all work to create.
God doesn’t push us into being then let go, like a child watching a toy car. Rather, God energizes us internally and sends us wildly to the fringe, where God’s new thing is already taking place, just waiting to be discovered.
Amen