the God particle: Unbound

from my message on All Saints' Sunday, Nov. 4, 2012, from John 11:32-44

I hate to admit it, but since I am in the Lord's house on the Lord's day, I must confess to you that there are whole weeks that go by without me thinking about subatomic particles.  How about you?  So this summer I was really thrilled when 2 labs, the Fermilab in the USA and the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, come up with results that pointed to the existence of the Higgs Boson, the so-called God particle.

As human beings we have always been filled with curiousity about the universe:  of what it is made, what holds it together.  A long time ago, it was pretty simple.  There were four elements:  earth, air, water, fire.  Then more elements were identified:  iron, copper, tin, lead, gold, silver, etc.  It has only been fairly recently that scientists said that all things were made up of atoms, so small you can't see them.  Then we started discovering that atoms were made of neutrons, protons, and electrons.  Now we are finding sub-atomic particles.  They have great names like photons, leptons, and gluons.  My favorites are quarks.  There are six different kinds of quarks:  Top, bottom, up, down, charm, and strange.  I am not making this up. 

So what is the big deal about the Higgs boson?  There was a problem in the universe.  The atom did seem to have enough mass.  There was nothing to hold the atom together.  Peter Higgs in 1964 theorized that there needed to be 3 particles, a w boson, a z boson, and one that came to bear his name, for matter to hang together.  Leon Lederman in a 1993 book called the Higgs boson the God particle.  Most scientists don't like the name.  But Lederman knew that it would have a popular appeal.  He also said something interesting, "There is an old story of how things began.  How beautiful is the universe God made."

On this All Saints' Sunday, I ask what holds us together?  Maybe the better questions is Who holds us together?  I believe it is the One who said, "I am the resurrection and the life."  I believe it is the One who said, "Lazarus, come out."  I believe it the One who said, "Unbind him, and let him go."

Lazarus really died.  We know about death.  It is real to us.  We grieve.   We cry.  We miss persons. We experience loss.  Mary and Martha cried over the death of their brother.  Even Jesus wept, in the shortest verse in the Bible.  Jesus is also greatly disturbed, in a word that has connotations of anger.    Death is real.

But I have some good news today.  It involves turning to a neighbor, maybe even touching a neighbor, holding hands like we do when we sing our benendiction song, "Go now in peace."  Is that person real?  I am here to witness to you that the communion of saints, all those who have died in the faith, are that real, and are that close to us.  Jesus is our God particle.  He is all God and all human.  He has brought together the divine and the human.  He is the resurrection and the life.  He has brought life out of death.  We say in the Apostles' Creed that we believe in the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body,and the life everlasting.  Jesus says to us, "Be unbound from your grief, loss, fear of death, and be bound to me and to one another as the communion of saints."

Understand this:  We are the communion of saints.  Not just those who have died, but us, right here, right now.  One of the most common term for a follower of Christ in the early church was saint.  A saint is not just one who passed the Roman Catholic test and got up on a stained glass window.  A saint is one who is holy.  Don't be scared by this.  In the Old Testament, things and people became holy by coming near what was holy.  It was the nearness factor.  So sheep and oxen and grain would come from the fields and be offered on the altar, and they would become holy.  People would enter the tabernacle or the temple, and they would become holy.  It is not about how good we are.  It is about how close we are to Jesus. 

What does Lazarus do to be holy?  Nothing!  He is as good as dead!  It is by coming close to Jesus that he is made holy.  So I would have you be unbound of your perfectionism, your rule-keeping, your over-functioning.  I would have you be bound to Jesus who sets you free.  We come close to Jesus this day as we approach this table where we take his body and his blood into our very being.  Jesus is our God particle.

I am not afraid of science.  I love what the Jesuits say.  That order in the Roman Catholic Church embraced all fields of study.  They did so because they found God in everything.  As I prepared this message, I found that there are still more problems to solve in physics, like dark matter, and unified field theory, or the "theory of everything."  I am sure that we will find God in absolutely everything.  Be unbound from fear to be bound to Christ.