The Gravitational Center of Grace

In addition to my role here at Holy Trinity as Associate Pastor, I also have this other role that I serve as Pastor of the South Loop Campus Ministry. In that role, along with the Board of Directors and student leaders, we do our very best to engage with students, staff, and faculty of Roosevelt, Columbia, Robert Morris, and DePaul, among the many other schools here in the South Loop neighborhood.

Inevitably and often we are asked the question, well how many people are you actually serving? I used to be really insecure about answering that question, because early on we weren’t serving that many folks, and in campus ministry it can hard to tell exactly who and how many we are in fact serving. Because as a campus ministry we don’t just have one central moment each week where everyone shows up, we have many. From small groups, to the South Loop Community Table meals we serve, to inviting people here to worship on Saturday nights, to every game night, retreat, trip, or movie night in between, people plug into the things when they can and sometimes that means we only see them once or twice during a semester. And that doesn’t even include the folks who know us but might never gather with us formally. Folks like that are hard to count, but what I have started to say in order to account for all the folks we serve is to tell people that in the South Loop Campus Ministry we have about 25 students in close orbit who attend events regularly and another 25 who are gravitationally connected to our community, but reside in the outer rings. And it’s my prayer that even if one of our community members is only peripherally drawn into our orbit that they would still experience the gravitational center of grace that we orbit as a community.

This kind of orbital, cosmic language captures the reality of campus ministry and the realities of the bigger religious landscape these days. Many people no longer belong to churches or attend faith communities as regularly as generations past. But that doesn’t mean that we as people of faith and members of a faith community can’t be gravitational centers of grace in people’s lives. I wonder if that’s how we can begin to see ourselves, and maybe then we can recognize that there are many more people who are a part of what God is up to here, they may not be attending church weekly or ever, maybe they are way out there orbiting from a distance like Pluto, but the gravitational force of grace that we offer can somehow keep them connected in meaningful ways. In other words the gravitational center of Grace that holds us, holds all of us and we are a part of something together, or as Paul says in our reading from Ephesians, “fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel”

In space, it’s the lighter objects that orbit heavier ones. That’s why our Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way around, because Earth is 300,000 times lighter than the Sun. But it’s not just weight its also gravity. It was Issac Newton who realized that the reason the planets orbit the Sun is related to why objects fall to Earth when we drop them. The Sun's gravity pulls on the planets, just as Earth's gravity pulls down anything that is not held up by some other force. Heavier objects or more accurately, more massive ones, produce a bigger gravitational pull than lighter ones, so as the heavyweight in our solar system, the Sun exerts the strongest gravitational pull.

And if we apply that logic to the church, it is Christ, the Son of God who exerts the strongest gravitational pull of grace on us. Maybe that’s what drew the Magi to the nativity scene in our Gospel today. Maybe that star that hung over the place where Jesus was born was more than a beacon of light, but a massive object in space that pulled the Magi into Jesus’ orbit with an unseen gravitational force of grace.

These Magi were star gazers who would notice such changes of light and energy in the night sky. They came from the East, from places like modern day Iraq and Iran. I can’t help but feel the dissonance with today’s gospel reading and the current state of our world. As we hear about a moment in time where these Iranian Magi encounter the grace of God in Christ and deliver him gifts fit for a king, in our own moment in time, the United States is delivering air strikes to Iraq, killing Iranian officials. This act of war now has us on the brink of war with Iran, what some people are calling a potential world war three. O Lord, we long for the day that the words of Paul were to come true, that “through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”

Is the birth of Christ powerful enough to create such a gravitational center of Grace for us all that we have no choice but to orbit it? I’d say so, yet we set our gaze on the false light of other stars. Stars that promise power, protection, security, and prosperity. These are lights we are drawn to that like a moth to a flame only bring death. And when rulers and authorities who are drawn to these lights plot death, we like the Magi, can disobey unjust orders and we can find new roads to travel home by. And it’s because the Magi have been given a new gravitational center of grace by which their compasses are now oriented.

We just finished another orbit of our sun, and with a new year, comes new hope. Hope of better fortune, hope of better health, hope of new horizons. But with 2019 in the rear view and 2020 off to a tumultuous start, the choir anthem by Rory Cooney, I think it says it best,

“When all the world was cruelly held in ancient winter’s grasp
When hope was old and faded or strewn like shattered glass
A universe of promises stretched deep across the sky
Death begun to die”

This universe of promise is anchored by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, born for us, who died for us, and who rose from the grave to become our gravitational center of grace. Even as we try to offer our best to Christ like the Magi bringing their gold, frankincense, and myrrh, we are simply recipients of grace which gently pulls us into its orbit. And as recipients of this grace we then become messengers of it, or as Paul says in Ephesians, “Of this gospel we have become a servants according to the gift of God's grace that was given us by the working of God’s power.”

On this Epiphany as we remember the gravitational center of grace pulling all the nations and the cosmos into its orbit. This grace that we encounter in Christ like the Magi did reorients our compases and we can then be about the work of grace which is more important than ever given the gravity of the crisis situation we find ourselves in these days.

A way in which we are offering this grace to those in our community in the South Loop in 2020 is through what we call the Spiritual Life Center. This will be a place for people to come for individual counseling and psychotherapy, but our dream is to also offer group wellness opportunities for folks who share certain affinities like parenting, community organizing, or who have shared experiences with grief.

It’s in this way that even if someone never comes to worship at Holy Trinity in the Loop, they can still experience the gravitational center of grace we orbit, and maybe through the Spiritual Life Center they will be drawn into that orbit as well. It is because of this grace that has pulled us in that we can invite others to experience a reorientation of our gravitational centers.

With our compasses oriented to the gravity of grace encountered in Christ, new roads emerge for us personally and collectively. And even when we lack the hope and strength to continue our journey, we can trust that the gravitational center of grace in Christ continues to hold us in orbit. And even in this new year with all it’s early tumult, God will continue to carry us in Grace through 2020. Sometimes moving within this graceful orbit will look like disobedience when unjust rulers issue deathly orders, but by these new roads we will experience life and love abundant. Whatever the circumstance, may the light and warmth of Jesus Christ, our gravitational center of grace, shine on us and reflect off of us for all in our orbit to experience. Amen.