Journey through Lent: The Second Step
“But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6).
Among my homiletic roads not traveled yesterday was “Secret Street.” The word “secret” occurs six times in the Ash Wednesday Gospel.
“Secret” is the English translation for the Greek original kruptw = crypto. And looking that up in my handy-dandy (and hefty-hefty) Theological Dictionary of the New Testament I discovered this entry:
“In all true religion there is an awareness of a reality which [humans] cannot reach by ordinary perception. . . . The deity is hidden” (Volume III, p. 961).
And then today, perusing the Science Times section in The New York Times, my eye was drawn to Dennis Overbye’s article titled “There’s More to Nothing Than We Knew.” It reads in part:
“Why is there something, rather than nothing at all?
“It is, perhaps, the mystery of last resort. Scientists may be at least theoretically able to trace every last galaxy back to a bump in the Big Bang, to complete the entire quantum roll call of particles and forces. But the question of why there was a Big Bang or any quantum particles at all was presumed to lie safely out of scientific bounds, in the realms of philosophy or religion.
“Now even that assumption is no longer safe, as exemplified by a new book by the cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss. In it he joins a chorus of physicists and cosmologists who have been pushing into sacred ground, proclaiming more and more loudly in the last few years that science can explain how something — namely our star-spangled cosmos — could be born from, if not nothing, something very close to it. God, they argue, is not part of the equation.”
Unfortunately, and predictably, the new book doesn’t really deliver, as Mr. Overbye points out in a paragraph commenting on one of Dr. Krause’s three kinds of nothingness― “a deeper nothing in which even the laws of physics are absent. Where do the laws come from? Are they born with the universe, or is the universe born in accordance with them?”
Looks like our Father who is in secret is safely hidden still!
P. S.
There’s another quotation in this article which I loved:
“The universe,” Alan H. Guth, a physicist at M.I.T., likes to say, “might be the ultimate free lunch.”
Score one more for our Father who is in secret. Just replace “free lunch” with “grace.”
P. P. S.
While we're on the subject of the Universe, and why there should be anything at all, try clicking here. And then score one more for our Father who is in secret.
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