Pastor C. Ashley (Ash) Dotson, Mdiv, Oasis UMC at Robson Ranch
Hi folks, another reminder as I know many are returning from their summer homes: There is a new thing in town. It’s called Oasis United Methodist Church! I am Ash Dotson, the pastor. I was called out of a career as a rocket and satellite motor test engineer into full time ministry back in 2001. We meet in the Laredo Room on Sundays at 9:30 a.m., and all are welcome! In these articles I’ll be giving just some samples or our time together.
I remember once leading a Bible study, and we were talking about creation and these verses, specifically, “everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being.” One of the folks in the study mentioned the word, ‘cosmic,’ in describing their take on God and creation. It fit perfectly as we had discussed the definition of panentheism … Everything in God and God in everything!
Understanding God, understanding Christ as the Cosmic Christ is something that has been lost in much of the Western Church. Think about how we pray; we tend to pray to God who is ‘out there somewhere,’ right? This is how we often separate ourselves from God. We believe that God and eternal life is something that will happen later on. Jesus says in Luke 17:21, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” Although some translations use ‘among’ or ‘in the midst,’ the Greek word used here (entos) is normally translated as ‘within’ or ‘inside.’
Carl Jung stated, “If we set a God outside of ourselves, he tears us loose from the self, since the God is more powerful than we are. Our self falls into privation. But if the God moves into the self, he snatches us from what is outside us. We arrive at singleness in ourselves.” Teihard de Chardin, Albert Einstein, Simone Weil, and so many others have explored and realized the theology of the Cosmic Christ or Cosmic God. Leo Tolstoy wrote a book titled “God is Within You.” And this is cool, there is Jewish Midrash which states that God made room in God’s self for creation. It may seem as if I am over emphasizing this, but it needs to be emphasized as it has been left out of the theology of the Western Church for so long.
This theology is called panentheism, which means as Jesus states in John 17:23, “I’m ‘in’ them, and you are ‘in’ me…” This is very different from pantheism that says that God ‘is’ all things and all things ‘are’ God. We are beginning to see evidence of the Cosmic Christ as now supported by science. For now, let us ponder the most basic consideration of the Cosmic Christ, and that is that we are all connected to God, we are all connected to each other, we are all connected to every creature of the earth, and we are all connected to the earth and all of the universe through the Cosmic Christ. Wow, right?!