John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” 

            I have to confess; I have a slightly philosophical bent.  I am oftentimes quite drawn into pondering what are likely to be difficult or perhaps even unanswerable questions.  In fact, that drive likely played a large role in my desire to become a pastor.  I also am a child of the 70s which meant that along the line, I got exposed to some great music.  One of my favorite bands was the Talking Heads, in their song, “Letting the Days Go By,” they ask the biggest question of all – “And you may ask yourself, how did I get here?”  And, again, someday you’ll see how grateful you should be that I didn’t sing that.  Don’t believe me?  Ask my kids.

            Now listen, you can be rather literal with this question.  How did I get here?  Well, I drove here to the church this morning, that’s how I got here.  That’s an answer, to be sure, but not one which wrestle with the question very strenuously.  I may have driven myself to get to the church this morning, but I didn’t create myself and history shows pretty clearly that if it weren’t for the intervention of God in my life and yours, that none of us would be here even to ponder the query.  No, I want to know, “How did I get here?”, a married pastor of a church?  How am I Jason Bryant living on this third rock from the sun in 21st century in the first place?  And how are you, you?  How do you and I get to be here, at Cook’s Memorial Presbyterian Church on this fourth Sunday in Lent? 

            Well, the child in me wants here to quote Bugs Bunny, that you and I arrived here as the consequence of that left turn, we took at Albuquerque.  I admit that’s probably a little too old a reference to use any longer and expect people to track you but I do want to state a fact I believe is not only Biblically true, but also one that scientists are warming up to again and again – that we are here because of a design.  A plan.  One that could only have been imagined, let alone created, by a being of inordinate power.

            John 3:16 begins to answer the question of how did I get here, of course.  It begins quite simply, “For God….”

            Here, God serves as the architect, designer, builder and sustainer of everything we’ll ever encounter, including ourselves.

            This knowledge or awareness of ONE all-powerful force of course even predates the arrival of our Lord, Jesus Christ.  Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus all worked with the fundamental assumption of what was called, The Prime Mover.  Looking at the world and determining that everything that is created by something else, these ancient philosophers saw what is undoubtedly true. Take for example you and I.  We were created, in a fashion, by our parents.  And it isn’t just humans, everything has a cause – a rock, a tree, a planet in the heavens.   Something had to happen.  Something had to act to bring it into being. 

            Consequently, it was here that the Great Chain of Being was articulated.  Best image for that I ever heard was a champagne waterfall.  Do you know what those are?  Well, they’re stacks of champagne flutes stacked together in a pyramid like fashion.  Then, the master of festivities gets up and pours a huge bottle of bubbly right there into the top glass.  The champagne then gushes downward, filling all those other cups.  Well, someone has to pour the champagne and that is conceived to be God. 

            But even beyond that, God is the one who made the bubbly, arranged the glasses and keeps pouring that stuff so that everything is progressing according to plan.  That’s the image that many philosophers from antiquity believed.

            And it makes sense, something must have started this thing called life.  But what was largely left unarticulated is why?  Why would whatever this prime mover is move initially in the first place?  What were its motivations, its goals?  Or was it just a power without personality, fated simply to serve in such a capacity?

            See, that’s not a very helpful or hopeful answer to our question.  “How did we get here?” becomes reduced to randomness.  And believe me, we live in an age where that’s getting to be more and more the preferred answer.  We are here for no reason whatsoever with no real purpose behind anything. 

            It’s terribly depressing.  It’s the reason that few people actually ever read atheists works because the end result of their words simply don’t harmonize with our souls.  We know that there’s a deeper cause, a prime mover if you will.

            No, certainly there was something, some power which designed all of this.  Some force which created the universe and set us within it.  And, whatever that God is, He was omnipotent.