Intersect

Holy and gracious God, we gather together as followers of Christ, people who believe in his vision of a world filled with one people of love. We strive to be the people who have answered Christ’s call to dream his love-filled world into reality by acting with love, compassion, and grace toward all God’s children. We have learned from Jesus that everyone is a child of God, no matter our skin color, our brain capacity, our gender, our sexual orientation, the language we speak or the religion we espouse. Jesus shows us that we are beings of ultimate and sacrificial love, and that if we act in kind, so too will everyone we meet. We have the power to melt hearts and change minds by simply being who we are called to be: Followers of Jesus who work in his name to bring about the kin-dom of love he so passionately believed in. His is a kin-dom full of paradox that seems to make no sense and defies all logic. Enemies are to be loved, not hated; outcasts are to be embraced, not disregarded or...

One day in a more transcendent reality, Jesus and Buddha decided to meet for a picnic under a Bodhi tree. The Bodhi tree, of course, is where Siddhartha Gautama, later known as Buddha, reached enlightenment. As they sat down to an excellent lunch of nuts, berries, cheeses and wine, Jesus asked, “Isn’t this a fig tree?” “Indeed, it is,” Buddha said. “I hate those things!” Jesus joked, and they both laughed heartily. “Is that story about you cursing the fig tree true?” Buddha asked. “What is truth?” Jesus replied. Buddha chuckled and said, “Your followers don’t know you have such a good sense of humor. It’s a pity the stories about you don’t portray that side of you. You’re always so serious with the parables and the answering in riddles. You didn’t make it easy for your students to understand what you were saying.” “Well, I’m not sure that’s entirely true, Siddhartha,” Jesus replied. “After all, you and I worked in different places and times. I spoke to my people in a language they ...

Great and loving God, as our understanding of your ever-expanding universe has increased, our affection for you seems, unfortunately, to have diminished. While we have gained tremendous knowledge, we have lost equal parts wisdom. For every atomic secret unlocked, for every quantum entanglement unraveled, for every genetic code revealed, we have locked away a little more of our sense of wonder. And those of us who find the wonders of God in atomic structures, quantum entanglement, and genetics, weep tears of grief and disappointment. In this, the age of knowledge, we are often ashamed to admit we still believe in the magic of love. Our compassionate voices are muted and our spiritual imaginations are stifled by the screams of hate-filled people yelling supercharged intolerance from the other side of an electron-charged screen. The broadcasting banshees try to convince us there is no love, there are no miracles, there is no God. They distract us with fear and hate-speech designed to keep...

String Theory is a sort of “theory of everything” that unites both branches of physics—general relativity (which talks about “big things” like planets) and quantum mechanics (which talks about “small things” like atoms and subatomic particles) with one, elegant idea: All physical reality is created by tiny vibrating strings. These strings create different fundamental building blocks depending on their frequency—their musical pitch, in essence. When we look at matter through an ultra-sensitive microscope, we can see the individual molecules vibrating away. What looks like a solid table or chair to us is, in fact, a bunch of wildly vibrating atoms. This makes sense if we think about what’s happening inside an atom. There’s a nucleus that’s orbited by a proton, a neutron, and an electron. Think about the way the moon orbits the earth and all the planets orbit the sun. That sort of motion is going on inside every single molecule. The stuff around us—and we the people—are composed of trilli...