God’s Got the Whole World

Children love the song “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” I do too. With the fun hand signs and all the possibilities of adding who and what God has in his hands it is an endlessly delightful song. Singing it for a while convinces all of us that God indeed does have pretty much everything in hand. To understand how this is so has been an endless quest for theologians and thinkers over the centuries. Does God control every detail of life and nature? Did God simply set up the universe and allow it to run on its fixed laws? Do things pretty much go along on their own until God intervenes in certain miraculous moments? What about suffering and evil, where do they come from? Each of these viewpoints has a name and a history. Each in some way addresses the subject of divine providence. We believe that all things exist because of God’s grace and that all are under God’s gracious rule and providence. In my view this does not mean that every event is created and controlled by God. Like an author’s characters in a novel, we human beings have free will and surprise God at times, both for good and for ill. What it means is that God is involved in all things always seeking to bless and give us what is good. As Julian of Norwich famously wrote when she contemplated a small hazelnut, “In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that he loves it. And the third, that God keeps it . . . the Creator, the Lover, the Keeper.” So it is, she wrote, with everything. Now our children’s song is absolutely clear on one point: God’s love is expansive love. God does not just have some of the world in his hands. He has all of it. That is the most important meaning of the song. We have a sinful tendency to see God as especially involved with us, or people like us, or with our point of view or culture or value system. We sometimes tend even to think that God is with us but not with them, those folks who are different or with whom we may disagree or be at odds. In the 60’s one of my heroes Joan Baez used to hush her audiences with the song, “With God on My Side,” which accounted a history of wars by nations claiming that they had God’s endorsement. It ended with the line, “If God is on our side he’ll stop the next war.”

This gentle protest song, like “He’s got the whole world,” would remind us profoundly that God loves all the world, not just us. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” the psalmist proclaims. The wonderful diversity of peoples and races and cultures, like that of nature, was created by God. God sees us as one. One of our prayers reads, “Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your loving hands on the hard wood of the cross, that all might come within the reach of your saving embrace.” The cross is God’s great hug of the whole world, showing us the holy and expansive love that saves us all. There is no such thing as narrow Christianity. The cross is one light for one world. One of the best ways to experience this truth is by taking mission trips. Some of these are to different parts of the world. Many people I know say that their life was changed by going to Haiti, to Honduras, to Namibia, to Brazil, or to Somalia, to share in Christian mission work. Mission trips include journeys closer to home too: inner city work, Sawyerville, Appalachian ministries, our ministries among the poor. Our lives can be changed by crossing continents or by crossing the street. Such journeys take us out of our familiar comfort zones to expand the horizons of our lives. They enable us to see the world whole and show us God’s grace at work in other cultures and in people different from us. Each helps us get out of the little box that we usually live in and realize, as the prayer says, that God has “made of one blood all the peoples of the earth.” Our minds are opened and our hearts are enlarged. Such mission trips make real the teaching of the song that God has big hands. Those big hands have room for you and me and the whole world over. In all you do as the Episcopal Churchwomen and as the Diocese of Alabama let us live and let this show. Your servant in Christ, The Rt. Rev. Henry N. Parsley, Jr. Bishop of Alabama