Exodus 3:14 A Pi Day Reflection

Observation: Well, the "Daily Bible" Email I get every day didn't come, so I was flying blind. But I thought, in honor of Pi Day, I'd find a Chapter 3, verse 14 of a Biblical book, and see what was there. And...wow. Exodus 3:14 says, "God said to Moses, 'I AM WHO I AM.'" For a people who had been slaves for centuries, God reminds them that God is not just a national deity, but the ground for all existence, source of all that ever was, and the one who IS.

Application: I'm one of many who has Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time on my bookshelf and never made much headway into it. Hawking himself once joked about it being the "least read bestseller of all time." But today, as the world mourns the loss of his great mind, I remember him fondly as someone who inspired many to a new sense of awe at the universe, at what can be learned about the earliest dawning of existence, and where we and all matter came from.

I am not sure how Hawking would feel about my offering a theological reflection in his memory, and I certainly mean no disrespect by doing so. But as a religious person reflecting on the amazing things we have learned about the universe and the nature of existence in the last few generations, I am filled with all the more awe at the mind of God. We may someday know what, if anything, came before the big bang, and we may not. We will likely find new secrets revealed in the infinitely-unfolding digits of Pi, a number first discovered in ancient times. In fact, since it is infinite, we are bound to find new things, as well as things we know well--somewhere in its infinitely repeating digits is the entire Bible, in order, all of Shakespeare's works, the full human genome, and the complete works of one Stephen Hawking too--and much more.

I'm not sure if I'm making much sense today. Though I always admired science from afar, academically I tended to acknowledge her as out of my league. But as a religious leader and a disciple of Jesus, I continue to support science and to accept the new places where it will lead the minds of the future, because I know that the God who is, the God from whose existence all existence comes, has a lot more cool stuff to show us, and it would be awfully rude not to show up for that.

Prayer: God, thank you for our minds. Thanks for math, for science, for language, for teachers and students, and for all the ways we can learn more about you, on Pi Day and every day.