Mathematics and God’s Love by iyree jarrett
One of the great joys of being part of City Church Long Beach has been the community groups I’ve joined, especially our board game group.
Last week we played Terraforming Mars, a sprawling strategy game where corporations compete to make Mars habitable. Every decision is a calculation: resources, production, probabilities, long-term investments, and victory points. Every turn I found myself hunched over the board, counting and recounting different possibilities, trying to figure out which move would earn me the most points.
One thing about me: I hate math. I’m a poet and writer at heart, not an equation enthusiast.
Later that week, while reflecting on Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, I realized that maybe the Gospel contains its own strange kind of mathematics. It isn’t the arithmetic of efficiency or optimization. It isn’t about maximizing returns or protecting what you already have.
Instead, I found myself writing these words:
“there is a God
who refuses
the mathematics
of exclusion.
a God who counts
until everyone is home.”
I believe God can be found in the most ordinary of things, even a board game about making Mars habitable. So perhaps the good news is this: I don’t have to love math because God already does! God is willing to do the impossible arithmetic of grace, where ninety-nine is never enough if one person is still missing.
Below is the poem that grew from that reflection:
Untitled
it is not that heaven
keeps misplacing things,
but because empire
keeps convincing us
that some lives
are easier to lose.
some of us were born
already outside the fold—
our names mispronounced,
our loves questioned,
our bodies debated
before we learned to speak.
a sheep wanders,
and learns that fences were never built
to protect everyone equally.
a coin slips beneath the cracks,
and learns the apathy that privilege
breeds and beholds
a child rehearses apologies
long before the journey home,
believing love
must always be negotiated.
yet the Shepherd
does not count from the center,
the good Mother notices the absence.
She leaves ninety-nine certainties
for one complicated truth:
you are not difficult to love,
you have never been.
you are not difficult to love,
you have never been.
you are not difficult to love,
you have never been.
She does not lift her shoulders and shrug,
she does not say,
“i still have nine coins”
she lights a lamp,
sweeps every corner,
overturns every rock,
turns the whole house upside down
for something the world calls insignificant.
perhaps liberation
has always looked like this:
a God willing
to disrupt the furniture
rather than leave
one precious thing
hidden beneath the dust.
the dust of racism.
the dust of shame.
the dust of colonization.
the dust of respectability.
the dust that settled
every time someone said,
“This is just the way things are.”
the good Mother keeps sweeping,
keeps yearning,
keeps hoping,
keeps praying,
and when She finds them,
She interrupts
every rehearsed confession
with embrace
before restitution.
before explanation.
before proving they have learned their lesson.
love arrives first.
love always arrives first.
the other coins watch with
arms folded,
like so many churches
guarding the gate.
as if grace
were a resource
that could run out,
as if someone else’s welcome
could diminish
their own belovedness.
but abundance
has never spoken
the language of scarcity.
and so, the feast grows larger
every time another chair
is pulled to the table.
see, there is a God
who refuses
the mathematics
of exclusion.
a God who counts
until everyone is home.