“Every Little
Thing: Which Snowflake Breaks the Branch?”
The prophet Isaiah gives image here of God shaping us, and re-shaping us,
and re-re-reshaping us – as many times as it takes to get us right! – like a
most patient, persistent potter working with clumsy recalcitrant clay. It
helps to remember the start of the new church year with first Sunday of
Advent today is the start of a new cosmic story – the story of God’s “new
creation” in the Christ, the Messiah, born simply Jesus of Nazareth. Advent
brings the offer of new beginnings for each creature – especially the human
ones who need new beginnings the most -- and for all the earth!
James Weldon Johnson begins his poem “The Creation” – And God stepped out
on space, / And he looked around and said: / I’m lonely - / I’ll make me a
world.” The poem ends -- Up from the bed of the river / God scooped
the clay; / And by the bank of the river / He kneeled him down; / And there
the great God Almighty / Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky, / Who
flung the stars to the most far corner of the night, / Who rounded the earth
in the middle of his hand; / This Great God, / Like a mammy bending over her
baby, / Kneeled down in the dust / Toiling over a lump of clay / Till he
shaped it in his own image.
The “new creation” offered anew by the Advent adventure beginning this day
is first a creation of consciousness that each and every one of us. We are
made of the very same substance that has been in all the cosmos, the
universe, since its magnificent and mysterious beginnings. Each and every
last one of us is personally sifted and sorted and sized and shaped by God
–“Like a mammy bending over her baby” – to become – cell by cell, pore by
pore, skin by skin, limb by limb – of the very substance and image of God!
We share the very fullness, the freeness, the fearlessness of the One who is
revealed to us for all times and places by the baby born in Bethlehem – “The
Bethlehem Explosion” as Madeleine L’Engle puts it in our seasonal Call to
Worship.
L’Engle compares new creation to a cosmic chemistry lab. There is the
accumulation of creative substance – “grain by grain, salt-sized crystals .
. . like white sand on the floor of the jar” filled with water. There is
always that “one more grain,” that tiniest, subtlest, least expected
“precipitating factor – as in, which snowflake breaks the branch? It’s the
littlest things that count, littlest persons that make a difference! That
single grain bursts water and crystal “into a living, moving pattern, / a
silent, quietly violent explosion” – the likes of which the earth will not
see again . . . until – “like grains of sand to be counted,” Joseph and Mary
descend – like stars of the sky and sands of the sea -- from David – to find
their way to Bethlehem to register under orders of empire. An empty and
offered barn precipitates new creation – a child is born! The pattern, our
pattern, each one of our patterns – our very DNA -- changes forever! The
cosmos is shaken with silent explosion.
The cosmos is shaken with silent explosion! Mark puts it – “the sun will be
darkened, / and the moon will not give its light, / and the stars will be
falling from heaven, / and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” What
a gracious, generous, giving universe we are given! For all of the real and
would-be horrors – earthquakes and hurricanes, tsunamis and tornados – plus
those universal horrors of our own making! – yet and still the universe
gives unceasingly of its light and its life every grain-like instant of
every lived and living day!
Physicist Aileen O’Donoghue writes so gratefully of the universe – first,
specifically of Mark’s “falling stars” – “The iron in our blood was forged
in supervovas.” Bursting stars! “We had to have giant stars blow
themselves to bits for us to carry oxygen from our lungs to our brain!” And
then generally of all light and life -- “I look at the generosity of the
universe, the richness of it, the fact that life manages to live in every
environment, from the boiling pools of Yellowstone to the dry pits of
Antarctica. Life is just everywhere and it is so abundant! The universe
doesn’t tell me to believe in God, but once I believe in God, the universe
tells me a lot about God – the abundance, the exuberance, the fecundity of
it all!”
Sisters and brothers, life in the “new creation,” born again of the Advent
adventure – the life, death and resurrection of the one named Jesus of
Nazareth whom we name as the Christ, the Messiah, the promise of God
fulfilled! It is life in a “new creation” each one of us can become as we
learn to reflect the image of that mammy-God who makes us each by hand.
That life is abundant! That life is exuberant! That life is fecund –
life-filled and life-filling, life-given and life-giving – beyond
comprehension! Literally, beyond belief! Speaking of growing grain by
grain, sand by sand, cell by cell – congregations do that! So do
confirmation classes! We have just started one – 7th and some 8th
graders meeting for now once a month – then beginning with Ash Wednesday
once a week through the Day of Pentecost! We are asking God so to grow us
in life, faith and practice! And we will need all the help, the examples,
we can get!
Last Sunday, in anticipation of the Advent adventure, we went to the movie
“Zathura” together. Talk about stepping out into space! Seeing one’s own
and family life in cosmic perspective! And the word about living was to
play the full and whole game – from beginning to end. We are to live --
grain by grain, turn by turn, step by step, scare by scare, day by day,
insight by insight, word by word, deed by deed – and as we are putting it in
the worship theme for this season – gift by gift, and goal by goal! Our
theme of “Bearing Gifts, Sharing Goals” is meant to see the playing out of
each one of our lives, each one of our households and families, and the
lives of our congregations and our communities – in light of the playing out
of the life of this world and the life of this earth – in the cosmic light
of this goodly godly universe!
Again, we are saying, every little thing, every gift, counts! Every little
person, every gifted one – God don’t make no junk, and we don’t give no
junk! -- makes a difference! For we never know which snowflake will break
the branch! It takes each and every last one of them! We never know which
of our words, which of our deeds, will make a breakthrough! Even a
miracle! Something that happens out of all context! Out of all frame of
reference to anything else that ever has been – “as we know it!” The kind
of instant, the kind of moment meant by Mark here – We blink, and we may
miss it! For we do not know when that time comes!
We never know when mammy/God, creator of both our once and our everyday
lives, like a mistress of household earth who seems to have gone far away –
God who seems even to have hidden her face from us, cries Isaiah – We never
know when that one may return – any time, any place, any way, to any one!
Every last person on this earth, as well as every last element in this
universe, may be a revealer of God’s “new coming” to us! Be awake! Aware!
Alive! Alert! Attuned! Attentive! To every last sign and signal of every
last size and shape!
Mammy/Gods see through the eyes of a child – from the grassroots, the bottom
of the heap – lowest on the food chain, closest to the ground. Mammy/ Gods
pay attention to every last detail, each passing moment – while they never
lose sight of the whole picture, either – the things that are meant to last
forever! The slightest bud on the fig tree that Jesus speaks of tells us
the summer is near! Albert Camus speaks to us in this time of the year –
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an
invincible summer.”
Advent is vulnerability promised to become invincible! Camus also is the
one who says of our bombed-out and broken world, in effect – Perhaps we
cannot prevent this from being a world in which children suffer. But we can
reduce the number of suffering children.” We can reduce the number of
suffering children! Grain by grain, gift by gift, goal by goal – that is
why for the Lighting of the Advent Candles this season we choose words from
the United Nations “Millennium Development Goals” (
www.millenniumcampaign.org
)
– adopted by 189 nations, of every size and shape, in the year 2000 –
designed to be actually achievable by the year 2015! – but only if each and
every last one of us – thinking globally, acting locally –
- encouraging city councils and county commissioners to take this
stand;
- sending letters to congressional representatives to do the same;
- volunteering with organizations such as the ONE campaign (www.theonecampaign.org)
Priscilla Barton has introduced to us;
- talking to family members and everyone else we know about this
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a difference – to change
“deathtime” to lifetime for millions of children!; and
- attempting to purchase “fair trade” products life coffee and
chocolate, as recommended by United Methodist Women, starting with our
own coffee hour! (www.makefairtrade.com)
The question Advent poses with such hard texts as from mark this morning is,
are our endings only endings? Whether with bang or with whimper? Or are
our endings also, and more so, new beginnings? Is the glass of life, the
jar in the chemistry lab, half-empty or half-full? Someone in
worship-planning for this season remembered this illustration of “fullness”
– first fill the jar with rocks and ask, is this jar full yet? Then fill
the same jar with sand to surround all the rocks and ask, is this jar full
yet? Then fill the same jar with water to surround the rocks and the sand
and ask, is this jar full yet? What else may God have to add? Stick
around! Advent is full of adventure! Stick around! We ain’t seen nothing
yet! God the sculptor of the mountains, / God the miller of the sand, /
God the jeweler of the heavens, / God the potter of the land: / You are womb
of all creation, / we are formless, shape us now. We are formless,
shape us now. And the Advent adventurers dare to say, Amen!
