A Sunday Sermon

from: http://bycommonconsent.com/2014/04/13/sunday-sermon-creation/

Author Lauren Winner writes in her book, Still:

My friend Ruth’s mother once told her, ‘Every ten years you have to remake everything.’ Reshape yourself. Reorient yourself. Remake everything. What struck Ruth about this was not just the insight, but the source: she had imagined that her mother, her steadfast, loving mother, was static, was always the same. She didn’t know that her mother had remade everything seven times, eight times. Sometimes the reshaping is not big, not audible; not a move, a marriage, a child, a heroic change of course. Sometimes it is only here inside, how you make sense of things. Sometimes it is only about who you know yourself to be. [6]

I don’t have any great insights on this rebuilding process. All I know is that it will require patience—with yourself, with others, even with God. Abraham 4:17-18 reads: “And the Gods set them [the lights] in the expanse of the heavens, to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to cause to divide the light from the darkness. And the Gods watched those things which they had ordered until they obeyed” (emphasis added). Sometimes after we start the process of rebuilding something, we have to be patient and watch and wait for things to play out. Maybe it doesn’t work, and we have to start the process over again.

Lauren Winner’s book is about her journey through an ebb of faith. Toward the end she writes:

From this place now—not in the midst of the marital maelstrom; not in the middle of discovering God’s abstraction, but a little while later—in this clearing, I can begin to see those people and stories and words that held me to something resembling the Christian faith; that hold me still, if sometimes with a loose stitch.

It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference between them matters: “Stories . . . told with . . . heroes at the centre of them . . . are told to laud the virtues of the heroes—for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can’t, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that’s always fundamentally about God.”

I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God. (Winner, 193-94)

The Björk song “Unravel” poignantly describes a process of recreating:

While you are away
My heart comes undone

Slowly unravels
In a ball of yarn

The devil collects it
With a grin

Our love
In a ball of yarn

He’ll never return it

So when you come back
We’ll have to make new love

What we rebuild will never be the same as what has been torn down. The materials we have at hand might be different, or we might have to reassemble them in a new way—the thimble we used here may have to fit somewhere else, and we may have lost the hub cap altogether. But we can rebuild. May we have the courage and the patience with ourselves to create of our lives what the Lord would have us build, and may we help others along the way.

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