William Yagel
Grace Radford
November 13, 2022
Proper 28, Year C
Holy and Loving God - may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing in your sight. Oh Lord, for you are our strength and our salvation.
Amen.
When I was working in construction one of my employers used to remark about the challenges of focus in our line of work. The company built large apartment complexes, mostly in central Virginia, and would retain ownership or those complexes for years to come. This meant that any problem of faulty construction would become a problem of maintenance in the years ahead. So, focusing on minute details like the type of screws used to attach masonry anchors to the wall, the way a piece of flashing was bent, or the particular manufacturing of of metal clips to eliminate rust in exterior concrete stairs were essential details that called for critical focus. But also, being able to draw back enough to see that the elevation of an entire building could be changed by a couple of inches to improve drainage across the entire property was necessary. We would talk about this as an adjustable zoom lens, drawing back from a project far enough to see the whole thing in on view before zooming in closely to study details, then backing out agian.
It was Veteran’s day this week, along with another notable day that I will get to in a minute, that had me thinking about this tension of seeing the general and the specific simultaneously in our passages today. In thinking about Veteran’s Day, I was remembering a documentary I watched years ago about our Congressional Medal of Honor. That award is often considered the most distinguished award any soldier can ever be granted in our military. The program kind of went through the entire history of the award and highlighted several recipients. Those persons who showed gallantry in action, who went above and beyond the call of duty, who risked their lives, who showed unwavering devotion, conspicuous gallantry, or extraordinary heroism.
I must admit that I don’t really remember many of the specific stories that were highlighted, but I do remember the narrator talking through the challenges of knowing the details of a particular act of gallantry needed to be awarded that medal AFTER that specific act was committed. You see, the first thing that needs to happen is heroic act, but that is only the beginning.
Someone must see that soldier do it.
That witness must survive.
That person then must tell the story that may be impossibly difficult to share.
And when they decide to tell that story it must be told well enough that it compels a response. After that point, the story begins its journey through whatever bureaucracy is set up to vet and consider those narratives.
All of that is before the official selection process of the powers that be who will read the narrative and decide yes or no.
Certainly, there are multitudes of soldiers deserving the Medal of Honor that will never be known because any one of those pieces won’t come together. These details of how a soldier’s story is revealed is therefore essential for our knowing it and honoring it.
Our scriptural record has much the same reality. We don’t have a single original, or Autograph, version of any book in the bible. Every book of either the Old or New Testament has been copied more than we can know. For example, our oldest copy of any gospel dates to about 200AD. And that is a fairly sparse bit of the Gospel of John. Surely Paul, or the Apostles, wrote more letters, which are now lost to history. We are compelled, then, to study the details of what we do have. Theologians pour over word choices, historical references, nuance, political climate, and tone to glean every scrap of meaning we can find. The good news is that over the arc of our history as a Judeo-Christian people we have collected enough of God’s revelation to make an image from the aggregate pieces.
The work of interpreting ancient texts in a modern world takes real work from an academic standpoint alone. Unlike the Medal of Honro, it is even more challenging when as this work of scriptural interpretation is no less than essential and life giving to the world. Small wonder it is the cause of such conflict, despite the ethos of its message!
While considering the dramatic shifts of happenstance that brought us the biblical canon as we know it today—and yes, I do believe that God has a particular interest in sharing God’s word with us, so I believe it is more than simple luck. But in considering that, I was struck by the other, less significant day of the week, Nov. 9. Also known as the birthday of the great astrophysicist, astrologist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, and author-Carl Sagan. This is the man who reminded the world that we are all star dust. That the elements in our bodies were formed from the heavy elements found in the crucibles of exploding stars. The Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen dust which form our bodies are the most prevalent elements found in the entire solar system. The majority of what is out there is what is in here! We are all made of the same star stuff.
Sagan forces us to take a step back and to look at the whole picture, to see the grand work of God in the Cosmos. He forces our zoom lens to retract and our view to get ever larger. One of may favorite Sagan quotes comes to us from Valentine’s day in 1990. Sagan had the Voyager Space Probe look back to earth after traveling away from us for 12 -1/2 years, from a distance of 3.6 Billion miles away and take one last photo of us, lost in a sea of stars. He offered:
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Indeed, he had the largest human view ever on our planet.
It leaves me wishing that God had told us a little bit about the galaxies, solar systems, black holes, supernovas, or any hint of what we would be in for. But that seems never to be God’s way. We are blessed mostly with stories of the intimate which we must interpret to our broader world view. So, when we hear of signs like Luke speaks of in our Gospel today we in the 21st century have a profoundly different view than those in the 1st century. This is easily evidenced by the blood red moon that showed herself on Tuesday morning this week during the lunar eclipse.
There were no calls that I heard for us to prepare to the coming day of the Lord, maybe because we have the benefit of men and women like Carl Sagan who have helped us understand the order of things. But this can have the effect of distancing us from wondering at the largeness of God’s works, have us looking too closely at details all the time. Certainly, in this season of stewardship my thoughts were often in the particular, looking at details of time and talent, thinking what I have to offer, but still there is that necessity to draw our view back and simply wonder at a God who set all things in motion, who created all things. God who continues to create anew. Who redeems us. Who sustains us.
As I have reflected on this jumble of thoughts in a jumble of a week, I have continued to return to the profound gift that comes to us as good news from early in the sixth century BC. There is much debate on the particular of who wrote Isaiah, the reading this morning is largely thought of as the Third book of Isaiah, being written about 200 years after the first 39 chapters of the work. Much has been read into the details of the book, trying to understand the writers of the work, the time of the writing, the meaning of each reference. We offer historical criticism, form criticism, canonical criticism dissecting the work into details for consideration. Now, all of that is vitally important and fascinating, but that is not what I want to leave you with this morning.
I want to leave by reminding us of the largeness particularly of the second sentence of our passage today. God’s immense joy and delight in God’s creation. What we can piece together from all of the details that we can find is that if there is one identity of God.
God is Love.
It is our common refrain, but it can never be said enough. That God creates us in Joy and delight, and that God will continue to create, redeem, and sustain us compelled by God’s love for us. God who has always loved in a measure so vast that it can’t be known, to be found in details we can often miss.
Amen