Telling Time – Dr. Rev. Carol Kerr – December 24, 2009

What time is it? Can anyone really answer that question? The problem is every time you answer that question, by the time you have answered it, more time has passed. CHECK WATCH AND CHECK TIME. For example, my watch reads…. 7:21 and 4 seconds, no now 7:21 and 5 seconds, 6 seconds, no now its’ 7 seconds…. What time is it? Is there a right answer to that question? I can’t tell you exactly what time it is. But, I can tell you time is ticking like this metronome.

Of all times of year during the Christmas season, we are made most aware that time is ticking. Advertisements say “Avoid the Christmas rush and shop now!” So we rush to the mall after Thanksgiving, along with 2,000,000 other people. “Only 13 more shopping days until Christmas!” has morphed into “Only 13 more days until Christmas!” because now every single day is a shopping day – 24/7.

After the major weekend blizzard that those south of us from Washington to Boston received on Monday on the Today show the reporter said that although the cities were paralyzed people stayed home and shopped on line. She said that 240,000 were buying on line every minute. It’s been 3 minutes since I last checked the time (it’s now 7:24…)that would have been 720,000 purchases on line. What time is it? Time is ticking. Time is money.

One thing I do know is that we think we don’t have enough time, so we are always trying to maximize our time. One obsessive compulsive newspaper writer once suggested we note all our seasonal goals on a super organized Christmas checklist. We are suppose to systematize gift preparation in a “home wrapping center,” and implement production line techniques in order to maximize efficiency.

There are other time saving things we do at Christmas in our frenzied rush for time and more time. One man announced, “We yanked the tree out of the box and then plugged it right into the wall! That sucker was pre-decorated with colored lights and a bunch of ornaments. It took three minutes tops. None of this three hours and listening to Christmas music nonsense!”

Not to be out done, his friend bragged about how he avoided the pain of thoughtful shopping. “Fifteen gift cards from the web sit. Three clicks of the mouse and a credit card number. In and out, five minutes and I’m done

O.K., who here has things unfinished at home that they ran out of time to do before they came to church.
- Who has presents unwrapped?
- Cooking to do?
- House to clean?
- Decorations to put up?
In fact, some of you are probably calculating right now as I am preaching this sermon how to get everything done fast when you get home…

What time is it? Is not a friendly question. It is accompanies with anxiety with demands, with a list of things that need to get done and are never done in time.

What time is it? More time is passing now. Time is ticking. Time is money Even if you are good with time, like money, you never seem to get entirely on top of it. I myself try to ignore it, I have a clock in my kitchen with all the numbers in a pile on the bottom left hand corner. The big and and little hand point to nothing. On the face of the clock it says, “Whatever.” But, that doesn’t work either because I make sure that clock is set five minutes fast so that Ian and I get out to school on time.

No matter how many ways we try to save time we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time. Time to us is sarcasm. When compelled to look into its face it opens its jaws and devours everything in its path.

But there is one thing that seems to stand outside of time during the Christmas season that is the crèche. The tableaux of Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus in a stable with some animals. I love crèches because it doesn’t seem to care what time it is.

We have a small one here. Have you seen our crèche in the front of the church? It was bought way back when Rev. George Phinny was with the church. It has been stored in Helen MacDermaid’s barn for years, and then in the Coupe’s barn. Then we stored it in the sanctuary at the back for a while. Now we store it in the parking lot.

Past Christmas’s we use display it in the front of the sanctuary. But, this year one of our members cut some Plexiglas and lit it from inside and we have finally put it where it is best, out front. Cars rush by our church, a child turns his head “Mommy I saw baby Jesus!” No time to stop. But, it doesn’t matter cars pass, time passes but Mary, Joseph and Jesus never move, never change.

Who here has a crèche at home? I recommend you getting one.

Certainly things happen to Mary and Joseph and Jesus when the crèche is put on display. Once someone stole the figurines out of our church’s crèche and then the following year the reappeared. Our family has a few footless shepherds at home, the dog wagged his tail one Christmas and brushed them off the table.

Some families have a complete minidrama setting out the manger scene. Here is an actual dispute that one family with three small kids had.
“He had baby Jesus last year.”
“Her camels are all bigger than mine.”
“I can’t believe you put a plastic army guy in with the shepherds.”
The parents thought of solving the problem by giving turns to rearrange the crèche on alternating days. Yet there is still sabotage:
“One of my shepherds is hanging upside down from the ceiling fan. He is going to puke!”
“If Mary ever wants to see Joseph again, she needs to stand back behind the manger where I put her yesterday and promise not to ride the camel.”

But, when all is said and done, no matter the trials and tribulations of storing it, of setting up the display, the crèche will not change year after year and forever: Jesus lays in the manger with his hands outstretched as if to welcome the angels. Mary sits next to him staring in adoration. Joseph stands by and holds a lamp.

There is a very ancient legend about Joseph that at the moment of the birth of Jesus he looked up and saw heaven standing still
- the birds were suspended in flight.
- He looked down and saw workers with their hands in a bucket lying there.
- He saw the animals chewing but they did not chew
- The shepherd had raised his hand to move the sheep along but his hand remained up.
- He saw children dipping into a streaming river to drink but they were not drinking.
- He saw all the facing looking upward

What time is it?

For one moment in time, something new entered time and stopped the ticking of the clock. Eternity moved in and after this time didn’t have to be seconds ticking like empty shells, reminding you of your limited life and futility of getting it all done.

The moment God entered into our time as Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, time was saved and we were saved.

At the top of your bulletins you will see a quote from Thomas Merton:
Christ is born. He is born to us. And, he is born today ….It is not merely another day in the weary round of time. Today, eternity enters into time, and time is caught up into eternity. Today, Christ… enters the world. to reclaim souls who had forgotten their identity… St. Leo says: “Today is a day restoring that which was long lost, a day of bliss unending.”

What time is it? CHECK WATCH AND COUNT SECONDS….Can that question ever be answered without it being immediately wrong as seconds tick by? It cannot be answered in chronological time, in digital watch time, but it can be answered in the fullness of time.

What time it as we light the candles and pass the light of Christ from one to the other. What time is it? It is a moment when eternity kisses our fleeting lives. What time is it? ? It is holy time. It is sacred time. Joseph holds the lamp and looks around and the world stands still. The time is now.

Water Tables at a 10k – Dr. Rev. Carol Kerr

Many of you know that I go jogging regularly. I have done so since I was a teenager and would go with my father. It became a life long habit and I jog about 3 miles about 3 times a week. Once, however, I decided to run in a race. It was a 10k in Cape Elizabeth around Thanksgiving called “The Turkey Trot.” Even though I never ran in a race before, I did it because I was feeling fat. That January I had given birth to Ian and had put on many pounds in the process. So, I thought signing up for a race would motivate me to run a little further and so loose some weight.

However, a couple days before the race I had come down with the 24 hour stomach flu which I was still feeling slightly weird from. I showed up for the race wearing what I always wear jogging, big ripped, faded, mismatched baggy sweats. I went to the registration table and paid my money. I got this little vest with my big yellow numbers, 132. I was feeling pretty spiffy until I went to gather where all the other runners were. There were these really tall men who were wearing matching Spandex tights and tops in neon colors that looked like they were painted on. They were warming up, with in place sprinting, and vigorous stretching. You could see their huge thigh muscles bulging out from behind the Spandex. One stranger came up to me and whispered in a low voice as if I was about to divulge a state secret “What is your race strategy?” However, that was the first time it ever occurred to me to have a strategy. My strategy was to show up, sign in, and start jogging.

I was wondering maybe I shouldn’t be here. I was wondering if I had gotten in over my head. It was like I had found myself in the middle of a bull fight. These people around me were the bulls snorting and pounding the ground. Their strategies were like the red capes the matador’s flinging to and fro in front of the bulls. If this was a bull fight, I was Ferdinand the bull. I am the most uncompetitive runner ever. I never time myself. I never do intervals, I don’t take my heart rate or keep charts, or pack carbs. When I go jogging, I trot along, enjoy the weather, and stop to pet as many dogs as I can.

The race started and I immediately fell behind everyone. There was one other nice woman who was slow too. She could see this was my first race. Out of mercy she jogged along next to me to keep me company. The only problem was that my shoe laces kept untying. So, I had to keep stopping and tie them. Finally, she wondered if I would mind if she went on ahead.

Then I was all alone. Right when I was sure I was on the wrong road, I turned a corner and there was a water table. On the ground around the table there was a kind of mayhem of Dixie cups left behind by the runners. But there were a few remaining cups on the table. There were three people standing behind the table. When they saw me they started cheering, “Good job, you can do it! Keep going!” Since I never had been in a race before I was totally surprised, not only by the water, but by the cheers. They held out a dixie cup just for me. I wasn’t at all thirsty, it was about 45 degrees and overcast. But, I stop and drank it anyway because they were just so nice. I thanked them and went on my way with “You can do it” and applause trailing behind me.

There were two more water tables. I loved them. Each one waited until I came before they packed up. When they saw me they started cheering as if I was the first and not the last.. I would wave, smile, and stop and drink some water not because I was particularly thirsty, but because they were so nice. They would encourage me, “Not far to go now! You are only about 10 minutes behind the last guy. He was limping so I think you might catch up. “

Between the second and the third water table, Dave drove by with Gavin and Ian in the car. They rolled down the window and cheered me on too! What a pleasant surprise. Finally I passed the finish line, more hydrated with water than I had been in years, and only 5 minutes behind the guy limping. I was dead last. But, I didn’t care. I loved the race because I loved people cheering me on.

Life is like running a race with no experience. We are born at the starting line with no strategy, no instructions, and little coaching. In life we face challenges and situations that have never encountered and often never expected. The world often doesn’t run like the world we grew up in and we are unprepared. There are strange twists and turns that unnerve us. For instance, any one going through a divorce never expected to find themselves in that situation. They wonder how did my marriage turn out this way? What happened? Anyone who ever had a serious illness never expected that to happen. They come home one day and pick up the messages on their answering machine with a message from the nurse saying the doctor want to talk to you about the results of your test. Or, who here expected to be in a recession as deep as the Depression of 1930’s? There are middle class citizens living in tents down in Florida. They didn’t expect they would be unemployed and bankrupt when they graduated from college 20 years ago. Parent’s never expect to get a call from the police telling them that there daughter is caught with drugs on her.

The writer of Hebrews knew about this race we of life that we are in. They also were running it. They also had encountered strange and unexpected twists and turns. The letter is addressed to Christians who are facing an uncertain future. It is sometime around the year AD 100 so these people represented the third and fourth generation of Christians. They can recall the faith of their grandparents who had eagerly expected the return of Jesus. And, as the writer of Hebrews reminds them, there was a time when their own faith was strong. And they had stood up to threats and public torment. But now that strong, clear faith was slipping away. Christ had not returned. Persecution was increasing. The future looked grim. The initial enthusiasm of faith was waning and the community was unraveling. What in the world would give those Christians the courage to move boldly into the future?

The writer of Hebrews tells them: Christ has gone first. Christ is already leading the way, he knows the route and has already made it past the finish line. It says, “Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfector of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross.”

As if that were not enough that Christ has gone first, the writer of Hebrews reminds us of generation after generation of faithful heroes and heroines in the Hebrew scripture who preceded Christ. Chapter 11, is the prelude to the verses we have read. It is a litany of woman and men who “by faith” endured every form of suffering and pain and disillusionment. The author gathers them all together in dramatic image calling them a cloud of witnesses. By faith Abel offered a better sacrifice than Cain did, and still speaks even through he is death. By faith Enoch was taken from this life and was commended as one who pleased God. By faith Noah was warned by God and built his ark. By faith Abraham was called to go to a place he did not know to receive his inheritance. By faith Abraham, and Sarah even though they were passed age were enabled to become parents. It continues a long list of people who lived by faith and then says that all these people were still living by faith and saw the things promised and welcomed them from a distance. It says that by faith they were aliens and strangers in this world and were looking for a better country a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for God has prepared a city for them. And so it says, faith is being sure of what we hope for, proof of what we do not see. This cloud of faithful witnesses surround us now and are cheering us on as we run the long-distance race they too ran.

We run the race. But, at times our hearts grow faint. We think we don’t have what it takes, aren’t prepared, had no idea what we got ourselves into. Perhaps you are feeling that now? But then we have come to church to day and it is “All Saints Day.” This Sunday we pause and listen to the great chant of the saints, that cloud of witnesses that have run the race before us cheering us on, no matter how slow we are. “Run the race, run the race! Look to Jesus, look to Jesus!”

Like the race I was in, at church these saints gather around a table waiting for us to refresh us. It isn’t the water table, it is the communion table. It quenches our thirst with many little cups, the blood of Christ, and satisfies our hunger with little broken pieces of bread, the body of Christ. There will be a time during todays’ sacrament where we can name the names of those saints that mean a lot to us. People we have known. They may be people who are still alive. They may be people who have passed on. But they have been people who have been our teachers, and mentors in the faith. Maybe it is a friend who died in High school of cancer, but you still hear his voice saying “I just want to see Jesus.” Maybe, it is a Sunday School teacher who had done mission in Honduras, and you can still hear her voice asking, “How are you doing

There are times when we have been in church and come to the communion table bearing burdens and worry and we receive the sacrament and listen to the choir and once again hear the chant, “Run the race, run the race, look to Jesus, look to Jesus!” Perhaps there is a surge of hope in your heart when things look hopeless. Perhaps it reminds you of a friends encouragements. Perhaps it is the patience to pick up on foot and put it in front of the other and get through another day. Perhaps it is the silent prayer that was filled with a mysterious presence as you feel the communion wine trickle down your throat. Perhaps it was when you stood up against injustice and your knees were shaking and your voice quivering but you heard inside a voice crying out for what is right and good and just. “Run the race, run the race, look to Jesus look to Jesus.”

Listen for their voices. For when you hear them, you will see that Christ ahs gone before you and first. You will drink and eat and receive the grace and strength to go on and finish the race.

The Shipwrecked – Rev. Dr. Carol Kerr

This is the “Fable of the Deserted Island:” You are on a voyage of discovery. There is a storm. Your ship is wrecked; all are lost except for you. You wash up on an utterly deserted island. Though no other humans live on the island, there is plenty of food and water. But you are stuck alone on the island. Question: What would you do for the rest of your life?

Which would you pick?

1. Who would work on building a boat?
2. Try to adapt to their circumstances such as taking up shell collecting and classification, write poetry on the back of a palm leaf, sit quietly and watch the sun set?
3. Kill yourself. (Now if you think I am being negative here, when the Fable of the Deserted Island is posed to a college lecture class there are always some who come up with this option. These people think the prospect of living alone for the rest of their lives with nowhere to go and nothing to do as a fate worse than death.)
4. Shoot off some flares to catch the attention of passing ships.
5. Grab on to a plank that is floating by and hold on for your life.

The Fable of the Deserted Island is really a primer on life. It is a “get real” sort of question. After all, the planet earth is an island, spinning blue and white, alone in the universe. Some people look at that picture of the planet earth and think it is beautiful. Others look at it and exclaim, “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Not only are we alone in the universe (or at least there is millions of light years between us and whatever other life form there might be in some distant star or galaxy). There are many of us who feel utterly alone on this planet even though it is inhabited by 4 billion people. Here is a grim statistic, did you know that many more Americans are victims of suicide than homicide? Here is another grim statistic, every two weeks, on average, someone jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge, thee world’s leading suicide location.

Even though some of us do not feel alone all of the time, all of us feel alone some of the time. Most of us would pick “a” or “b” than “c.” That is most of us are the shell collectors, boat builders, sunset gazers than the bridge jumpers. There are times in all of our lives when we lift our heads and notice the circumference of the island we are on and are astonished how small it really is. These are times when we realize that “Life is short.” or wonder “What’s the point?”, or feel, “I’m stuck.” – Maybe I am shipwrecked after all.

Then there is option “d” which would be to shoot flares hoping that passing ships would notice. Our hope is not on the island. Rather our hope is in the possibility of catching the attention of something passing by.

It’s the Christmas season, why am I preaching this sermon about deserted islands and being shipwrecked? Well, Christmas season seems to be like a grand ocean liner with parties, and friends, and so many lights that it looks like a wedding cake floating on the ocean. These people have their own security systems, their credit cards, their nice homes,

In contrast, for some people Christmas is more lonely than any other time. For instance, some people come from dysfunctional homes. Getting together with the family means witnessing Dad getting drunk and more and more verbally abusive throughout the day. For others hanging the stockings means wondering where to hang, what to do with the stocking of their child who died last year. There are families divorced for the first time, who have had to split up the Christmas ornaments into two households. The husband has the star, the wife has the angel, and the kids have a tree with bare spots all over it.

Then there are people who just don’t feel very good about themselves. People who try to be “Good” but just can’t seem to do it. People where the issue has gone beyond whether they’ve been “naughty or nice” but have wandered into evil this year.

I went to a lecture by Steven Callahan who wrote the book Adrift. His boat sank off of Europe and was lost at sea floating in a life raft for 76 days. He said that ocean liners would pass within sight. But no matter how he shot off his flares they never saw him. It is hard to catch the attention of someone who is preoccupied with their own thing. These ships that passed by were on automatic pilot, steering for their destination, and not looking around. Calahan recalls the anguish he felt when he saw the ships sail off, his hope for rescue and for life, a shrinking dot on the horizon.

“a,b,c, and d” don’t seem to work that well. Which leaves that last crazy option of “e” – Grab onto a plank that is floating by and hold on for your life.

The shipwrecked have not other choice. I have discovered a wonderful show on line which is called TED. TED has experts from around the world to come and speak on their subject and pass on ideas worth spreading. Famous, accomplishes, and brilliant people come and speak on TED. One person they invited was Dr. Sunitha Krishanan who has dedicated her life to rescuing women and children from sex slavery which is a multimillion dollar global market. She described her own gang rape as a young teenager. She says that she was not so much traumatized by the event as terribly angry by the fact that no one was doing anything about it. She continued to tell gut wrenching stories about young girls even ages 3 and 4, who are raped repeatedly and sold into slavery. She is speaking in an opulent auditorium with oriental carpets on the stage and gilded statues with lavaish drapery. However, the slides she shows are of women with their throats slashes, faces beaten, and half dead from AIDS. Somewhere in the lecture she happen to mention that she herself has saved over 3,500 women and girls at which point the auditorium broke out in applause. But, looking at her facial expression I had the uneasy feeling that the applause was inappropriate. “Doesn’t it make you feel good?” the audience was saying. But, she did not smile, she simply stopped her pacing and stared back at them, saying nothing. Her expression at that moment is the expression I imagine most shipwrecked people would have on their faces who have clinged to their solitary planks and are washed ashore and have made their way to the stable in Bethlehem and kneel before the baby Jesus. It is not an expression that says, “I feel good going to church at Christmas!” For the shipwrecked are weaned from themselves and all they thought was important. The ship wrecked come to the stable seeking not to posses, not to have their self esteem built up, not for applause, or for a feel good moment. Dr. Sunitha Krishanan, did not save women who are sold into slavery, so as to gather trophies and put them on her mantel piece. The shipwreck make their way to the stable not to posses, but to be possessed by love and to serve justice. The Christian tradition has a spiritual word for these people, “the pure in heart.”

The Spanish author Jose Ortega y Gasset puts it this way:

The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from fantasy ad looks life in the face, realized that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. And this is the simple truth – that to live is to feel oneself lost. Whoever accepts this has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere because it is a question of his salvation, weill cause him to bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas: the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not feel himself lost is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, ver comes up against his own reality.

When the shipwrecked arrive at the staple they will see that Mary and Joseph and Jesus are ship wrecked too. After all, there was “no room in the inn.” And they were left to fend for themselves in a stable

God came down to this island of a planet not to be on an ocean cruser but to dwell with the shipwrecked. God became a shipwrecked on himself, as a babe utterly vulnerable, under millions of light years of darkness.

When the shipwrecked come to the stable they discover that it is not the deserted island that made them so alone, rather it was a deserted place inside themselves. In front of Jesus God finds this empty place and it becomes an opening for God to create something new. That is how Christ is born in us. The broken ones gaze onto the whole one, Emmanuel, who trusts them enough to let their planks become the very crèche upon which he lies. “I am so glad you came!” He seems to say.

I just thought of a final option if you found yourself on a deserted island. Option a, build a boat. Option b, make the best of it. Option c, kill yourself. Option d, send off flairs. Option e, grab onto a plank floating by. Option “f.” Make every desire is transformed into a pure and simple desire for Jesus.

The people on the ocean liner with all the lights and noise can miss it. But the one floating alone will witness….what? The northern lights washing even the vast starless spaces with color.

Christmas Letter from Rev. Carol Kerr

Dear friends,

As a parent I have wanted to teach my children things that will make life better for them when they grow up. Things that will help them live a life of value, happiness and joy. Sometimes I wish could do the learning for them. I want to be able to buffer whatever pain they may encounter. But, I can’t be there all the time for them.

There is something I can do. At Christmas I can teach them the difference between a gift and a present. Presents are the sort of things that fit on lists with sizes and colors. Presents are found in catalogs which have been circled by our kids several times as “hints.” Gifts are things that we don’t think to ask for but come anyway. Gifts differ from presents because no matter what form they take, they always represent something greater, deeper, more enduring.

The Christmas Eve service is a gift we give our children. I remember one year after the service I asked the boy who lit the candles on the altar before the first hymn, “How did you like it?” He was a heavy boy with ADD type energy who lived for football. I was startled by the enthusiasm of his answer: “Are you kidding? It was the best thing I have ever done in my whole life!” What a gift. A gift to him and a gift to me. Who would have guessed it?

My oldest son is coming home from his freshman semester at college this Christmas. The pile of presents under the tree is smaller than it use to be. But, the gift remains. We will all be there this Christmas Eve passing the light of Christ from one to the other, singing, “Silent Night.”

Christmas Sunday Service: 9:30am on December 20th. We will have a specially big choir (I think Nancy now has just about everybody singing!) We are also going to have digital pictures of Christmas on powerpoint taken by our youth.

Christmas Eve candle lighting service for the whole family: 7:00pm on December 24th. Carols, reading the Christmas story, for children and adults. Of course, candle lighting to end in peace and beauty.

I wish all of you a wonderful gift filled Christmas!

Peace,

Pastor Carol

The Egg of the Universe and the Big Idea of God. – Dr. Rev. Carol Kerr

Luke 21:25-36

Do you think that the universe is more like a wrist watch or like an egg? Probably you never thought of it before, but for now what would you say? Watch? Egg? I myself like the idea of an egg. The universe is one big egg waiting to hatch. Cracks are beginning to form on the thin shell that separates us/it from a higher more complete and whole reality. There are even little hole chipped away through which we can peer into this fantastic cosmic second birth. An egg is exciting as we wait for it to hatch. We feel God about to do something – a movement just behind the shell.

One big cosmic egg, to say the least, is not a very popular idea of the universe. In fact, I am the only one I know of in the last 900 years that has taken a shine to the idea. Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic who lived around 1080, sported the notion for a while. She wrote: By this supreme instrument in the figure of an egg, and which is the universe, invisible and eternal things are manifested.”

Our modern day and age has incubated the more sensible metaphor of a watch for the universe. In most of our minds the universe is like one of those ultra modern stylized watches. The type whose face is made out of some kind of smooth and polished gray stone. There aren’t even any numbers on it just a little chip of silver to mark where there 12 would be. The kind of watch that looks like it could care les if anyone read time off it. The kind of watch that calibrates time in chilled quartz perfection until the battery runs out. After Isaac Newton what other kind of image of the universe could there be? Eggs? What nonsense. The universe is made up of cold matter that could care less if we gaze at it for answers. Right? The universe operates according to immense impersonal forces whirring inexorably to an ending, maybe, not never never to a goal.

One reason why I like the idea of an egg as a metaphor for the universe is that, frankly, eggs are in the kitchen and stars are in the sky. In our minds eggs have to do with everyday practical down to earth things like breakfast. Stars are for poets and scientists who stay up all night and don’t get on with life. To think about the big, big picture like how the universe is made, and the culmination of history seems like a waste of time. How do I get through the day is what I want to know. She’s talking about stars and I’ve got teenagers! Well, these big questions effect us all even in our day to day living. Just like the stuff that settles behind our refrigerator, under our beds, and over the door frame. Seriously, have you ever moved your refrigerator and wondered about that stuff that collected behind it? What is that stuff made of anyway? An analysis of it reveals that most of it is made of exfoliated skin and hair combined with the dust of meteorites! Literally tons of meteorites disintegrate as they hit the earth’s atmosphere everyday. Shake out your bedspread in the late afternoon sun and you’ll see it. Stardust! As Robert Fulgum points out, the stuff of the stars is commingling with us every day and we don’t notice it. So too, the stuff of the big picture is commingling with us everyday if we roll back the little picture every once and a while and take a look. The big picture is not for scientists and poets alone. The big picture is everywhere. The Universe and egg? Why not? There is stardust behind our refrigerators.

There is another reason I like the metaphor of an egg. It is organic. When yo think about it something organic is really far more sophisticated than anything human made. Organic things grow into something. They don’t just unwind. They become. They become a higher reality altogether, a life form.

It use to be that scientists thought the things in the universe didn’t have much to do with other things unless they ran into them, or exploded near them. The universe was sort of like two people sharing an apartment, who coexist, but they are not married. However, science probes deeper and deeper into the heart of reality it has come to the inevitable conclusion that instead of merely coexisting, everything in the universe effects everything else in the universe.

Take gravity, for instance. Let me do a little experiment right here and drop this hymnal. See it lands on the floor. That is gravity working. But what is gravity. An arm didn’t come up out of the floor and pull the hymnal down. The closest explanation for the nature of gravity sounds suspiciously egg like. The physicist Brian Swimm says gravity is the allurement that objects in the universe have for all other objects in the universe. The hymnal is allured to the earth and the earth is allured to the hymnal.

Now, I am going to take this hymnal and swing it side to side. I feel the weight as I swing it. But, what is that weight? That weight is the allurement of all the stars in all the galaxies in the universe upon the hymnal. What is this cosmic allurement of all for all else? The best analogy I can come up with is ore organic than anything else. It is a kind of sticky attraction sort of like the gooey stuff in an egg.

Hildegard of Bingen talked about another kind of sticky interconnectedness of the universe. She called it the Holy Spirit. O Holy Spirit, you are the mighty way in which everything that is in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, and penetrated with relatedness. Surely, I am not saying that the Holy Spirit is the same thing as gravity. I am just saying that it is interesting how they sound the same now days.

My son and I were down at the Boston Museum of Science a couple weeks ago. There we went to the planetarium. As we were looking back at the thousands and billions of stars and galaxies in the universe, as the lecturer was telling us about black holes, and quasars, and the big bang, and the edges of the universe, he suddenly said something like, The conditions of the universe are so precisely tuned to the advent of life and even consciousness that it is as if the universe has been waiting billions of years of our arrival. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! This scientist was leaning into theology. Universe talk was beginning to sound like God talk.

Let me talk about this a little more. It is as if all the preexisting conditions of the universe were calibrated for life to arise. As Robert Wright wrote in Time Magazine:

If the force of gravity were pushed upward a bit, stars would burn out faster, leaving little time for life to evolve on the planets circling them. If the relative masses of protons and neutrons were changed by a hair, stars might never be born, since the hydrogen they eat wouldn’t exist. If, at the Big Bang, some basic numbers, the “initial conditions” had been jiggled, matter and energy would never have coagulated into galaxies, stars, planets or any other platforms stable enough for life as we know it.

On top of these uncanny “initial conditions” from which the universe was created scientists are also beginning to suspect a natural law that drives the universe towards increasing complex organization of itself. They think that self organization rather than de-organization is so basic as to account for the origin of life including intelligent life. It is like we hit the megabucks again and again and again and again. So many times that scientists begin to wonder that the game isn’t rigged by someone.

You can see what I am getting at. The universe, from the subatomic particles to the largest stars and galaxies, seem to be more than just parts, but a kind of great whole. Like an egg is a greater whole. It might even be driving to a goal of intelligent life. Intelligent life that can listen to this sermon and think about eggs versus watches. Intelligent life that concludes that certainly there is much more going on in this universe than a cold impersonal mechanism slowly winding down to nothing.

The last question is this: Are we the culmination of this universe? Are humans the chicks that have hatched from the billion years of brooding that the universe has done until now? I don’t think so. If you go to the planetarium and just hear about how phenomenally huge our universe is, you have got to leave with the idea that God has something bigger in mind that just us. Although we are a part of it. God is driving towards a greater goal.

Now Jesus comes from a very different time and place than we do. He had a totally different idea of what the universe was made of. But, none the less if given a choice between a watch or an egg, I think Jesus would have said the universe is like an egg. He thought in terms of end times and in terms of the universe culminating in something far greater than it is now. The reign of God. That is why he talked about watching for the signs of the times. He thought that the chick had not yet hatched with humans. He thought that there was going to be something ore. He talked about something that would affect even the sun and the moon and the stars. This is what is called the second coming of “the Son of Man.” Now, no one knows exactly what this is that he expected, or when it was going to happen. Certainly our scientific theory of the universe is very different than the view of the universe that Jesus held. But, still both point to a universe that is growing a moving to a fantastic culmination of some point.

Advent is as much a time of waiting for this second cosmic birth as it is of remembering the first cosmic birth, Jesus the Christ. Advent is about feeling for the cracks in the egg shell, listening for the sounds of God’s movement, and peering through the little holes that have already been chipped away between us and this culmination.

What are these holes like? They are like climbing Mount Washington in the fog, only for the clouds to suddenly part on the summit. They are like being lost in a city and a stranger helping you. They are like the joy at seeing your grandchild for the first time. They are like contemplating science as it discovers the vast and eternal mystery behind everything.

And as we peer through the egg shell thin layer that separates us from the unknown only to find, behold!, another eye peering back at us. Moments where we are suddenly and genuinely confused as to whether we were chipping away to it, or it was chipping its way to us. These are moments when we know that our lives are part of a vast and wonderful design of the universe and are infinitely valuable for the part we are playing in it. Even with teenage sons, it helps me get through my day, with more meaning, reverence and awe, for what is really going on around me.

These are moments where as we sweep the star dust away from behind our refrigerators, we swell with hope for the hatching.