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“Our God is Big Enough”
Our God is big. I mean really big. I mean so big we cannot comprehend how big God really is.
Big enough to have created everything that we can see through the strongest telescope (galaxies and black holes and other far-away stuff that only astronomers can contemplate)...and big enough to have created everything we see only through the strongest microscope (snowflakes and living cells, protons, and nano-whatevers).
Big enough to have created all nations, tribes, and peoples and this earth (maybe even other planets in other galaxies as well), and big enough to have knit together each person with is or her unique, irreplicable DNA.
Big enough to have existed before the farthest back person we can remember, can name, or even number….and big enough to exist beyond the furthest ahead person we know or can ever imagine.
It boggles our minds to think of how really big God is.
And yet…and yet this really big, transcendent, omnipotent God is open, generous, and personal enough to give us such things as we can comprehend and appreciate and do something with. God gives us this earth particular earth—its purple mountained majesties, its running steams and ocean waves, its blue skies and scudding clouds, its songbirds to hear and pets, its air to breathe and water to drink, its seasons of green grass and flowers, colored leaves and snowflakes. God is big enough to give us this earth to take care of.
God is generous and personal enough to give us ourselves–our minds to think, our hearts to feel, our wills to act, our souls to believe; our spouses and children, our friends to both love and secure us; and communities and countries where we can make a positive difference through hard and productive work.
And God is generous and personal enough to give us each day one day at time…no more, no less. Yesterday is past; we remember it. We can feel ecstasies of heart-throbbing joy about it. We can feel heart-stabbing guilt about it. But we cannot change the past. What has happened has happened. What is done is done. And so often, it is best to let the past be past; by Jesus’ own counsel, to let the dead bury the dead. Our God is big enough to bear the joys and heartaches of the past. And tomorrow is tomorrow; we anticipate it. We can dream about it. We can lie awake at night worrying about it. But we cannot change the future. And so it is best to let the future be the future: our God is big enough to hold the future in God’s hands. What we do have, and what God gives us, is now: our present earth; our present selves, families, communities and country; our present moment. In Jesus’ wise and generous teaching in the New Testament lesson this morning, over and over again, he says, “Do not worry about your life. Look at the birds and how God feeds them. Are you are of more value than they?”
Do not worry about yesterday or, for that matter tomorrow. “Who can add a single hour to your span of life?”
Do not worry about clothing. “Look at the lilies and the grass of the field. Will God not much more clothe you?”
Do not worry; but seek first the presence of God. Our God is big enough to give you all that you need.
The summer solstice passed last Thursday. Now the year again turns to begin its journey toward the dark. More than ever I treasure these days as they slowly, but surely grow shorter. It’s like knowing I know I have fewer days left now than I have lived. Or, in a paraphrase of Mother Teresa, “I do what I can”…today; and then leave what I cannot do today to God. Our God is big enough to give us what we can do and to handle the rest himself. God gives us the summer birds and the summer flowers, God gives us the summer to be mindful of the beauty of each day.
One of the ways I spend my summer time is weeding the grass. The fertile, spontaneous and wild growth of spring is more temperate now. I thought several years ago, when I had weeded out the crabgrass for several years before, that I had won a decisive victory in the battle of order over chaos. As, indeed, I had; the crabgrass is now virtually nil. But, alas, in place of the crabgrass there have arisen wee wild strawberries. Unthreading their roots in the lawn, delving deep with bare hands as in a tub of soil and tugging out the string-like roots, attempting to unravel them from one another, I have resumed the battle. I used to charge at the task, trying to tame the wilderness by assault, going on working for long hours, hoping to see order arrive out of chaos by nightfall. Now I am more patient.
I think I learned this patience from my father. In my young child’s eyes, I can easily imagine him charge at the task of weeding his lawn, hoping in a day to wipe out the brigades of crabgrass assaulting his lawn of rye grass. But by the time I was a teenager, he had changed his strategy. For us kids (who had to weed crabgrass before dinner each summer evening), he would mark out with string just a single section to be weeded that day—miniscule, of course, in terms of the whole lawn, but ever so large before my impatient eyes. I suspect my dad had at some point given up trying to seek or see the end. Just so much a day, he was saying, in effect. Create some order today.
All the while knowing, of course, that in the back of the yard—and alongside its sides, too, there were certain areas of wilderness as a reminder that I would never be able to tackle, let alone control. Those places of disorder and chaos, those patches of untidy gardens along my self-set boundaries and the brush pile in the back: they remind me that best intentions, my best visions, my best order is always surrounded by places where only God governs.
And so this summer I will work slowly on the strawberries, creating a little order as I go, just keeping the wilderness at bay. I have a plan, a vision, of this lawn and the gardens, beholding how I should like them to be, but in order to achieve that plan, I would have to have my haunches glued to the ground all the time and even then I would not realize that dream. For even then, that vision likely extends well beyond the reach of my hands, the days of my life. Of course, such plans and visions could drive me. They could obsess me. Vision and dreams of tomorrows tend to do that, you know. But I also know that I do what I can do…today. “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” (or “What if I don’t fulfill the plan?”), do not worry about tomorrow…but strive first for an awe before God and his rule and governance, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
The lawn is like my life. Yours, too, I suspect? They will never finished. I am able to see the finished lawn in my dreams; but in my hands alone, in my lifetime alone, I know it will never be finished. I shall die at the end of my life, like I go to sleep at the end of each day, with the weeds still rampant. And surrendering. Whatever plans you’ve made, whatever dreams you’ve dreamt, whatever work you’ve done each day that you could do, you set them aside, find a place to stretch out somewhere, close your eyes, and wait for sleep. When everything stops, except, of course, the breathing in and out and the pulsing of the heart. If some faint memory or worry from the day stirs somewhere in the depths of you, it’s converted into a dream so you can go on sleeping and not have to wake up to think it through before tomorrow comes. At the end of each day, you lay down your arms, give up being in charge of your life, and put yourself into the hands of the night. Which, of course, is the rehearsal for the final laying down of arms, when you trust yourself to the same unseen benevolence to see you through the dark and to wake you when the time comes—with new hope, new strength—into the return again of light.
I want you for a moment to imagine an alarm clock by a bedside.
Mrs. Dubose was a curmudgeon of a woman who used to sit on her front porch and yell at Jem and Scout Finch as they passed by on their way home from town. The kids had grown used to her yelling, but one day, when she called his father trash for sticking up for a Negro in court, Jem had had enough. So one afternoon, when Mrs. Dubose was NOT on her front porch, Jem grabbed scout’s baton, ran up the steps into her front yard and cut the tops off every camellia bush Mrs. Dubose owned. And for that brazen act, Jem was sentenced to read Ivanhoe to Mrs. Dubose every day (including Saturday) for a month and then an extra week for good measure. Jem’s time at Mrs. Dubose’s was pretty much the same every afternoon. Mrs. Dubose would hound Jem for a wile on her favorite subjects, she would grow increasingly silent, then drift away. Then, by her beside the alarm clock would ring, Jessie would shoo him out, and the rest of the day was his.
One night a month after Jem had finished his readings, the telephone rang. Atticus answered it. “I’m going down to Mrs. Dubose’s for a while,” he said. “I won’t be long.” When he returned he was carrying a candy box. Atticus sat down in the living room and put the box on the floor beside his chair.
“What’d she want?” asked Jem. “She’s dead, son,” said Atticus. “She died a few minutes ago.”
“Oh,” said Jem. “Well.”
“Well is right,” said Atticus. “She’s not suffering any more. She was sick for a long time. Son, didn’t you know what her fits were?”
Jem shook his head.
“Mrs. Dubose was a morphine addict,” said Atticus. “She took it as a pain-killer for years. The doctor put her on it. She’d have spent the rest of her life on it and died without do much agony, but she was too contrary.--.”
“You mean that’s what her fits were?”
“Yes, that’s what they were. Most of the time you were reading to her I doubt if she heard a word you said. Her whole mind and body were concentrated on that alarm clock….There was another reason—“
“Did she die free?” asked Jem.
“As the mountain air,” said Atticus. She was conscious to the last, almost. Conscious,” he smiled, “and cantankerous. She still disapproved of my doings, and said I’d probably spend the rest of my jail. She had Jessie fix this box—“
Atticus reached down and picked up the candy box. He handed it to Jem.
Jem opened the box. Inside, surrounded by wads of damp cotton, was white, waxy, perfect camellia.”
Jem’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Old hell-devil, old hell-devil!” he screamed, flinging it down. “Why can’t she leave me alone?”
In a flash Atticus was up and standing over him. Jem buried his face in Atticus’ shirt front. “Sh-h,” he said. “I think that was her way of telling you—everything’s all right now, Jem, everything’s all right. You know, she was a great lady.”
“A lady?” Jem raised his head. His face was scarlet. “After all those things she said about you, a lady?”
“She was. She had her own views about things, a lot different from mine, maybe…son, I told you that if you hadn’t lost your head I’d have made you go read to him. I wanted you to see something about her—I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”
(Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird)
Our life situation is different from Mrs. Dubose’s; but I’ll bet each of you has an alarm clock by your bedside just like Mrs. Dubose. An alarm clock opening you to each day—and each moment within that day. Opening to its challenges, yes; but also to its promises. Opening to its anxieties, but also to its beauties. Our God is big enough to take care of yesterday and tomorrow; and our God is big enough to give you today. Just today. That’s all, just today
Today: To shed what light I can today to illumine a way for others to walk.
To stretch every nerve of strength you can today to lift up others who may have fallen.
To love away what fears I can today so others might live in peace.
To cherish and seize what opportunities there are today to care for the world and for others beyond me.
To join the birds in their songs, the smell the flowers on this earth today to give thanks for this sweet, fragile planet,
And to give to your family and friends today, your community and country today, your world today the best you can do.
To do what I what I can…and leave the rest to God.
For beyond everything God gives you to say and do, our God is big enough to be in charge of all the yesterdays that ever were and all the tomorrows that ever shall be. But our God is also big enough to give you this summer day, free as the mountain air to do what you can do and surrender/pray the rest into God’s good hands.