ADVENT SERMON SERIES PART 1

The Rev. Aron Kramer Advent Sermon Series I Sunday, Dec. 2, 2007
In the absence of Christ, what emerges?

If you read my email this week, you saw that I asked the provocative question, what do Jesus and slime mold have in common? Before I answer that, let me tell you a little bit about slime mold, my new favorite slimy organism. Scientists have been studying for years different kinds of systems that use simple and small components to build higher level intelligence. Essentially, organisms that have no brain or organization at all and how they come together to create a more intelligent organism that can actually get things done.

So back to slime mold, say you are walking in a forest and you come across this red, orange-ish slimy goo lying on a log, or in the midst of some leaves, seemingly sitting still in a mass on the forest floor. If you were to come back later, it might be gone, or it might be in a different place, if the weather were to cool down and get rainy, it might actually disappear completely. We might think it has been eaten by an animal, or maybe moved to a different place, but actually it has done something no one figured out until the late sixties. Slime mold has perplexed biologists for decades, and it took a physicist and a mathematician, not a biologist, to figure out what it was doing. Steven Johnson, in his book Emergence writes, “The slime mold spends much of its life as thousands of distinct single celled units, each moving separately from its other comrades. Under the right conditions, those myriad cells will coalesce again into a single, larger organism, which begins its crawl across the garden floor… When the weather turns cooler and the mold enjoys a large food supply, “it” becomes a “they”.”

Now, bear with me, I will, hopefully, take this to a place you all can resonate with. The problem for biologists for years was wondering what caused the slime mold cells to come together, they believed there was a mother cell, a cell that set the pace for the others, a pacemaker cell that was responsible for all the others to come together, the problem was, biologists everywhere, could not find a pacemaker cell anywhere. A physicist and a mathematician combined efforts to study this phenomenon and simply asked the question, what if there was no pacemaker cell? What if these single celled organisms came together of their own accord? Suffice it to say, this turned the world of biology on its head, and there has been a tremendous amount of progression in a field called the Science of Emergence, or simply, the study of how simple, single organisms come together to form a higher, more complex, intelligent organism. This work has transformed a whole lot by studying things like slime mold, ants, termites, our brains and cities and the development of neighborhoods in our various cities.

Let me take one step back for a minute and tell you why I am thinking about slime mold and preaching about it from this pulpit. A while back I heard a story about the science of emergence in the context of many small pieces, seemingly organizing out of nothing and coming together to create a more dynamic, adaptive organism; it was a study of ant colonies. As Advent was fast approaching, and as we live in a liminal time here at Gethsemane, trying to create something from the ground up, I began to wonder how this concept, which gripped my soul, could apply to our lives together and to how God is at work here in the Garden. Advent is the time in the liturgical year when we wait, we wait for Christ to be born, we wait for the savior to come. During Advent, Christ is absent from the world, there is only God in these few weeks leading up to Christmas. Christ is not present, I began to think of Advent in a new way, what if Advent could be that time where we discover our own ability to self organize, where we discover that the gifts, skills and talents that God has given us are adequate enough to build a community that is transformative and passionate and world changing? Seriously, I thought all that. What sealed the deal for me was when I was in Baltimore for Alison and Will’s wedding I ran across a book called Signs of Emergence that asked exactly that same question. How can we create a community that does not necessarily wait for the pacemaker cell or the mother cell to send out a signal to us, but rather a community that is able to determine the resources we have now, the needs that are all around us and how to best address and effectively meet the needs as they exist in our world?

The challenge of this sermon series, is a simple one, but one that is more than difficult to overcome. The challenge is to recognize that Christ is not the single pacemaker cell sending out the signal to tell us what to do, but rather Christ is the trail we leave in our wake, the trail that tells others to follow, that tells others: this way to joy, justice and peace. It is the same with God, God is not just a personal God that we can all define in whatever way we choose, God is not far away from us striking stray cells with bolts of lightening to get them back on track, God is a living God who is out in the world teaching, preaching and healing, whether we are with God or not. The challenge is to stop, and recognize that God has given us gifts and passions and skills that are immensely transformative and effective in healing the world and bringing righteousness to places of injustice. God has given us all we need to participate with God in this new creation that is being built. God has given us the gifts we need to help bring about a new world and a new heaven.

Jesus, then is the result, in some way, of the mission and the ministry we accomplish. As we, as Paul says, put on Jesus, not follow Jesus, not wait for Jesus, but put on Jesus, we join ourselves to a growing body that brings light to the darkness, that wakes us from sleep, that brings justice and righteousness to the poor, and the oppressed. Jesus is the trail left behind that tells people, there is joy here, there is justice here, and there is peace here. Jesus is the trail that people are able to follow because we have done the work to make straight the paths of the Lord, because we have accomplished the mission to make holy the way of God. We do not follow, we do not even lead, rather we simply walk together and live because we have put on our Lord Jesus Christ and because the light shining forth let’s us “live honorably as in the day”.

What I love about all these readings from Paul, and Isaiah and Matthew is that they require from us great humility. In Isaiah the nation’s stream to the house of the Lord, the house of God, they stream to it because of the trails left by our forebears, because it is a place of great nourishment and holiness. But they also stream to it because the people have left behind their weapons of hate, their weapons of destruction their weapons of war. They stream to the house of the Lord because they have seen that hubris and haughtiness do no good while living with Christ put on, living with Christ trailing behind, giving people an opportunity to experience the righteousness, the right relationship, the holy meaning and deep understanding God has for all of us. When I think of the waiting of Advent I imagine heads turned to the sky in anticipation of a star, a sign of some sort that will call to us that will pull at us and transform us. All the while, at our feet, while we are looking to the sky, people are crawling on the ground below us, bleeding, starving, thirsting for the simple ability to experience the new earth and the new heaven God is at work creating, without the help of those who are looking away.

We do not know when or even if Jesus will return, but we do know that God has given us talents beyond measure, gifts above average and passions that will change the world. We do know that God has given each of us and this community that is part of a larger global community, all the tools we need to do God’s work. There is nothing more we need, there is nothing more we can desire, we have it all. How do we communicate then, with those around us, the passions and the skills we have. How do we even come to understand what skills and talents we already have? How can we organize and come together and, in the same way God is creating a new heaven and earth, create a new Church, and not just a new building, but a new community, a community that has confidence in its ability to participate with God, a community that has put on Christ and lives fully into the justice and righteousness that God is calling us to live into.

I have a confession to make, when I arrived here at the Garden, one of the first things I read was the 125 year history of the Church. I was succumbed by the temptation to be the one who does it all, I wanted a page in the book of this history that rivaled our founder, David Buel Knickerbocker. I wanted to follow the pattern he set for us, the idea of mission that he placed at the center of our DNA. I wanted to be immortal in that same way. It was exciting and it was intoxicating to think about what I could do. Today, I do not want that, today I am more passionate about re-writing that history, I want to re-write that history to tell the stories of you, to tell the stories of how you all gathered together, a group of people who have put on Christ, a group of people who desire to participate with God in creating something new. This is about all of us together; it is about the coming together, out of seemingly nothing, of a rag tag, gentle and beautiful group of people who responded to the trail left by someone who came before us. Let us re-write the history of the future of this place and create, together, stories that will be inspirational, stories that will be transformative, stories that will be holy and faithful, stories that will give people hope for the future, not fear of it.

Our minds may be wired to look for the mother cell, our minds may be wired to look for that pacemaker cell, but let us together turn the world on its head and be with the bloody, the hungry, the thirsty the prisoners, the marginalized, let us be with them, fully present to their needs, to their stories, sharing with them in the power of God and discovering the gifts and talents they have to offer us. Let us empty ourselves fully of all expectations this Advent, let us just live, let us just live meeting one another where we are and let us see what emerges out of our passion.