Sermon Advent 3A, December 11, 2022

Did any of you think the same thing I did at the beginning of today’s Gospel? The part where Jesus says, “And blessed are those who take no offense at me.” I'm taking a page out of Matthew’s Gospel and saying the same thing, those of you who take offense from my sermons, well, let’s just say that those who take no offense are blessed, you others…

I am sure I am doing you all a disservice when I say that, because the translation has been wrought several times over several centuries. Also, there is the fact that a human wrote this and wanted to be sure that people knew who it was meant for. This is one of those cases where your and my sleuthing can be of invaluable service to understanding the truth. Was this something Jesus said or something Matthew added as a kicker to get at those who disagreed with him?

Let’s recap my hair brained advent idea, first, we are slime mold. Single celled organisms that self organize based on conditions and circumstances that bring us together to create a larger organism that benefits the whole. Next time I do this, I might have to actually pass out slime. But remember, slime mold does not have a pacemaker or mother cell that tells all the other cells to come together. They come together of their own accord based on conditions the single celled organism finds themselves in.

Next we have to remember that we are like ants with different pheremones that create trails to the places we find value and importance. Our Churches, our neighbors homes, and other places of meaning. Not only do we create trails to different places, our trails help share information with others about what needs to be done. Is there a threat to the community? Is there some clean up that needs to happen? Do we need to find a source of sustenance that will give us energy and passion to do our work?

All of this, of course, is based on the premise that we are, at this time during Advent, without Jesus. Jesus is absent from the world, even though we get a good glimpse of him in today’s Gospel. Just as the Epistle speaks to, “Be patient, Beloved, until the coming of the Lord.” The idea of Advent is that we are waiting, we are patiently anticipating the arrival of a savior, a leader, a pacemaker cell to tell us all what to do. Wait, that’s not right. That's not the premise. The premise is about coming to the understanding that God created us in God’s image, loves us deeply and wants us to learn to come together and live as children of God, always changing the world and adapting to it.

God did not create us to be led, to be told what to believe. God created us as wild imaginative beings that have autonomy and understand the world is better off when it learns rather than when it is commanded. There I go telling you what to believe…

Which brings me to the last organism to help explain my hair brained theory about Advent. Any guesses as to what it might be? Does anyone have any idea what the third organism might be? It’s you. It's each of you. Now, I'm not going to just say it's you and let you all off the hook, no it’s really the cells that make up all of you. 

You know we all started as a single celled being that rapidly divided into multiple cells working together to become the person we are today. This process is amazing, I found out, and though what I am about to tell you is a bit simplified, it is a quick overview of how we become who we are. You know that your cells die off in the billions every minute, so essentially our whole body is replaced by completely new cells daily. I think I read once that our entire body is changed over every 7 to 10 years. 

So how is it that all these new cells know how to function in the way they need to? Some might say there is a consciousness that directs our cells to do the work they are tasked with. Some might say our brain directs these cells, but our brain is made up of a ton of neurons that don’t change, and cells that  do change in the same way. DNA is a thing, it's the book that has all the information for our bodies and how our body is supposed to work. 

But it also has to do with how our cells communicate. Scientists have discovered that our cells do more than just follow the dictates of DNA. They also learn from their neighbors. And without that neighborly interaction, the master plan of our genetic code is completely useless. Since our cells have no way of seeing the whole, they don’t know that they are creating an arm that can find food and move that food to our mouths where it is chewed and digested in our stomachs and made into energy for our sustenance. Our cells have no idea what is happening outside of their little job.

The cells in our bodies come to function in the correct way because they look to their neighbors for cues and ways to behave. But there is one other really important thing that our cells have that helps them create the amazing complex human being that you are. They have a sense of place. They have to have a sense of place in order to do their work. If a cell cannot find its place, its work is meaningless and doesn’t help create the function needed for the whole to survive.

There is a Nobel laureate named Gerald Edelman who came up with this idea of each cell having a place, he said, “Since every cell in the body carries a complete copy of the genome, no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbors.” When a cell finds its place, it has everything it needs to be a cell and then works with its neighbors to create a world that is complex, amazing and brilliant.

OK, take a breath, now, is it possible to see what I am getting at? In our birth God imprints on us everything we need to be who we are. The information is there, within us, and then we grow up, we develop and we learn how to love, how to forgive and of course how to hurt others. But we don’t learn all that from something God told us to do or from what some pastor somewhere said was how God would want us to be. We learn from our neighbors. We learn from the actions that we observe and experience. Then we teach others, our neighbors, how to belong.

Go back to that line in todays Gospel, those who take offense, at any point in reading the Gospels, all four of them and all the other apocryphal Gospels many of you have read, how often did you see Jesus caring about whether people took offense at his words and actions? It’s pretty rare, if it happened at all. This is one of those moments where we see a human, inspired by God, unable to shed the shackles of power and authority. We see it everyday, people seeking to control how we believe and how we live. Seeking to create separations that define who is worthy and who is not. These are the efforts we have to fight against. These are the efforts that we have to move beyond. 

Advent is a time when Jesus is absent, when the messiah we know and love is not yet here. Not yet among us. All we have is each other, each of us a neighbor to the other. And honestly that is all we need to begin fulfilling God's dream for the world, and most importantly, God’s dream for each of us.