In our panicked scramble to clean the house before my in-laws came to town, we found a puzzle that Jonah had received for his birthday…last August? Maybe the August before? 1000 pieces of the solar system, stars and planets, our own sun’s rays bending down from above, and the earth, a swirling blue marble, creeping up from left hand corner down below. This puzzle is hard. There are so many colors and swirls and clouds of gas that it is just overwhelming the moment you open the box. 1000 puzzle pieces, each containing its own little world, a cluster of stars, a moon orbiting Jupiter. So while the grandparents visited, we’d weave in tiny little moments of puzzle piecing. Waiting for the hamburgers to cook on the grill, waiting for me to get home from work, waiting in between YouTube commercials, they’d study the pieces, gathering up like colors, trying possibilities, flipping them around, trying again. The other day I went to say goodnight to Dan before I went up to bed, and I found him, back arched, eyes squinting, hovering over the puzzle pieces, determined to find just one more connection before his own lights out. It was really slow going at first. There was just so much, all jumbled together, and none of it made any sense. In proper, decent, and in order fashion, we started sifting through to find the edge pieces first, trying to define our border, our limits, some comfort in the fact that this is where the puzzle ends and begins, even if it is a puzzle of the universe. Grandpa and Levi were the most dedicated, and Dan stepped in to help after a few notes on his banjo. Eventually, Gramma got involved, and even Jonah came by and found one piece to put right.
Great Grandma and Grandpa always had a puzzle out when we’d visit them in Arizona. Every time we walked by, we were supposed to stop and find two pieces to put in their place. Eventually, by the end of our visit, we’d had enough pauses to form an entire picture of sailboats or red barns or deer grazing in the forest.
They’re such pointless things, puzzles. You take a box with a nice picture on the front, open it up to find a thousand tiny pieces that you then painstakingly sort and turn and try and turn again so that you can form a copy of the picture that has already been printed on the cover of the box.
And I could not start this sermon until I had at least figured out how the earth went together. I’d forage and hunt, looking for the exact right piece to fit the specific section, only to try other pieces that just seemed to show up in my hands, seemed to just quietly tell me, “try me here. Or maybe here.” I sifted and searched, sorted and tried, until all those clouds and waves and currents and land came together to form this terrible, beautiful world that we live in.
My twelve year old son has two pairs of black and white Adidas tennis shoes. Both are mostly black, both have three white stripes, both have black laces. Once when he was running around, late for school, looking for his shoes, I found a pair of said black and white Adidas tennis shoes, and offered them to him. “Here, Jonah. I found them.” “No. Mom,” he said with a frustrated sigh, "Those are not the right ones.”
The other day at his soccer practice, one of his white teammates was chasing another teammate, who was black, saying, “Hey monkey! Hey monkey! Get in the back of the bus monkey!”
And about three weeks ago he came home from school, dumped his backpack in the middle of the kitchen floor, and ran straight to his room. A few minutes later we checked on him. He’s on the floor, tears streaming down his face while he pulls and tugs at his cheeks, saying, “They said my cheeks are so fat. How do I get rid of my cheeks? I have to get rid of my cheeks.”
Last week in Buffalo, New York, ten people were murdered and three people were injured as they shopped for Corn Flakes and bananas and hamburger buns at their neighborhood grocery store. One man went in to buy a birthday cake and never made it home. This was the 198th mass shooting in the United States this year.
The war in Ukraine rages on.
Babies aren’t getting enough formula.
Forest fires are consuming thousands of acres of land and homes in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, and Nebraska.
A news reporter in Delhi asks a man pulling his cart of fruit to the market how he’s surviving these weeks and weeks of deadly 120 degree days, and he shrugs and says, “I try to drink water. I am not a rich man; I cannot afford cold drinks.”
Three weeks ago the orchestra teacher at my son’s middle school was arrested under child pornography charges.
I’m sure you carry with you your own pieces that just don’t seem to fit.
Do you ever feel like the world is just breaking apart? Do you ever feel like the earth’s puzzle pieces just won’t fit?
Paul had spent most of his life trying to unravel the world. Of course, he wouldn’t have admitted that at the time. At the time, he thought that he was merely sifting through all the pieces and throwing out the ones that don’t fit. But then, when his own world is broken apart, when he experiences a vision from God where he can no longer see anything, something changes, something shifts, and he dedicates his life to gathering up all the puzzle pieces and showing how, in God’s grace, they can fit back together again. So he’s traveling around, eating with all the wrong people, getting himself thrown in prison, and then thrown out of prison, arguing with the other disciples, and somehow still finding time to proclaim the love of God in Christ, when he has another vision. A Macedonian man appeared to him and pleads with him. “Come to Macedonia and help us,” this envisioned man says. So Paul and his posse all pack up and set sail for Macedonia. It's quite a road trip. Several stops for gas and Slim Jims and mixed Coke-and-Cherry Slushees. Eventually, they land in Philippi, a Roman city, determined to connect all the pieces of this vision and their travels and the Word of God as they understand it back together. Except they hang out for a few days, and that Macedonian man pleading for Paul’s help is nowhere to be found. So, on the sabbath day, they take the remaining pieces of their puzzling vision, and they wander outside the gates to find a place of prayer. They’re searching for the searchers. The ones who don’t fit in. The ones who are looking for something more, and are willing to sit outside the gates until it comes. And instead of rescuing a Macedonian man, they take that puzzle piece and flip it around, studying it, wondering how it will fit. They sit down on the rocks and start talking to a bunch of women who had gathered there. Then they see Lydia, likely a Gentile woman, listening intently to their every word. Paul fingers the puzzle piece in his hand, trying to make sense of how any of this connects. She’s a rich woman. A dealer of purple cloth. A dealer in luxury. So that’s strange. Why would a rich woman who has everything she needs wander outside the gates in search of something more? Another set of pieces that don’t seem to fit together. She is fully present to what they have to say about God, she receives it with her whole heart, and Paul is given another piece to this Macedonian puzzle. They baptize her. Her and her whole household. More pieces. More turning and trying and studying to see how it all fits. She invites them home. She compels them. She urges. She insists. She will not take no for an answer. She gives them the final piece, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” “If you have found that I, too, fit in to the family of God, that I’m a vital piece to this kingdom of God puzzle, then come, come home.” She demands that they realize that she fits, and that they fit, too. And Paul and his friends gather up all the pieces that they have collected, pile them up, stuff them in their pockets, and follow her home. Nothing seems to fit the vision that Paul had received, but they’ve found more pieces in the process, widening the boarders of this picture even further, even if they don’t seem to fit together quite yet.
Last Thursday a bunch of misfit middle school kids in the school’s music department had a concert. The choir sang. The band and the orchestra played. Kids with pink hair and clip on ties and combat boots. Kids with big feet. Kids hiding under their hoodies and curtains of long, stringy hair. Kids with the wrong kind of black and white Adidas tennis shoes. Kids who’d said stupid things and kids who’d heard it. Kids who know what is going on in our world and show up to sing a song or play the drums or squeak through their first solos anyway. Kids who used their voices and the air in their lungs and the rhythm in their hearts to bring their puzzle piece forward, to explore how it fit in with everyone else’s, to say, even for just an hour and a half, even just among themselves and their parents and their siblings and grandparents, “I belong. I fit in. I am a vital piece. Come. Come outside the gates, beyond the insults and the constant criticism, beyond the comparisons and the violence and the inequalities. Beyond the oppression and injustice. In search of something more. Bring your pieces. Let’s see how all this fits together. We’re all searchers, searching for something that we can’t really name and we don’t really know what it looks like, but that will quietly invite us to try. “Try me here,” they’ll say, “or maybe here. We’ve travelled this far. Come. Come home.”
How brave were those kids? How trusting their teachers? How’d they know that if they just brought what they had, if they just came together, if they just looked around, it’d all fit together somehow? How many negative voices and terrifying comparisons and echoing laughter for their “wrong” shoes did they have to endure, and then take what they had, no matter how imperfect, no matter how unsure of the big picture, and stand up there on that stage and say, “Me. I’m here. I belong, too. You can come to my house. I’ll sing you a song. I just learned the clarinet.”
These are just ordinary stories, really. Puzzles. Road trips. Middle school band concerts. Trying to survive the sixth grade. Worrying about what other people think of you. Getting bombarded by constant bad news. Being uncertain that you’re on the right track. Looking for the searchers outside the city gates. Thinking you know exactly what you’re looking for and then stumbling upon some other thing you’d never expected, but really needed. Getting invited over to a new friend’s house for dinner. Tearing up at a band concert because it’s such a terrible, beautiful world.
“Jesus answered him, “‘those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and will come to them and make our home with them.’”
Oh God, how will all this fit? Will it ever make any sense? Bring us more pieces. Teach us to turn them around, study them, pause as we pass by, and let the picture unfold. Help us look outside the gates. Let the pieces we need just land in our palms. There is so much more out there to be connected to. Do not let our hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. Give us your peace. Invite us home.
Thanks be to God.
