Sand or Stars or Rubik's Cubes

 Read this! Acts 2:1-21

“Hey Mom,” Jonah says, “Did you know that the Rubik’s cube has something like a trillion different combination possibilities?” “What?” I said. “Nu uh.” 

See Jonah loves random facts. He reads these National Geographic “Weird But True” books and they’re full of things like “the world’s termites outweigh the world’s people” and “If you traveled at the speed of light, you’d reach Pluto in just four hours,” and, “you’d never get older.” And “It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.” Sometimes he just pulls random “facts” out of his butt. They aren’t really facts at all, just things he’s made up that he thinks he heard somewhere, so, meh, true enough. He’ll say stuff like, “Hey Mom, did you know that cotton candy is actually a vegetable,” and “Soccer player Lionel Messi can kick a soccer ball at 187 miles per hour,” and “It’s totally reasonable for an eleven year old to have three gaming monitors, a cell phone, and an 11 o’clock bedtime.” So you can see why I might be a little skeptical. But this got us all wondering about big, big numbers. There are almost 8 billion people on earth, and for every one person alive today, there are 1.6 million ants. It takes a human at least 89 days to count to a million. And Jeff Bezos has enough money to spend 11 million dollars a day for the next 50 years - or until he turns 107 - and have a few bucks left over. 

We wondered about how many stars are in the sky, and how many grains of sand are on the earth. And which would be a bigger number, the sand or the stars? Well, we had to look that one up. Turns out that if you assumed a grain of sand has an average size, and then you figured out approximately how many of those grains would fit into a teaspoon, and multiply that by the size of all the beaches and deserts in the world, Earth holds roughly seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains of sand. Pretty impressive. That’s a number we can’t even get close to understanding or fathoming or comprehending, not even Jeff Bezos. But, with the help of a Hubble telescope and a calculator, they’ve figured out that there’s somewhere around 70 thousand million, million, million stars in the observable universe. So that means there are something like 10,000 stars for every grain of sand on Earth. So there you go, some random trivia for your next cocktail party. 

But outside of cocktail parties and eleven year old brains, who really cares about this stuff? Why should we even bother thinking about the bigness of such things? Well, I’m interested, at least, because it makes me think about how very very small we are. And about how God came to us as one of these very very small ones. God limited God’s self in space and time and got particular and individual and up close and intimate. And then whoosh, he’s gone, sucked up to who knows where through the clouds, never to be seen in a corporeal body again. Meanwhile, creation is still happening. Trees are still growing. Babies are being born. Cells are dividing. Stars are exploding. Grains of sand are being carved and smoothed and rolled against the shore. Jesus ascends, but the work keeps going. And just as we get to see a little bit of who Monet was in his “Water Lilies,” and we can hear a bit who Beethoven was in his 5th Symphony, and we understand Shakespeare a little better by reading Twelfth Night, we get the tiniest glimmers of who God is in all this stuff, in these quintillion grains of sand and these thousands of million, million, million stars in the observable universe, and in all those ants and termites and humans and dust bunnies and pine cones and glasses of beer and YouTube cat videos and late credit card payments and specks of afternoon light coming through our kitchen window. Friends, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, this searching for God thing. But somehow, somehow, it’s still so easy for us to miss.

Why is it still so easy for us to miss? Why is it everywhere, all around us, and yet we still can’t seem to see it, to trust it, to know that it’s there? 

I think we get some hints as to why this is so in our passage today. 

See the disciples are all hunkered down, gathered together in one place, and they’re waiting. They’re waiting just like Jesus told them to. God has come to them in a very particular place, at a very specific time, in the unique brown-eyed, olive complexioned, callused footed, five foot something physical mediocrity of Jesus. And so they’re waiting. What are they expecting, I wonder? I mean, Jesus has walked through walls and met them in crowded rooms before, maybe they’re expecting that again? They’ve seen miraculous healings and the defiance of physics and heard strange teachings, so, I wonder, are they expecting more of the same? Sometimes, I wonder, do we miss it because we’re just so used to more of the same? If we’ve seen one grain of sand, we’ve seen them all? The stars have always been there, so why notice tonight? 

Or are they hyper vigilant? Do they hear every creak in the floorboards and watch the sun go behind the clouds and feel a drip of sweat down their necks and wonder “what was that? Was that it? Did we miss it? Did you see it?” Sometimes, I wonder if we miss it because we’ve lost all sense of the sacred and we don’t trust ourselves when it’s there. 

God comes to us in our particularity, but it’s too small, we take it for granted.

God comes to us in our familiarity, but we glance over it, like leftovers in the fridge or the pile of dirty laundry that’s been languishing in the corner.

So this one time, God comes to them in fire and fury. Forget the particularity. Forget the familiarity. God comes in strangeness and astonishment. There’s the sound of the rush of a violent wind, and it fills the whole house. And then their heads catch on fire. Or something. These tongues of flames dance above their heads, and they all start talking in different languages and they’re “filled with the Holy Spirit.” God does not want them to miss this. God is making sure that God’s voice is heard and God’s presence is clearly recognized. God gives them an experience of God’s self that is like shooting fish in a barrel. They can’t miss it. It’s right there. Right in front of them. No doubts. No questions. No wonderings. It’s clearly God. But, you know, just in case it’s still not clear to them, they get witnesses. All these Jews from all over the world are in Jerusalem, and they hear it, too. So they gather around these instant polyglots and hear familiar words, words that they understand, words that they don’t have to process through the translation machines in their brains in order to get some semblance of meaning. These disciples are speaking their language. There’s an understanding going on between them that runs deeper than the marketplace or religious tradition or the exchange of commerce. And these witnesses are totally floored. These “others,” these Galileans, these followers of Jesus - this strange insurrectionist who was rumored to have healed and taught and then was put to death by the state - these nervous, hiding, awkward band of brothers, are speaking in their native languages, in their home tongues, in the words of their parents and their children and their earliest memories of comprehension. Everyone, in their own particularity, in their own specificity, in their own unique language, is hearing the word of God in a way they can understand and intimately connect with. God does not want anyone to miss this, so God pulls out all the stops - the rushing wind, the tongues of fire, the specificity of meeting each individual exactly where they are. 

God in the big and dramatic.

God in the tiny and specific.

All of it.

And of course, there are also still the cynics. “They’re all just drunk,” they say. 

And ready to defend himself and his friends, Peter attempts to make their defense. And in probably one of the greatest non sequiturs ever used, he says, “we’re not drunk, for it’s only nine o’clock in the morning!” As any of us who have had too much fun in college might attest, that really proves nothing. But maybe it’s not the argument that gets the crowd’s attention, but the common language of their holy scriptures. Peter quotes from the prophet Joel - a common language, familiar sounds that can unite them all. 

God is desperate that we don’t miss this. God sends wind. God sends flames. God sends witnesses. God sends the intimacy and particularity of our own languages and God sends the unifying common stories of our traditions. God in the rushing wind, and in the still, small voice. So, like a delicious gumbo, God throws in everything God’s got, right down to the kitchen sink. God cashes it all in. God goes for broke. God pulls out all the stops. Please, oh please, let’s not miss it.

Pentecost comes to us with all the wind raging and the chaos swirling and the languages speaking so that all we have to do is reach out our hands and just like that, we’ve caught it. Or, a little bit of it, at least. And well, that’s enough. It’s as easy and as close as our next breath. It’s as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. As finding a star in the sky. As discovering a grain of sand on the beach. This is the birth of the church.

It’s as particular to each of us as there are combinations on a Rubik’s cube.

See, Jonah was actually wrong. There are over 43 quintillion possible combinations on a standard 3x3 Rubik’s cube. 43 quintillion different ways to see and experience the same thing. See, I think we miss it, I think God comes to us in 43 quintillion different ways and we’re so busy trying to “solve it,” trying to get all the colors together and everything all lined up in the way it’s “supposed” to be, that we don’t realize that it’s all God. It’s all one cube in different languages. Because God came to us in the specificity and particularity and embodiedness and Aramaic of Jesus Christ, we get to experience God in all the specificity and particularity and embodiedness and native languages of our own lives. 

]43 quintillion combinations. One cube. 

Seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains of sand in the world. One earth.

70 thousand million, million, million observable stars in the sky. One universe.

And here’s the biggest littlest mind-blowingest thing of them all: there are the same amount of molecules in ten drops of water as there are stars in the sky. Water that settles in, that fills up, that flows and travels and gets in to even the most tiniest of spaces and can be found everywhere we go, their number is beyond measure. 

See, big or little, vast and expansive or compressed and minuscule, God is in it all. God is coursing through our veins and crossing boundaries of language and rushing in to our lives in all the big expansive mind numbingly impossible ways, and in the smallest nooks and crannies of our lives. God gives us millions and billions and trillions and quintillions of ways to experience some part of who God is, because God is desperate that we don’t miss it. 

God is in the tiniest particularities, everywhere. 

God’s spirit poured out on all flesh. All of us. 

Holy God, give us ears to hear your rushing wind, eyes to see your tongues of fire, and hearts to understand the unique languages with which you speak to us. Let us reach out our hands and know that we’ve touched a bit of you. Maybe, God, may it be enough that we feel a little bit drunk on it all.

God, let’s not miss it.

Thanks be to God. 

I am. We are. They are…going to wreck the car.

Read this! John 17:6-19

So for those of you who weren’t here last week, you missed some embarrassing details about my teenage years. You missed some pretty ridiculous measurements: I was too short to ride the “King Cobra” at King’s Island, our closest theme park, I was small enough that whether I had any actual skill as a cheerleader was completely irrelevant. And, if you’d been listening extra closely, you would have heard me slip in a tiny, but important detail, about my ability to drive a car. I barely, I mean, miss-one-more-question-and-fail-barely, passed my driver’s test. I knew I was nowhere near ready to get my drivers license, my drivers ed teacher had his window down and got hit in the head by a branch as I slowed to a stop sign, I panicked and didn’t even look when I was merging on to the highway, and I’d gotten a C- in driver’s ed for gosh sakes. But it just so happened that I accidentally left my learner’s permit in my jeans pocket as they went through the wash around the same time when most kids my age, who are much more proficient drivers, step into the DMV, answer a few written questions and drive some poor DMV evaluator around while they tried to remember right hand turn signals, yielding on left turns, and how to parallel park. So I walk in to the DMV with my mom, I take one of those numbered arrow paper tickets, and settle in for the long wait. When it’s finally my turn, I pull out the remaining wads of torn and washed paper that was once my learner’s permit, I show it to the clerk, and I say, “Hi. I’m here to get a new learner’s permit so I can get my license.” Now, I’ve gone over these words in my mind for years, trying to figure out whether or not it was my fault that this major event of miscommunication had transpired. The clerk simply waved me over to the box that you stick you face in to test your eyesight. She told me to read the third line. Thinking this was a bit odd, but always being one to do what she was told, I stepped over, read the letters, and came back. “Ok,” she said, “go over to that table and put this code in the computer. They’re going to ask you twenty questions. If you miss more than three, you fail the test.” ‘Uhhhh. Ok?” I said. Again, I was just there to get a new copy of my learner’s permit, not to get my actual license. But I walked over there anyway, missed my three questions, came back up and she said something about me “cutting it pretty close there” and then to “go stand in front of the red curtain.” Now, I’m really starting to wonder what in the world is going on here. I don’t need my picture taken for a learner’s permit… But I go over there, give them an awkward smile, squint at the flash, and she tells me to go pay $36 at the teller in the middle, give them a few minutes, and the license will be ready shortly. So, I don’t question it. I just go over there. Pay my $36 - luckily I had $36. Sit and wait. And about twenty minutes later I’m walking out of there with a certified bonafide Indiana Drivers License. I never took the actual driver’s test, just the written one. I never had to parallel park (which, I’m still pretty bad at), I never had to count my following distances under my breath, I never smelled the tobacco on the examiner’s breath, never accidentally sneaked out into the middle of the intersection while waiting to turn left and then have to run the red light because it never got clear enough for me to turn, which, I’ve been told, would have been an instant fail. I walked out of that sticky nondescript linoleum lined office building with a drivers license I had not earned. Go to it kid. Good luck. Be safe out there. Wear your seatbelt.

There are lots of times in my life when I don’t feel ready for something. I haven’t studied enough for this test, or I haven’t exercised enough for bathing suit season, or I get the job that I keep thinking I’m really not qualified for. In those situations, I usually do have what it takes to get the job done, even though I’m doubting myself the whole time. It’s called ‘imposter syndrome’ and it happens to me all the time.

But sometimes, sometimes we get thrown into the deep end before we’ve even learned how to swim. Sometimes, we get pregnant too early, or we fall in love too fast, or we make that big impulsive purchase, or someone hands us a free drivers license, and suddenly, it’s sink or swim, learn on the job, ready or not, here you are. It’s not just our lack of self esteem that makes us feel inept; it’s the facts - I don’t know enough Spanish to pass this class, I have no business turning off the breaker and rewiring that light switch, I am in no kind of emotional space to coach this person through the hardest day of their life. 

But. In this passage, Jesus is handing us the keys. I mean, sort of, in this weird passive way, by basically telling God, “Hey! I’m done here. Let’s leave the rest to the kids and let them figure it out. It’ll be fine.” Jesus does this sort of strange new math: he’s like since I have made your name known to them, and you gave them to me, and I told them everything I have comes from you, then, basically, they’re as good as me, which means they’re as good as you, but not really because they’re sinful humans, but they’re still yours, and I am in you and you are in me, so that makes them in us, so yeah. Ok. It’s good. No problem.

Maybe Jesus is just tired of driving us to school and then to soccer practice and then to pizzeria Uno’s where we welcome guests and seat them at tables and flirt with the bus boys and get yelled at by the servers and then have to call him too late at night to come pick us up and take us home and stay up with us while we cry over our Calculus homework until three in the morning. Maybe Jesus is like, “I am. Tired. Y’all are totally capable of doing all of this for yourselves.” And, then also like a parent, he is filled with trepidation and burdened by exponentially rising insurance costs when he hands over the car keys to the rusting 1986 baby blue Ford Escort, and says, “sure. Go to it. Wear your seatbelt. Don’t play the radio too loud.” 

And so as we adjust the mirrors and move up the seat and turn the radio dial and slowly back out of the driveway, with our hands tightly gripping the steering wheel and amazed by this new power that we have been given, Jesus prays, Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one..I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. 

Set them loose. Trust them. Give them freedom. But protect them. Don’t let the world separate us. After prom and parties and heartbreak and football games and band practice, bring them back home to me, to Us.

It’s a terrifying responsibility when we’ve been given the keys to the good news, when it’s our job to be the hands and feet of Christ, when we have to navigate this scary and confusing and often gridlocked world while bringing good news to the poor and release to the captives and telling the story of a God who turns everything upside down in order to right it back up again. 

I can’t help but think, God, I am going to wreck this car.

I don’t have enough training. I don’t have enough Greek or Hebrew. I don’t even know where my Book of Confessions is, let alone all the rules of Roberts Rules of Order. I need better listening skills. I need more focus. More discipline, more humility and more sacrifice. I should learn more about community organizing and biblical exegesis and the difference between sanctification and justification. I need to know how to avoid falling in to the heresies of Docetism and modalism and gnosticism and Patripassianism. What if I say trespasses instead of debts and get caught going over the speed limit and I get confused which way to flip the turn signal when I’m turning right and turning left? When am I allowed to turn on red and what if I go down a one way street the wrong way and what if there is only one parking space left and there’s a line of cars behind me and it takes me forever to finally fit it into the space? Why are you trusting someone like me to transport this precious good news to the rest of the world? 

Yup, dear ones. We are going to wreck the car. We have no business getting behind the wheel. It is a dangerous world and we are under equipped and some of us have barely passed the prerequisites in this thing we call life. 

And. That is where we are called. 

And. Like a parent who prays for the safety of her child as he pulls out of the driveway, she really isn’t thinking all that much about the car.

She’s thinking about her child. She’s praying that he will stay safe. And that others will be safe. She’s praying that there be a shield of protection around that car so that when people do come racing into his lane or cutting him off in traffic or tailgating him too closely, her child will be ok. She is praying and hoping that he will get to where he needs to go, and then come back home again.

The amazing, mind-blowing, almost incomprehensible thing about this prayer that Jesus prays is that he doesn’t seem so much to care about the car. He could have said, “Oh God, help them to deliver these words perfectly, so that everyone can hear and understand.” He could have said, “God, let’s build some schools to help these folks carry out my message in the ‘right’ way.” He could have said, “let’s make more rules for them to follow so that we can measure whether or not they’re doing this right." He could have prayed, “Lord, let’s just suck up all the good ones that are yours right now and leave the rest of this world to rot.” Nope. He knows we are going to get this wrong. The message is going to be skewed and blurred and confused and conflated. And still, he says, “They have enough. They have your name. They have an understanding that I came from you. They have your words and your protection and my joy. And they’ve been set apart. That’s enough. That’s all they need. Let’s set them loose. Let’s see what happens. Let’s give them the keys to this thing, and see if they can open ‘er up. They are going to wreck it. But let’s give it to them anyway. They will only come to realize how much they need us after they’ve wrecked the car. Just keep them safe so that once they do slide into the guardrail or spin out on the ice, they’ll know who to come back to, they’ll know they aren’t alone, they’ll know that I am in you and you are in me and that means that they are in us, and who cares about the increase in insurance premiums.”

Thanks be to God.