Lawnmower Theology

1 Peter 1:22-25

Robert M. Watkins

March 25, 2007

 

I think all of us know how transient life can be, particularly in light of the last thirty days within this congregation with so many folks dealing with serious illnesses and the run of funerals we have held here at the church. We understand and accept that life is precious because it is so fragile, so momentary. While we do not completely know the context of the letter Peter wrote to one of his missionary congregations, we can certainly sympathize with the thinking—all life is grass that withers and fades.

 

This week, our daughter Chelsea has been studying astronomy in her science class. She has been learning about the great astronomers from the ancient Chinese who studied the heavens centuries before Christ to the Greeks and to the great names of Western science like Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and even Edwin Hubble for whom the space borne telescope is named. As I helped her study for a quiz this week, we began to talk about just how huge the universe is and how old it is and how mind-boggling the numbers in astronomy are. Who can truly grasp the trillions of miles between us and the stars over our heads? Who can really comprehend the sheer time it takes to get from place to place in the universe? In a Calvin and Hobbes comic, Calvin stands under a pristine night sky and yells, “I am significant!” Then he reflects for a moment and adds, “Cried the speck of dust.”

 

That speaks for all of us. We are motes in the presence of God—a mote, the tiniest speck of dust, an insignificant particle caught in a headlight beam.

 

When we find ourselves passing through a month like this one has been, that realization of what we actually are can become overwhelming. Who are we in the scope of things? How are we to cope with forces and powers that reduce us to nothing? How are we to face days of living in a cosmos that ignores us? What are we to do?

 

Again, Peter points the way, although at first glance, it is hard to see how in what he says.

 

Peter reminds his congregation that even though they have more in common than they want to admit with the grass that grows everywhere they go, they still have reason to hope and the ability to find meaning within their lives. Both hope and meaning come through God, the ultimate infinite, the lone eternal entity, and the creator of all that is.

At first glance, a skeptic will shrug and comment that all such an observation does is put us right back in the hands of another incomprehensible, completely other being who could never understand life such as ours, nor have any interest in doing so. Do we really pay attention to the grass we mow?

 

But that is the exact point at which our gospel intercedes for us. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God, wrote Peter. He is stating nothing less than the root of our faith, the most basic credo we hold to—through faith in God, we are transcendent. We break the bounds of temporal and physical life, becoming united with God’s own eternity.

 

Yes, but we still die, retorts the cynic.

 

True, replies the faith, but we live through God, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

 

The cynic’s eyebrow rises in thinly veiled contempt—what utter nonsense.

 

Taken at face value, Calvin crying out beneath the stars is every one of us—the specks of dust strewn along the surface of the cosmos, so small as to be beneath contempt. Jerry Allison sent me a wonderful email that was a series of pictures, first of the earth with the inner four planets, then in relation to all nine planets, then in relation to the sun, then in relation to stars nearby—in each picture, the earth grows smaller and smaller until it literally disappears in relation to other objects racing through the cosmos. How could someone living on a planet so small it vanishes against the sweep of space possibly have the eye of God?

 

Yet that is the bold statement of faith contained in the revelation of Jesus Christ. Not only do we have the eye of God, we have God’s heart. God loves us. God loves all of us. God has numbered the hairs upon our heads. God has reveled in the whorl of our fingerprints. God treasures each of us.

 

We believe this because of the presence of Jesus Christ within the world. Christ came and dwelt among us. Christ walked the same dusty roads all of us walk. Christ breathed in the same clouds of pollen we wade through right now. Christ faced the certainty of clogged nasal passages and felt the ache of tired muscles and shed tears for friends who were hurting and for people lost in a sea of need.

 

It sounds far too banal to be a statement about God with us, but it is in that utter banality that we discover the overwhelming transcendence of the love God holds for us. God loves us so much that God completely lost himself in human life as it is really lived—not from the pristine confines of a marble temple or gazing down from a willowy throne of clouds, but right here in the thick of all that makes us who we are.

 

God came and walked in the grass, grass that will wither and fade, grass that will be mowed and left to become part of the soil from which it grew.

 

There are folks among us who actually do pay attention to the grass as it grows. They note its color and they note the presence and prevalence of weeds within it. They water it and fertilize it and break up the thatch that accumulates within it. They seem to love grass with a devotion that brings someone like me to shame—I don’t care what’s in the lawn as long as it’s green. They enjoy grass and the beauty of a manicured lawn beyond anything correspondent to the basic nature of a blade of grass.

 

In the sweep of the cosmos, human beings are a tiny, tiny part. Our lives do not even register—what is 80 years in light of the billions of years the universe has seen? Yet, God has noticed us. God put us here. God is present here.

 

Even more, God blesses us with his power and his eternity. God recognizes and accepts the fragility of human existence. God recognizes and accepts what that fragility does to us at the deepest levels. God accepts our fear, doubt, and worry that our lives ultimately have no meaning or purpose. God accepts those things and then shatters them. In Christ, God brought us to himself and gave us life beyond life and glory over glory.

 

We are now one week away from Holy Week, the seven day stretch in which we will remember and recall the gifts of Christ given to the world as we remember his march to the Cross, his death for the sins of the world, and his resurrection into the new creation that is eternal and forever alive.

 

This is the eternal word of God, a word that does not fade, wither, or grow irrelevant. It is a word that never loses its meaning. It is a word that is always as glorious as the moment it was first spoken. It is a word of life in a world consumed by death.

 

It is God’s whispered love in every ear.

 

It is our salvation.

 

Amen.