Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass
Amos 8:1-12;
Luke 10:38-42
(Bristol Village Vespers)

A minister once told his congregation, “There is a sermon in every blade of grass.” Later that week the minister was out mowing her lawn when a church member rode by, stopped and rolled down the window and yelled out to her, “That’s right, Preacher. Cut those sermons short!”

I have plenty of grass to mow, not counting the weeds. The ways God comes to us and seeks to speak to us are a numerous as the blades of grass. God is not just out there somewhere – the transcendent, distant, Holy Other. God is also here – immanent! God is around us. God is in us. I like what Acts says about God being the one in which “we live, and move and have our being.”

But we like to put our lives into neat, labeled compartments. We divide them up into times and places for certain things. Sunday for many of us, is that time we give some attention to the Divine in our lives. This is well and good, but what this time really should do is help us realized and know that God is related to our lives every day. We tend to see other times and places as ordinary. All ground is holy ground, ll time is holy time, filled with the presence and voice of God.

The incarnation itself teaches us this. God chose to come to us in flesh and blood, in a child born to a peasant man and woman. God comes to us in the ordinary. Jesus taught us to look for God in the ordinary. Just read his teachings. He saw and heard God everywhere – in a coin, a fish net, a lamp, fruit trees, children, salt, a cup, a loaf of bread – in all things he saw some lesson God would teach us.

The fingerprints of God are all around us, if we know how to look.

The voice of God constantly fills the air, if we know how to listen.

Maltbie Babcock, the hymn writer, knew this well and expressed it in a hymn many of us know and love:

“This is my Father’s world,
The birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white,
Declare their Maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world:
He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass I hear him pass,
He speaks to me everywhere” (verse 2). 

Malcolm Muggeridge, a British Christian journalist, said it this way: “Every happening great or small is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.”

Every moment we are bombarded with thousands of sound waves of all kinds. We don’t recognize it until we get out a radio. You turn it on, adjust the antenna, tune it, and you open yourself to a world of information, music, news. All that enriching information and enjoyment, but only if you turn the radio on and listen for it. We exist by our cell phones and bluetooth devices. No wires, just radio waves.

The voice of God, like radio waves, surrounds us and permeates our world. And each of us has a radio, a kind of spiritual receiver inside us that we can pick up those messages, that enables us to hear God. This spiritual radio inside of us is a kind of sixth sense. We have five senses: taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch. This sixth sense uses all of those other senses in seeking to open ourselves to the presence of God which is as close to us as our breath.

The people who were in these parts before European Americans arrived could follow the trail of animals and find their ways through wilderness by “reading signs.” They could see things all around them that I’m sure I don’t see because I don’t know how to look.

This sixth sense is the one we develop to help us look for God-signs, those events, great and small, in our daily lives that reveal the presence of God. I’m talking about being able to read the world spiritually, of expecting to hear God. We watch and listen, expecting to catch God doing something in our lives and in our world. So we are constantly wide-eyed with anticipation.

The problem is that this sixth sense is often underused. We need to hone, sharpen, and develop it.  We need to learn how to turn on our inner radio and adjust the spiritual tuner so that we begin to hear the ever-present voice of God. Our scripture lessons speak to this tonight. They tell us about Amos and Mary, two persons who knew something about this sixth sense, who knew how to listen to the rustling grass and hear God pass.

Wherever Amos turned, he saw God and heard God speaking to him. On one occasion he saw God in a plumb line, on other occasions, in a swarm of locusts and in a fire. In tonight’s lesson he even gets a message from God in a basket of ripening fruit.

Mary, in the Gospel lesson, became a model for us all in her desire to sit, to be quiet and listen for God’s voice at the feet of Jesus. Martha was into to activity, and she chides Mary for not helping her. Jesus gently chides Martha back, saying that she’s too distracted and is missing something that Mary has found, that one needful, essential thing.  The dishes will wait a few moments.

A lot of people think that Jesus is saying that Martha needed to stop doing unimportant stuff and sit down like her sister at his feet. Maybe what he was really saying is that Martha needed to take a deep breath and make some quiet time. I don’t think Jesus feels what she is doing is unimportant. Hospitality, cooking, taking care of the basic needs of family and guests is significant, and Jesus celebrated that. Jesus’ concern is that Martha seemed obsessed, distracted by all the things she had to do (we can identify with that). Martha was driven to distraction.

We live such hectic, distracted lives that we are not able to be fully present and to listen for God wherever we are, whatever we are doing. God is present in baking bread, washing dishes, setting a table, sweeping the floor. In Martha’s kitchen; in our kitchen. If Mary had complained to Jesus about Martha, “Lord do you not care that Martha has left me to sit here by myself? Tell her to sit here with me,” what would Jesus have said to Mary?  “Mary, you are distracted, you had chosen the better part, but now you are worried. You are not paying attention.” There are times and places for focused activity and focused reflection. Both are necessary. Some people major in one or the other. Few can evenly balance both. But both are required in the total working of God’s kingdom.

When Paula and I hike on park trails, I often get wrapped up in moving along the trails that I forget to pause and see what is around me. On the other hand, she likes to look at everything and forgets about moving along. My body is surrounded by the trees, the wonder of God’s creation everywhere, but my mind is distracted, filled with what I’ve got to do when I get back, and I have to force myself to slow down, to listen, to be present where I am. Only then can the distractions begin to fade and I can be where I am and hear God pass in the rustling grass.

Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon warns, “We spend a long time wishing we were elsewhere and otherwise.”

The main character in the book, Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher, sends a postcard home from vacation in which she writes, “Having a wonderful time. Wish I were here.”

The key to hearing and experiencing God in our daily lives is to be fully present in all we do. To give our whole selves to whatever duties or responsibilities each moment brings, knowing that in them and through them God is present and speaking. It is being attentive to the present, not obsessed with the past or the future, not driven from one distraction to another. Sometimes the present brings a moment to sit quietly at the feet of Jesus and other moments to mop the floor; one moment we walk in the forest, another we sit at a desk piled high with work. Yet, whatever the present brings, God is there, God is speaking, if we give ourselves to each moment, if we look and listen with that sixth sense that enables us to find that one needful thing – that wondrous sense of God’s pass even in leaves of grass.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.