A heart of flesh

(Ezekiel 11:17 - "Thus says the Lord God:"

"I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart flesh, so that they may follow..." (Ezekiel 11:19-20a)

The Pale Blue Dust Mote

Dear Friends,

Yesterday (May 5th), I preached a sermon based on John 14:23-29. Referred to as the farewell discourse, Jesus is preparing his disciples for a time in the near future when he will no longer be with them. Jesus promises the gift of the Holy Spirit to be with them as they continue to work on being an authentic community.
     I don't know about you, but I spend a lot of time thinking about authentic community. I desire to be a part of a community that is real, that cares for one another, without judgment or shame, because we all know that we are in this thing - this messy, complicated thing called life - together.
     I think the church often falls well short of this kind of authentic community, but I deeply believe that the church has the potential to be an authentic community. And I am deeply committed to being authentic and working towards an authentic community.
     In his speech to his disciples, Jesus commands them that they love one another. This is the basis for the genuine community that I desire. To love one another as Christ loves us.

This is no easy task. What gets in the way?

There are many answers to this - namely that people are hard to love and that we often get caught up into thinking that it (all of it!) is about us.

To give some perspective on why I think love is of the utmost importance, I'd like to share a quote from Carl Sagan. In 1990, the spacecraft Voyager I took a picture of the planet earth from the edge of our solar system. The iconic picture shows the vastness of the cosmos. The planet Earth shows up as a pale, blue dot. Here is how Carl Sagan reflected on this image in his book "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space."

"Look again at the dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tine world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

To that, I would add, the pale blue dot reminds us all of the importance to love and to love well.

Amen and amen.