Scripture: First Peter 3:13-22 and John 14:15-21 and Acts 17:22-31

Hope lies in braving the chaos, and waiting calmly with trust in the God who loves us.

—Sue Monk Kidd

On Friday, after a rash of suicide bombings left Baghdad trembling and bereft, the cry of a baby sent rescuers searching for God. In the smoking, twisted wreckage of a bombed minibus, Iraqi soldiers found the baby, eight month old Sajjid Hassan, safe and alive in the protective embrace of his mother and grandmother, both dead. The rescuers and the doctor who treated him found in Sajjid’s survival, a badly needed sign that God was still with them, even in the midst of unspeakable chaos. Said Dr. Abdullah Younis, the hospital’s director, this baby had no strength, no family, but he was alive…this is a reminder that no matter how many the terrorists kill, there will still be life.[1] We all need such signs of hope; we need to believe that some god is at work for good in chaos, in the midst of these terrors of powers and principalities that are ripping apart our world, the creation and the creatures in whom God had hoped we would see his image made flesh. The novelist Sue Monk Kidd said it this way: hope lies in braving the chaos, and waiting calmly with trust in the God who loves us.

Braving the chaos is an old and honorable work, as evidenced by, among other things, the witness of today’s readings. In the book of Acts, when the apostle Paul went to Athens to preach what he had found, which was Christ, and him crucified, he said to the Greeks who inquired about his unusual faith, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. I looked around the city at the objects of your worship, and I found your altar to ‘an unknown god.’ Anyone who gets up in the morning and faces the news, lives through depression, pain, illness, or grief…or suffers like those do who are surviving day by day in Banda Aceh, Darfur, Sudan, or Baghdad, to name just a few, knows that we are all looking, everywhere we can think of, for a way to put a face to the unknown god who may somehow be at work in the midst of our inexplicable suffering. To put a face to One who might give meaning to the chaos, and hope for the living of these days. If nothing else moved Paul in the great and ancient pagan citadel of Athens, that common ground surely did: to know that the Athenians, no less than the Jews, waited with hope in the midst of chaos for a glimpse of a God who loves us. And so Paul bore witness with his words to what he had seen and heard by choosing to follow the path of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth to God: I am here to tell you that the God I have seen is not far from each one of us. It is that God’s desire that we should look in the world and at each other, who are each of us God’s children, for signs of the One whose will it is that we should know him, and love him. It is in the midst of chaos, in the breadth of the immense diversity of the human family and the human condition, that we are driven to seek the face of a god we can scarcely recognize, not so that it would be enough for us, but so that we would taste a possibility of God’s grace, and tasting it, want more, work for more, live for more.

There was a woman at the hospital in Baghdad, a woman no longer young and with twelve children of her own, who was visiting a sick relative, which, as many of us know, is an absorbing and important work. She had enough to do, waiting calmly and braving the chaos of her own family circumstance in war-torn Iraq, but then she heard about the little survivor being cared for in a room nearby. Without hesitation, she recognized the face of the unknown god in Sajjid’s black eyes and battered face, and declared that she would be his guardian, his comforter, his advocate—family to this lost boy until his own kin could find and claim him. In the midst of chaos, waiting calmly and attending to the ways of unknown gods in the known world, she saw someOne she knew, and acted with hope on behalf of this One who loves us….

In our other reading for this morning, the letter of First Peter was addressed to a gang of misfits and outcasts: a “community,” though I use the term loosely, of slaves, Gentiles, and resident aliens who were scattered and persecuted throughout Asia Minor because of the one thing they had in common: belief in Jesus, crucified and risen. I know who you are, the author wrote, and he did, aliens, foreigners, misfits. I know what you suffer, and I tell you: you are not alone. You belong to one another, and you belong to God. He reminded them: they were baptized, and baptism was the sign and seal of their belonging to one another and to God. He reminded them: their lives were patterned after Jesus’ own life, and their suffering and wandering was seen by God and known by God. That rag-tag band had little in common—but they could and did affirm that somehow, in the story of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, they had come home to God, and thus, out of many misfits, they were one people, and they belonged.

Last week I was called in my volunteer work for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to the little town of Stockton, New Jersey, which had been inundated by the Delaware River for the second time this month. The local Presbyterian Church was described to me as a “funky” little congregation whose members were “from every walk of theology and life,” who were hard to describe because they didn’t really seem to fit together in any real way. The church has some 80 members, and a pastor with a PhD who had major surgery five months ago, and whose church-owned home had suffered, in addition to a flooded basement, two “puff-back” furnace fires since the winter season began, which forced Greg and his wife and daughter into a motel for several months. With this latest flood, a third of his ordained leadership and thirteen families of the congregation were out of their homes, some, forever. The Presbytery exec asked me and my colleagues to give Greg “the works”—down to “a mint on his pillow.” But he and his little congregation gave me the works, instead: for a full week after the flood, as people were picking through the rubble and mudding out what was salvageable of their possessions, Stockton Presbyterian Church opened their doors, scrounged money and food from wherever they could find it, and fed dozens in the community, every day. And when I gathered with them a week later, to help them begin a process of healing and recovery, they were far more interested in how to serve their neighbors, and be a part of the developing interfaith flood response and recovery work, than they were in addressing their own struggles through chaos. They may have looked like misfits, but I recognized them immediately as the brothers and sisters of Jesus, who did not leave them orphaned, but made them a family through the Holy Spirit.

The tradition of Jewish mysticism, known as the Kabbalah, describes the glory of God, known in the Hebrew scriptures as the Shekinah, as a woman, wandering the world in exile, weeping for the pain of humanity and for the loss of God. It also speaks, in its creation narratives, of how the grace of God flowed in cascades down to the world like light through ten earthen vessels, vessels which burst with the power of that which they contained, and scattered over the face of the earth. The souls of people, the Kabbalah teaches, are sparks of the light of God, trapped in clay, trying to free the light. So is the glory of God exiled, weeping, in the world: and we, knowing that we belong to God, are trying to find our way home. Though this creation account lacks the specificity, the down-and-dirty humanness of the Genesis stories, still, I like it. And the reason I like it is that it challenges me. For if there is within me an exiled spark of the Divine Presence: then no matter what I do with my daily hours, my highest calling and my heart’s true home, is to make it possible for God’s light to be freed from Chaos to hope. From the clay of my selfishness, my denseness, my fear and brokenness to the Light. My job at work is to free God’s light. My job in the midst of chaos, suffering, or grief, is to free God’s light. My job at home is to free God’s light. My job when I meet with friends or walk alone under the starry sky, is to know the light of God within me, and within those I meet and set it free. I will not leave you orphaned, said Jesus, I am coming to you. In that day you will know that I am in God, and you are in me, and I am in you. I am sending you an Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, to be with you forever. The word for Advocate is paraclete, and it means Advocate, Comforter, Companion….Jesus is describing the Holy Spirit to his about-to-be-abandoned disciples, but he is also telling them what they are about to become for each other, and the world into which they are being called.

We are all connected by God, Jesus believed, and bound to one another; we cannot escape. So the woman in Baghdad, Saadiya Nasr, convinced the police and the hospital officials to let her take Sajjid home for the night, or for forever, whichever was necessary. She and her daughters sat vigil through the night, passing the baby from comforter to comforter, dribbling water and formula through his lips, rocking him to sleep. She said: my conscience wouldn’t let me leave a baby like that. I would have cared for him as long as I lived.

I read a story once about a man who was walking down a road and passed a place where there had been a car accident. He caught a glimpse of something shining in the dirt and grass, and bent to pick it up. It was a piece of broken mirror, and without thinking he stuck it in his wallet. Later, he kept it, saying, you’d be surprised how useful a broken piece of mirror can be. It shines into the smallest of dark spaces. And so do we. We are all part of God: broken pieces of the Light, shattered and shaped by chaos, shining into dark places, if we are willing, if we remember that even broken pieces can be useful if they are not thrown away…for we are all part and parcel of the One who has made us and called us by the Spirit of Love, to find our way, together, home.

[1] Miami Herald, Sunday, May 1, 2005, pp. 1-2.