Daniel 7: 1-3, 15-18 + Psalm 149 + Ephesians 1: 11-23 +
Luke 6: 20-13
Saints of God….grace, mercy, and peace are yours from the Triune God. Amen.
This morning our Prayer of the Day began in this way: Almighty God, you have knit your people together in one communion in the mystical body of your Son, Jesus Christ.
You have knit your people together.
Now, I am not a knitter, but I know a lot of people who are. Pastor Dan Sorenson, who often supplies here when I am away is an amazing knitter. My good friend Pastor Deanna Wildermuth knitted these awesome fingerless gloves for me. When we were at synod assembly last May every voting member received a knitted prayer shawl on their chair.
You have knit your people together.
This is an amazing and wondrous image of God, isn’t it? Knitting us together. Needles clacking as God knits. Intent on crafting a community stitched together in unity and love. A community of saints….all.
But I’ve watched knitters tear out entire rows of stitches. Beginning again. A new start. So I did a little bit of research and here’s what I learned about the pitfalls of knitting and of being God’s people together.
According to my research, here are the most common mistakes one makes when knitting, either a scarf or humanity.
Mistake #1: You put your knitting down in the middle of a row. Now you don’t know which direction you were going
It’s always a risk in being the community of God together that we will get sidetracked along the way. There we are doing the work of ministry and all of sudden…BAM….the unexpected thing happens and we put aside what we were focused on. There’s the quarrel or the division or the issue or the problem and we turn away from the ministry God has given to us. We put it down in the middle of a row and tend to the squeaky wheel. And then, when we pick it back up, we forget the direction we were going. We take our eyes off of the mission. We can’t tell which direction the ministry was headed.
Mistake #2: Your stitches are too tight. It’s hard to move them up the needle.
Oh, when we hold too tightly to things, it’s hard to move. Anywhere. We cling to the past. We cling to the familiar. We cling to old ideas and ways of doing things. We don’t let Jesus reveal some new holy thing to us because we cling so tightly to our old ideas. Scripture is the living and breathing Word of God. Every time I read or hear a story there is something there I had not seen before. Every time. Unless I’m holding tightly to the old things. The old ways. We can’t move forward when we’re looking back.
Mistake #3: Your knitting is getting wider at the edges (but you’re trying to knit straight).
I have to confess, I had not idea what would cause one’s knitting to get wider at the edges. But here’s what I learned. Knitting gets wider at the edges when you accidentally start the same thing twice. So you forget that you’ve already started a row, or a project, or an argument and you do it again. We lose focus, we forget where we are, that we’ve already started and what we need to do is persevere…keep going….and not return to a brand new beginning.
Mistake #4: You’ve dropped a stitch
Here’s the thing about dropped stitches. You have to recover them quickly. The more time you let go by the harder it is to repair the damage.
Isn’t this just the same for us as people of God knit together in a community? Someone says something that offends us or does something that hurts us and rather than speak out, rather than pick up that dropped stitch, we let it go. And maybe we think about it, about how it makes us feel, rather than about the fact that what we’re knitting can’t be whole without it. And then it becomes almost impossible to pick it up again.
Beloveds, we are siblings in Christ. But we will still disagree. We will still see things differently and that’s okay. The growth for us is to learn to live in our differences.
But we also have to acknowledge that Jesus calls us to specific things that cannot be excused as a “difference.” We cannot NOT love our neighbor. And we cannot NOT imagine that our neighbor may be or look or act or come from someplace very different from us. We cannot NOT care for the widow or the orphan. We cannot lock children in cages and separate them from their parents and imagine that in any way that is what Jesus would have us do. We cannot NOT work for justice and peace. These are the very things that Jesus weaves the fabric of society together with. They are stitches we cannot drop.
Mistake #5: Your knitting looks uneven and “messy”
This is caused by not holding your yarn with equal tension. The equivalent of this in our life together would be running hot and cold and never finding the temperature that is just right. Or being inconsistent. Or picking and choosing the parts of the story of God that suit us. It would be saying that women can’t be in ministry while ignoring the fact that Jesus told the first news of the resurrection to Mary of Magdala and then told her to go and tell the others. We have to look to the things that are consistent about our faith: God’s preference for the poor; Jesus call to give up our concerns for ourselves and walk with him. Follow him. Not when it’s convenient, but to hold the same tension all the time as we follow him through good times and hard times.
Mistake #6: You are starting a new row, but the yarn is attached to the second stitch instead of the first
This mistake is basically about leaving matters unfinished. About not following through with one another. About failing to honor our calls to live in community together. It’s hard. I know that it is. But we have to return to the first stitch so we can complete what we’ve started. So we can be true to our promises and not simply say that it’s gotten too hard to carry on.
Mistake #7: Your knitting has holes in it (and you’re not sure why!?)
The key to fixing this mistake is to make sure you are working from the back. The equivalent for us in community would be to insure that we are not putting our own needs first, but that we are putting the needs of others and of the whole first. That the words of Jesus are more important than our words. That the needs of our neighbors outweigh our need to be right or have more or be seen.
This is hard. But it’s what knits us together.
This is All Saints Sunday and we remember Ruth and Ava and Susie. Ruth was the beloved wife of Pastor Paul Bartling. She and Paul were missionaries in Korea and served in our synod. Until the end of her life Ruth loved to hear about what was happening in the life of this congregation. On my last visit with her, the day before her death, I read the Psalms and her lips murmured along. I will lift up my eyes to the hills. I will be in community.
Ava, the niece of Steph and Les, was just months old. This sanctuary was full to overflowing with people who had not set foot in a church but who somehow needed to make sense of the senseless.
And Susie. We will forever miss her model of faithfulness. She didn’t hold it against me when I had to ask her to repeat herself. She sang the songs of her faith with gusto so that we could believe in them.
Almighty God, you have knit your people together in one communion in the mystical body of your Son, Jesus Christ.
May our lives be knit together in spite of dropped stitches and wide edges and tight rows. For we are knit together by the One who has crafted the very fabric of our being.
Thanks be to God, and let the Church say…Amen.