A Sublime Patchwork--November 19, 2020

 A Sublime Patchwork--November 19, 2020

"Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain." [1 Corinthians 15:58]

It is worth it--the good that you do in this world.

The tiny gestures of decency and mercy that go unnoticed--they are worth doing, even if they do not register on someone else's radar or make a lasting impression in their memory.

The persistence you put in--small actions, day by day, that form a lifetime--it matters, and it is not lost, even if you are going through a time when you wonder if any of it makes a difference.  The effort you put in at work... the time you take with your children or grandchildren... the additional grace you extend to a stranger... the willingness to be put to a little bit of inconvenience in the hopes of helping someone else.... the energy you spent taking the time to speak kindly rather than rashly... these things are not lost in the great sweep of history, even when we can't see what any of it accomplished.

Or, as the apostle puts it succinctly, in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

Now, to be clear, that doesn't mean the world around you will always recognize the value of what you do.  Our 24-hour-a-day news-cycle culture wants flashy, attention-getting, headline-making acts of heroics, and most of the good you and I can be a part of is, honestly, the stuff that is easily overlook-able.  You aren't likely to get a parade in your honor or a statue in your likeness set up somewhere, but that may be for the best anyway (Jesus seems pretty skeptical about the value of statues of anybody, it seems to me, and he knows how fickle the crowd at a parade can be, too, between a Sunday and a Friday).  

So as long as we understand that Paul isn't promising that the world will recognize your work and hand you a Nobel prize or Academy Award for it, we can trust Paul's point.  The world's big names and so-and-sos will always boast about crowd size, ratings, or numbers of social media followers they command, but the followers of Jesus aren't meant to be fooled by any of those metrics as the key to our worth.  For us who are disciples of the homeless, jobless, executed rabbi from a backwater town called Nazareth, we don't have to worry about who looks like a "winner," and we don't have to go blustering on about the legacies we will leave, or how much we have done in our time compared to anybody else.  

We just don't have to play those games, because we know better.  Or at least, we should.  We know that we don't have control over anybody else's estimation of the value of our work.  We know that the kind of work that really matters--the labor we call love--usually doesn't turn heads, sell newspapers, or get clicks.  But we do it anyway, because it is the work to which Jesus calls us.  And Jesus' work, in his divine creativity, takes all these small actions, these momentary graces we extend to others, and stitches them together into something beautiful and whole, like a quilter taking small scraps in all their different colors and arranging them into a pattern than creates a sublime patchwork.  

Like a weaver working individual threads into a tapestry, or like the countless drops of water in the river that carves a canyon out of the colored layers of rock, in Jesus, our small actions of love are not lost.  Sure, nobody sets up a plaque to commemorate the ten billionth drip in the stream, but you can see how its presence, together with all the others that flow into the river, make a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon.  The difference the droplet makes is in the canyon itself, and the way its presence ripples out to nudge other droplets as they smooth away the jagged edges of the shale is the legacy it leaves.  None of the droplets, none of the threads, none of the little squares and triangles of fabric, are meaningless.  Their presence is not in vain.

Maybe what it takes is a divine quilter like Christ to see the possibilities and beauty in each scrap, each thread, and to find ways to use what the world would discard.  But that is exactly what our hope is as Christians--that the small actions of love for neighbor, the small words of truth we insist on, the small commitments to justice and decency we muster in this life are not wasted, but are gathered up in the arms of Jesus himself, who stitches them together and incorporates them into the new creation.

Think of that--the good you do, the love you show, the grace you practice, and the welcome you offer, won't be lost even when the world's empires have crumbled and the universe itself has worn out.  They will be preserved in some way, and their impact will endure, like the river of the water of life carving a canyon into the bedrock in the new heaven and new earth.

Add a droplet.  Add a blue square or a purple triangle.  Add a golden thread.

Lord Jesus, take what we offer today and use it for good--even if we cannot yet see how it matters.