God of Falling Sparrows and Counted Hairs
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost – June 19, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[texts: Romans 6:1b-11/Matthew 10:24-39]

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father/ And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid, you are of more value than many sparrows.”

            God is the God of ultimate values. In other words, God’s concern is that which is of ultimate worth, or value, to us. The question before us, today is, “what do we value?” or “what really matters to us?” When we look at the world around us we get mixed messages as to what matters or what is valued.

The front page of the paper and the daily news casts tell us that American society values human life, peace and security, and our growth intellectually and spiritually as human persons. Of course, at the same time there are stories, indications, that run absolutely in the opposite direction and reflect entirely different values. We see that human life is not held dear, on the streets of Milwaukee or on the streets of Baghdad. One certainly gets the impression that public trust and concern for the common good manages to elude leaders in business and government on a regular basis. Intellectual and spiritual growth takes a back-seat to the ability to get ahead, even at the cost of someone else.

Those of us in the religious corner don’t fare a great deal better. Scandals, both monetary and sexual, rock the various churches. The number of churches in conflict seems to grow and grow, while the number of clergy – especially qualified ones – drops. Often faith is treated like any other consumer good with ‘church shoppers’ and even members who display little or no loyalty or concern for what it means to be an integral part of a faith community.

I’m reading David Shi’s book, The Simple Life, and the conflict over values has been a part of the American experience from the beginning. So I suppose if this attitude has been around from the beginning of the American experiment we shouldn’t find it surprising to read Matthew’s Gospel and to hear the voice of Jesus speaking across the centuries, “Do not be afraid…you are of value to God.” This is the same voice Mother Julian heard centuries later that counseled her, “All shall be well and all manners of things shall be well.”  What we hear is not a platitude, nor a sop, but the assurance of God’s care for us. In that assurance, however, we are also to hear a call reminding us who we are. It is a voice crying to us to recognize and awaken to the love and that care that our Creator lavishes on us if we but open our eyes and our ears, both of our bodies and of our hearts. Once we have come to that realization of who we are and what it means to be valued, we are to turn and value others, value the world in which we live. We show what matters to us by how we live.

Last week I came across something written by the twentieth century Quaker theologian and mystic, Rufus Jones that just made wondrous sense – one of those things you should know but just don’t think about. Mystics, like Jones and Julian of Norwich, fascinate me because these dear folk see God through persons, situations, and things where others of us see nothing. For them the world is the transparent stage of God’s activity where, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, “Christ plays in ten thousand places.” Jones tells the story of a regular summer visitor to Maine who decided that he would start a Sunday School on one of the islands lying within sight of his summer home. This island was a tiny one, so small in fact, that the surrounding ocean could be seen from every part of it. A few families had planted themselves on the island among the scrubby tress and blueberry bushes, amid boats and nets and fish and lobster pots, in the undying noise of the ocean crashing on the shore. The children knew nothing else but the island.  There was no place to which they could go where they could escape the sea. It resounded in their ear when they awoke in the morning and it was the last sound they heard as they dropped off to sleep at night. It was everywhere and provided not only the source of their livelihood and daily food, but also their recreation.  

Jones says that the visitor gathered all the children and assembled them around him in friendly fashion for their first lesson. Before he tried to tell them about invisible realities he thought he would begin with visible and familiar things. He asked how many of them had ever seen the Atlantic Ocean? He raised his own hand and said, “I have.” To his surprise no other hand went up. They looked at him, with no idea at a;; what he was talking about. As Jones writes, “The Atlantic Ocean was as foreign to their minds as the South Pole would have been if he had asked how many of them had seen that. They had been born by the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, they had lived by it and enjoyed its beauty, they had boated on it and bathed in it, but nobody had ever named it to them before, or interpreted it to their minds. It was their constant environment, and yet they had never once discovered that there was such a thing as the Atlantic Ocean, rolling unexplored in front of their eyes.”

He comments:

This simple event may not inaptly, I think, be treated as a parable of life. There are persons all about us who never dream that their little island of spirit, over which they exercise control and dominion, is ringed about surrounded by an inner world of Spirit, from which they draw their central being and to which they owe all the functions of their reason, all their enjoyment of beauty, all their capacity of love, all their certitude of truth, all their power to expand life in ideal directions, and all their transcendent hopes and faiths. To be isolated and insulated from that More of Life to which we belong would carry with that isolation and insulation and shrinkage that one would become only the minimal fraction of self. . .And yet it is possible to live sundered from that environing Life of the Spirit and to be wholly unaware and unconscious of the near presence. [Spiritual Energies in Daily Life quoted in Rufus Jones Speaks to Our Time, p. 3-4]

            I think Jones’ makes the point quite powerfully that we can live in the midst of God’s presence and do so absolutely unaware. We miss the point that the God who has created and sustains all that is really does care for us and is aware of not only our situation, but that of the whole world. That’s what Jesus was trying to get across to those listeners on the long –ago day. If sparrows are so cheap, a single one really worth nothing at all, and God is not only aware of that sparrow’s situation, but holds it in value, then of how much worth are you, since every hair of your head is counted? How much are those around you, and the teeming life of this world worth? Jesus is telling them, and us, that what we may consider insignificant God prizes. What God prizes, what God cares about, so should we, if we are God’s children.

            This passage from Matthew is filled with vibrant ideas and strong, sometimes almost seemingly contradictory, language. After Jesus talks about what God values he makes statements that some use to make our faith exclusionary. “Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven. . . .Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” He uses this strong, seemingly contradictory, language to point out that which is of ultimate worth and upon which one’s priorities and actions are to be based.

            John Shea, contemporary theologian and story-teller, comments on this text, “It insists that the disciples of Jesus have proper priorities. There is a hierarchy of values, and it must be respected. Loyalty to the revelation of God in Christ is absolute. Ultimate commitment is reserved for ultimate reality. Therefore, if you value what is not ultimate as ultimate, you are not worthy of Jesus who is a Jew of the first commandment, “I am the Lord your God . . . you shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:2-3) [On Earth As It Is In Heaven, p. 214] What he is saying is that to hold, to be centered in that ultimate worth brings all of life into the realm of God’s supreme love. Our love of parents, spouse, friends, siblings, nature, name it, whatever we value only has value because of who God is and the value that God has given it.

Remember the sparrow? Remember the hairs on your head? What Jesus says is paradoxical, but it isn’t contradictory. What we’re hearing is a matter of priority that bids us to first be ‘one-ed,’ as Julian of Norwich would say, with God. As we are drawn more and more into God’s life we draw that all that we value, all that has value, with us. I go back again and again to Julian’s ‘showing’ where she saw,

. . .in this revelation He showed a little thing, the size of an hazel nut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: “What can this be?” And it was generally answered thus: “It is all that is made.” I marveled how it could continue, because it seemed to me it could suddenly have sunk into nothingness because of its littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: “It continueth and always shall, because God loveth it; and in this way everything hath its being by the love of God.” In this little thing I saw three characteristics: the first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third that God keeps it. But what did I observe in that? Truly the Maker, the Lover, and the Keeper for, until I am in essence one-ed to Him, I can never have full rest nor true joy (that is to say, until I am made so fast to Him that there is absolutely nothing that is created separating my God and myself). [A Lesson of Love: The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, translated by Fr. John-Julian, O.J.N. , p. 14-15]

What she is saying is what we heard Paul telling the church in Rome. When we die to self and live to God, then we experience the fullness of what God has for us and come, at last, to our true self-hood.  In our baptism we sacramentally and symbolically die and rise again as new persons who have the potential to be united, joined with God through the instrumentality of the living Christ.

            What begins with our baptism takes a lifetime as we seek to be “in essence one-ed to Him.” What Jesus tells us in Matthew’s Gospel is that for us to come to that experience of oneness, of unity with God, we have to open our eyes, look around us, and become aware of the world in which we live and the reality of who we are. We are the children of God and as God’s children our priorities, our values are different because we come to value that which God values. Jesus reminds us that we serve a God of falling sparrows and counted hairs. A God who values us ultimately and desires to share life with us, but we must choose to value and to live as God does.

            I invite you to come to a new or a renewed awareness of the God who has drawn us together this morning. In the days ahead open your eyes to the wondrous ocean of grace and goodness in which you swim everyday. Seek to find God at work even in the littlest of things and know the truth that even the littlest has its being because God loves it. God loves you, too, your hairs are counted. So also love and value as lavishly as your heavenly Father, the good God and Creator does. What we value and how we set our priorities does, indeed, make a difference to a God who knows when sparrows fall and takes the time to number the hairs even of balding heads!