Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 17:22-31

Psalm 66:8-20

1 Peter 3:13-22

John 14:15-21

I want everyone to hum. Trust me. Just pick a note. Hmmmm….(Louder, softer)

How cool is that? Thanks! You have just sent your hum into the universe. It has mixed with your neighbors hum and bounced off the walls and the ceiling and soaked through into the atmosphere to join with the noise of the world which leaks off into space and joins the cosmic hum.

Really. Scientists have detected this hum. The Kronos Quartet has created a beautiful piece of music based on it.

I heard about the hum again this week on NPR. The interviewer wanted to know what happened to Lucy (I Love Lucy)’s voice once it was beamed away into space.

It joined the hum: Indistinguishable at last from the other noise in the air, part of the music of the spheres.

All right, in the end very little sound actually escapes from earth, the sound waves decrease and dissipate. But I love the imaginative picture of all that humming we can’t even hear.

Being part of a larger whole, a greater good, a cosmic purpose. Fredrerik Buechner says when he defines Grace: “You might never have been, but you are her because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.”

Everyone is here because it makes the party complete, the parts a whole, the view beautiful.

Here’s where I am headed with this little meditation on the holy hum: Our first reading today is a speech of the Apostle Paul. He is standing in the town square talking respectfully to people who don’t know his God. They do worship, the “unknown God.” Paul puts flesh on this God, and a name. So that the unknown God may be known. Not in whole, but in part.

Glimpses, pieces, parts. Paul, brilliant speaker that he is, takes a piece of existing local culture and belief and points it to God. He quotes a familiar (to them, not us) Greek poet, Epimenides: “In him we live and move and have our being.” Hmmm.

Part of the big hum! Right? “In him we live and move and have our being.” So God is not just the big guy (or gal) out there in the heavens sitting on a golden throne. But the very air we breathe.

Paul is not just talking about himself, but you and I and all the peoples of the world and creation itself bound up in God.

We are all connected through being in God. What difference does knowing this make? What does it matter?

First, it shows that we are not alone. We are never alone. We are in this together. And we are in this with God. John quotes Jesus saying “…he abides with you and he will be in you....I am in my Father and you in me, and I in you.”

So we are never alone even when we are sitting by ourselves in the quiet of our own homes. Never alone.

This also means, however, that we are part of a vast creation. Not only with God but with all created life. And that can make all the difference.

Especially in a world so fraught with war and division. A world so full of distrust and dehumanization. In order to kill someone, or whole societies we must first dehumanize them, see them as less than human. I remember someone saying, in the midst of a fundraising appeal for Somalia…”oh, they just don’t value their children like we do, so when one dies, it isn’t that big a deal.”

I’m glad you winced. That means you care. That you see all people as human. That you realize we have more in common with our brothers and sister in Palestine and Iran than we have differences. If only governments saw all people as valuable human beings…there would be less war and more aid.

Call me naïve. But I do not want to fear what they fear…(that’s from the second lesson). I do not want to be caught up in fearing my neighbor or the next country over….can you really trust those Canadians? (Lol).

If we see the world as fragmented it is easy to be afraid, to dehumanize others, to put up walls and barriers of protection. It is easy to be afraid.

But if we live and move and have our being in the God of the universe who created all people and all things…we have peace. And we care and work for the good of all. And the sacred is not separate from the secular.

But God is in all and through all. Psalm 46:2 (NRSV) )

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,

though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;

For weaving in and around and through us, binding us together, friend and stranger alike, is the great hum of God who is still at work in the world.

I picture on of my kids who, when very content and busy creating something, hums.

And we are part of the hum. The goodness of creation, the goodness of creating, the goodness of the created.

Hummm……

Alleluia. Amen.