“Knit
Together”
My
grandmother was a knitter. I remember
being fascinated by her hands as she sat in her chair knitting away. I wanted her to teach me to knit, but we did
not live near her and our visits were short.
We did find one short moment in time for her to teach me enough to get
me started practicing. I can still
remember the white yarn and the handful of rows that we knit together. But then we went home and without her help, I
found that I just couldn’t figure out how to keep going.
Fast
forward many years later and I was introduced to a book called: Knitting into the mystery. The book works through the spiritual practice
of knitting prayer shawls. Well, I still
did not know how to knit, but I had inherited a handful of my grandmothers
knitting books. So, together with my
grandmother’s spirit and the guidance of the book Knitting into the mystery, I
focused myself during the season of Lent to teach myself to knit. And I loved it. I found it so relaxing, and energizing, and
rewarding. By the end of Lent, I had
created a prayer shawl. And so I set out
to make another and another.
I
am still very much a beginner when it comes to knitting. Back when many of my friends were having
babies, I thought it would be fun to knit baby blankets. I quickly learned that the various patterns
in these blankets were more than I could handle. So, I started making scarves. But even in making simple scarves, I loved
how each and every stitch was made by me.
Yes, sometimes the rows were too loose or too tight, or maybe I dropped
a stitch here or there, but each blanket, each scarf was made loop by loop,
stitch by stitch, by me, with my hands. By
the time I finished a project whether it was large of small, it was known
completely by me.
Take
the metaphor of knitting, of being stitched together loop by loop, as one piece
of yarn is transformed into a beautiful blanket or scarf or sweater, and
overlay it into the Psalm we read today.
There is such an intimacy in this psalm, of God knowing us completely. From before we are even born, God is there,
God is creating us, God is knitting us together in our mother’s womb. Cell by cell, God knows us. God designs us so that our heart begins to
beat, our various organs develop, our faces form, our arms and our legs and
fingers and our toes take form. While pregnant,
I signed up to receive weekly emails from a sight called: baby center.
Each week it described the size of the baby as a piece of fruit, from a
blueberry to an orange to a watermelon, week by week there was a description of
the growth and transformation going on within my womb as this little being was
being knit together.
This
is one of the Psalms that I could read every day. It is a constant reminder to me that God has
intimately created this world, that God loves each and every one of us, that there
is no where we can go that God is not present.
With 7.5 billion people in the world, I have had people ask me, how is
it possible that God is involved in the lives of each of us? For many, there is a struggle of believing
that God could possibly care about our worries, stress, and grief. So many feel that this world has spun
horribly out of control. Has God created
this world and just left it? Turned us
human loose to let us do whatever our free will calls us to do? Or is God intimately involved in this world,
continuing to create, continuing to redeem, continuing to pour out love into
our lives?
In
seeking to find a way for our minds to grasp the concept that yes, indeed, God
is all around us, constantly at work within us, and within this world, think
about listening to the radio. Right now,
I cannot hear music playing, but in this very room, there are radio waves
waiting to be heard. If I had a radio,
and turned it on, it would start to play, and then I can change it to another
station and another station and another station. Right here in this room, there are a
multitude of songs playing. We are just
unaware of them. God is very much like
the radio, able to pick up the signals, pick up the waves, and hear them as our
prayers.
Our
God is intimately involved in our lives and one way we acknowledge this is
through the sacrament of baptism.
Whether we are baptized as an infant, or a teenager, or an adult, we
have a liturgy that proclaims that we believe that God is at work in the
world. Baptism is not a magic forcefield
protecting us from harm or illness or the temptations of this world, but it is
our profession that we believe God has defeated the power of sin in this
world. In baptism we proclaim that we
seek to be nourished in God’s love, in God’s grace, and to learn the teachings
of our Creator through the community of faith.
Baptism is often the beginning of our faith journey, the beginning of
our way of seeking to understand that God is active in the world and in each
and everyone of our lives. Throughout
our lives, we have sacred moments, insights, spiritual awakenings that
reinforce our baptism, that reinforce our belief that God is active in the
world, that reinforces the understanding that God’s love overcomes the
hardships of this world
This
psalm is so intimate, it is universal, it speaks to the human experience of our
doubts and fears and trust and faith. We
may be in a place right now where we feel we have gone to the far ends of the
earth and there is no way that God is present with us. Or we may be in the moment of awe and
awareness that God is knit every cell of our body together to create us into
these beings that we are. Most of us are
somewhere in between. Embrace your own
baptism, embrace the promise made when you were an infant or a time in your own
life where you felt called to proclaim your faith, and seek to notice those
moments when God breaks into our routines, our business, our everyday actions
and reminds us that God is truly at work.
Amen.
