You Are Known

Hey everyone,

It's Tuesday, June 23rd. I don't know about you, but by the time Tuesday rolls around, the Sunday morning energy, the liturgy, singing out of those hymnals, the whole feeling of being gathered together in the sanctuary, has usually worn thin by now for most folks. Real life has a habit of just kicking the doors in by Monday afternoon.

I've been looking over the lectionary texts for this week. I keep getting stuck on Matthew 10. Jesus is talking to his disciples, and he drops this line about sparrows, "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care."

I’ll be totally honest: I’ve always had a love-hate reaction to this verse. It looks great embroidered on a pillow. But when you’re actually in the thick of it, when the grocery bill is climbing, or you're watching the news and seeing just how endlessly angry and fractured everything is right now, or you're just dead tired from trying to keep your head above water at work...knowing God is doing a headcount of the local bird population doesn't exactly pay the rent.

For a lot of us, our brains may want to go to a negative place, "Cool, God knows about the sparrows. Does God know I feel like I'm dropping the ball everywhere? Does God know I feel like I keep letting people down?"

But I think that we usually read this passage backwards. Jesus isn't promising that the sparrows won't fall. They absolutely do. There's also not some magic forcefield where bad things skip over us. The point Jesus is making is that even when the sparrows fall, they aren't abandoned. They aren't overlooked.

I see this all the time at my day job over at the residential facility. I sit across from young men who feel completely invisible to the rest of the world. Society just walks right past them. But then you sit there. You listen to their story. You realize the image of God is stamped right on them, clear as day. They aren't invisible. And neither are you. None of us are.

I wanted to pair this today with a painting that always captures this exact feeling for me. It’s The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet. If you haven't seen it, it's from 1857. It just shows three peasant women hunched over, picking up the leftover scraps of wheat out in a field after the main harvest is already done. In that society, they were the bottom of the barrel. Completely ignored. But Millet didn't paint them like background props. He painted them with this heavy, grounded dignity. He forced the viewer to actually stop and look at them and say, "These lives matter."

That's what Jesus is doing with the sparrows. That's what God does with us.

So if you're feeling like a bit of a background character in your own life today, or if you're just exhausted from the summer heat and the daily grind... just remember you are seen. You are known...every hair on your head.

Take a breath today. Be kind to yourselves, and be kind to the people you bump into.

Peace,
Tony