Psalm 139, part II

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The other element of this great intimacy between knitter and knitted is a physical connection that has a spiritual element. As you knit, pieces of yourself are integrated into the garment you are knitting: strands of hair, skin cells, sweat, and so on. You literally put yourself into your project. You don’t know this transfer is happening, usually; and you have very little control over it. Your knitting project will forever contain little inextricable bits of you.

At the same time, in the process of knitting, sometimes fibers come dislodged from the yarn and float around in the air. They land on your skin as you knit. You inhale them accidentally, without even knowing it. You may get fibers in your mouth as you talk, and you end up swallowing them. Just as pieces of you are being integrated into your knitting, little bits of your knitting are becoming a part of you, as well. There is an exchange of being.

A piece of God rubbed off on you as you were being created. And a piece of you rubbed off on God. You and God are a part of one another; that’s how close you are.

(and a bit later...)

Faith calls us to a place of daring: daring to name the closeness of our relationship with our Creator; daring to name the holiness of our own creation; daring to be the person we were created to be, rather than trying to be Moses, or Jesus, or anyone else. We are gathered together by the Holy Spirit to be a community of daring – a community that dares to affirm our own sacred worth, the sacred worth of all creatures of God.

The truth of our created-ness is the one thing that we all have in common with every other human being around the world. God carefully and lovingly crafted each person; there is no one who was NOT made with God’s love and care. Perhaps that is why it hurts us so much when our brothers and sisters in the Middle East shoot rockets and bombs at one another, or when little boys are kidnapped from their villages in Africa and forced to kill one another to prove that they are men, or when kids in our own community are violated and slain. God knit each one of them together to be unique, to be a blessing that only they could be, and killing one another dishonors God’s handiwork. They were fearfully and lovingly made, but their unraveling was not nearly so holy. There is a piece of God in each of them, and there is a piece of God in each of us – and pieces of all of us in God. Of course we hurt when those pieces of God are destroyed!

We each have this intimate experience, this personal understanding of God as Creator, stitch by loving stitch. We are each called to be ourselves, a one-of-a-kind creation, a unique work of God’s fingers. And we are called together to recognize our common link as a community, to celebrate the sacredness of God’s whole creation. God knows each one of us better than we know ourselves, and far better than we know one another! Isn’t that reason enough to join together in God’s name? Let us rejoice, as God’s people, God’s knitting projects, God’s afghan, stitched together through our common calling to discipleship and faith. Let us share in God’s accessibility, God’s intimacy, God’s immediacy with us. Let us praise God, for we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Thanks be to God. Amen.