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We have heard it said that “the devil is in the details” meaning that details are important, even necessary, and that if they are not given proper attention, whole projects can fail; the phrase reminds us, albeit in a somewhat fear-induced way, to pay attention to the details, for the grandest project depends on the success of the smallest components. The devil is in the details…” I suggest to you that today’s three scripture lessons offer us a variation on this familiar phrase…each in their own way invite us to see that God, not the devil, is in the details.
Today’s biblical authors help us see the active presence of a caring God, a faithful God, an inspiring God, everywhere we look. God is in the stirring waters. God is in the man who has been ill for 38 years…and God is also in the attentiveness of Jesus who takes special notice of this otherwise forgettable outcast. God is most certainly in the Sabbath, and though healing was forbidden on such a holy day, God is experienced even in the detail of breaking the law in order to bring life.
Move with me to the reading from Revelation and God is still to be found in the details of the panoramic drama. There, God is the temple, God is the light, God is the lamp within the holy city. God is seen as the open city gate through which all are welcome to enter. God is the river of the water of life, and God is the gardener planting not one or two but twelve kinds of fruit trees in abundance to effect healing for all the nations of the world.
In the reading from the book of Acts, for the Apostle Paul and his associate Silas, God is in the late-night vision. God is in the barring of one direction in ministry, and in the opening of another. God is in the unlikely group of women gathered for prayer. God is in the powerful and wealthy businesswoman
Lydia
, a seller of purple goods…a woman after my own heart! Let’s pause for a moment to chronicle her impressive résumé:
Lydia
owns her own business and her own home. She is a dealer in purple cloth that originates in the city of
Thyatira
, a city well known in the ancient world for its textile industry. Purple clothing was destined for the rich and royal throughout the
Roman Empire
, where its vibrant color symbolized power and influence. A merchant in purple cloth, then, was someone who rubbed shoulders daily with society’s rich and famous.
Lydia
is socially prominent, yet she is also an active participant in the women’s prayer group that meets by the river; and she is an eager respondent to the new gospel of Jesus the Christ. Given the time and space the author of Acts dedicates to informing readers about
Lydia
’s influence, we can safely say that God is in the details of
Lydia
’s life and ministry. Later in the book of Acts, we will read that God is in
Lydia
’s large and welcoming home as it gives refuge to the first Christian church in all of
Europe
.
Friends, as we explore today’s three biblical passages, we see that God is most certainly in the details. The color purple…the stirring waters…the abundant orchard of fruit trees…God is to be noticed, acknowledged, and appreciated, not only in the big picture, the macro, but also in the detail of life.
Alfred North Whitehead, English philosopher and mathematician, upon whose thought is based 20th century Process Theology, was the subject of a book by his colleague Lucien Price. For nearly 15 years, Mr. Price spent Sunday evenings at the Whitehead home, conversing with the couple on a wide variety of topics. Faithfully, within a day or two of each conversation, Mr. Price transcribed Whitehead’s words, ultimately editing them into a book entitled, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. Near the end of the book, in a conversation that turned out to be just 6 weeks before Whitehead’s death, he is quoted as saying,
“God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. But this creation is a continuing process, and ‘the process is itself the actuality,’ since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey. Insofar as [humanity] partakes of this creative process do [we] partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is [our] immortality…” (pp. 370-371)
This is Whitehead’s way of saying that God, the divine Spirit, is to be found actively and compassionately at work everywhere and within everything. God is working from within each object, person, creature, and event, working like leaven in a loaf of bread dough. There is no detail in which God is not present, and therefore no detail in which God’s potential transformation can be prohibited. In the world of pre-quantum physics, for example, this wooden pulpit would have been considered an inanimate object, consisting of hard bits of atoms. Thanks to recent advancements in physics, and the additional philosophizing by folks like Whitehead, we now know that this pulpit is better understood as a series of events. If we were to put parts of the pulpit under a microscope, the scope would show, not a stagnant entity, but rather a series of energy patterns or energy waves, a high level of visible activity and motion. These events are the details, if you will, of this particular pulpit and God is working through them all.
We see God in the details of actual events as well. This past Friday, in the wildly positive “Get on the Bus” program, God was to be found in the details once again. We saw God in activity bags enjoyed by the children as they made the long bus ride to visit their incarcerated mothers. We saw God in a mountainous pile of cuddly teddy bears, in a warm breakfast served to the children and their sponsors by smiling volunteers. We saw God in the brave youngsters walking courageously into the locked prison yard to see their moms, and God was seen in the mothers themselves, ready to embrace their child and thereby spark hope within themselves. As Whitehead said, “God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter in the ether, water, earth, human hearts.”
As I pondered the scripture passages for this morning, I of course was struck by the detail of the color purple. In
Lydia
’s story in the book of Acts, the color purple represents so much more than a place on the color wheel. It represents her independence, her leadership, and her resources which she generously offered to give birth to the Christian church in
Europe
. The color purple is one of those seemingly insignificant details of
Lydia
’s résumé which easily could be disregarded. Yet we know that God is in the details, and with the divine Spirit working from within the detail of
Lydia
’s color purple, great things happen.
There is another color purple, a gift to us from another woman whose life was far removed from European Lydia. Her name is Alice Walker, novelist and poet; she is a spiritual mother to many in the feminist and womanist movements of the past twenty-five years. In 1982, Ms. Walker wrote one of the greatest novels of our time. It’s title…The Color Purple. It provides for our generation one of the strongest statements of how the human spirit is disfigured by cruelty and transformed by love. In the first few pages, author Alice Walker gives us Celie, who is fourteen years old when the book opens. Celie has been raped, abused, degraded and twice impregnated by her father. After he takes Celie’s children away from her without so much as a word, he marries her off like a piece of chattel to her husband, who is so cold, distant and inhuman to her that she can only refer to him as Mr.; in his jealousy, this husband deprives her of her sister Nettie, the only one who ever loved her.
Celie manages to survive by living one day at a time, writing letters, first to God, and then to her absent and sorely-missed sister. In one letter, Celie recounts a conversation that she and good friend Shug Avery are having about God. As Celie expresses her doubts about God, Shug assures her in the vernacular of their culture,
“Here’s the thing about God…the thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for…God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.” “You saying God vain?” Celie asks. “Naw, not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it ticks God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it…People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see that God always trying to please us back...always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect…” (Walker, The Color Purple, pp. 177-178)
Is God saddened when we walk by the color purple without noticing, or ignore any other detail of our busy lives within which the Divine is most certainly at work? Yes! I agree with Shug Avery and with Alfred North Whitehead and with Jesus and Paul and with the poetic author of the book of Revelation. God is in the details of your life and in mine…in budgets and bills to be paid and cars to be filled with over-priced gasoline and yes, as today’s scriptures attest, God is also to be found in stirring waters and abundant groves of fruit trees and even, and most especially in the color purple. Open your eyes, friends, and notice that everywhere you look, God is seeking to transform the details of your life into a stream of healing, nourishing, life-giving waters. As Alice Walker so eloquently writes, “God just wants to share a good thing with you…” and I triple-dog dare you to sit up and take notice!
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