God's Via Positiva #13 | Say Amen to Hands

0:01 Our passage for this morning, this fifth Sunday in the season of Easter, this cantata Sunday, comes from the book of Psalms. Listen now for God's word to you as it echoes to us from this brief verse from Psalm 90. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands. O prosper the work of our hands. This is the word of God for you, the people of God. Thanks be to God. In 1976, in his book, The Selfish Gene, biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins coined a word, a term that may prove to be Dawkins' most important and lasting contribution to the cultural conversation.

1:15 The word Dawkins coined was meme. A meme derived from the Greek word mimesis, from which we also get words like mimic, mime, and imitate,

1:35 is an idea, behavior, style, or image or image that gets passed from one cultural node to another, mind to mind, person to person, group to group, through imitation. A meme is a copied theme. It's a mimicked scene played as a joke. It's a shared image, recognizable but endlessly modified, riffed on, and remixed. As they tumble through our culture, memes carry layers of meaning that are neither entirely stable nor completely malleable. Take, for example, the image on the front of your bulletin cover today.

2:36 A close-up of the hand of God and the hand of Adam, God's creation, from Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. This is one of the world's most famous works of art, completed in 1512. Before we even had a word for it, these two hands were a cultural meme. They're a familiar sight, even to those who cannot name the artist or the location of the painting. Over time, these hands have been altered and shaped into evocative reflections and scores of silly jokes. Taking a quick internet sample this past week, I found images in which God's hand reaches out to touch the paw of a cat.

3:40 God's hand is clad in a Spider-Man glove. Both hands are replaced by the hands of characters from the Simpsons cartoon. The online riffs on this work of art are endless. Now, some argue that this playful engagement, this meme making, is only possible because the underlying image is so recognizable and so powerful. I suspect this is true.

4:17 Michelangelo asks us to picture God with hands. This is who God is, the artist asserts. The one who reaches out to empower us, to give us life. So that we in turn might do the same. use our power to reach out toward others with compassion.

4:47 Today, Dr. Ryan Jackson, Dr. Patrick Krieger, an immensely talented quintet of musicians from Juilliard and our accomplished choir have prepared a modern masterpiece for us. Carolyn Shaw's To the Hands. The cantata that you are about to hear is too, in a way, a meme. It is a creative reflection on the layers of cultural and spiritual meaning that gather around an ordinary seeming image, hands. Along the way, the peace evokes the wounded hands of Christ, the beckoning hand of the Statue of Liberty, the hands of neighbors in need, hands that are tired and dirty and scarred, and yet nonetheless belong to the children of God. to those who reach out hoping in this short life to find another loving hand, a caring hand, a life-filled hand to grasp.

6:21 Friends, let us settle our hearts and listen for the truth that comes when artists, considering an issue of enormous moral import, begin to riff on an image that is both so pedestrian and so spiritually powerful as a pair of hands. Maestro.