Today our priest preached on of her best sermons of late. It dealt with our belonging to God, and how God The Creator might put God's " maker's marks" on us collectively & individually.
My thoughts went to the amazing engineering feat that is the human hand. We are the only creatures in Creation that possess opposable thumbs-- and one of the few species who have hands . Our primate cousins also have hands, but their hands lack the opposable thumbs that make grasping tools so easy for we humans.
In our hands, I think we see evidence of our own making in God's Image. Through our hands, we are able to act as co-creators with God the Mother.
As a writer and artist-- I am especially mindful of my own two hands. In addition to my hands marking me as a member of the human family, the long slender fingers on each of my two hands are a physical trait that I share with people on my father's side of my family. I see the same finger length and hand shape evident in myself, my brother, our Dad , and my brother's children. These hands gripped both a basketball and various art supplies from an early age. As a writer, I depend on my hands' ability to type effectively on a keyboard every day. Musicians depend on hands to bring beautiful music from the page to the ears of listeners.
Our hands and our large, complex brains have also enabled humans to invent and use tools that make life easier.
The question for we Christians might be: How can I use my hands to bring glory to God? How can my hands bless others' lives? When we act on these questions, we are also living into our Baptismal Covenant. At our baptism, the hands of another human -- a clergyperson-- poured water over us and then traced a cross onto our foreheads with their thumb. By our baptism, we are " marked" as a member of Christ's family here on Earth.
While our hands are a visible sign of being born into the human family, our invisible , permanent maker's mark' on our foreheads marks us as adopted kin of Jesus.
Amen.
Sarah McCarren
6 June 2021
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