The Divine Spark: A Pastor's Reminder
michael young
This past Sunday I preached “Get Busy Living,” a sermon about moving from a fearful way of life toward an abundant way of living. Along the way, as in so many of my sermons, I spoke of the Divine Spark: no matter our outward physical expression, each of us carries a piece of the Divine Spark of the cosmos in our very being.
Afterward I was reminded of something I have to relearn more often than I’d like to admit. I sometimes get ahead of where my congregation is. The Divine Spark has become second nature to me. It’s so familiar that I forget that not everyone knows what I’m getting at in the sermon.
For me, it is the place where science and faith stop arguing and start speaking together. But a phrase that feels like home to the preacher can still leave the listeners reaching for the meaning instead of resting in it.
So let me tell the story behind the phrase.
“Let Us Make Them in Our Image”
Scripture begins with a stirring. Before light, before land, the Spirit of God hovers, moves, broods over the face of the waters (Genesis 1:2). That Hebrew word is ruach: wind, breath and spirit all at once.
Then God speaks: “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). In the second telling, God kneels in the dust and breathes the breath of life into us (Genesis 2:7). The breath that moved over the waters now fills human lungs. That is the Divine Spark. It is not earned, and it is given to every one of us, no matter our outward physical expression.
The Divine Spark is not ours alone. It is found in all of creation. It lives in the trees and the clouds, in the streams and the stones, in the sparrow and the soil. All of it carries the breath of the One who made it.
And notice God’s verdict on it all: very good (Genesis 1:31). That is Scripture’s first word over humanity, and it is the deepest truth about us. We begin, and have our being, within original blessing.
The Original Spark
Science tells its own story of beginnings, and I find it just as holy. Some 13.8 billion years ago, everything that is began in a state of unimaginable heat and density, and it has been expanding ever since. The universe began with a spark. Stars formed, burned and died, forging the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones. We are, quite literally, made of stardust.
The cosmologist Brian Swimme likes to say that if you leave hydrogen alone long enough, it becomes rosebushes, giraffes and people who wonder where they came from. In us, the universe has begun to reflect on itself and creation is not finished. The universe is still being born, and the first spark is still flaring forth.
Some theologians go further and say the first incarnation was not Bethlehem but creation itself, when God first poured divine life into matter. So, I see no contest between Genesis and the physics classroom. I hear one story in two languages. Science tells us how the spark unfolded; faith dares to call it Divine.
From Dust to Dust
Every Ash Wednesday, we hear the ancient words as ashes are pressed onto our foreheads: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). I have come to hear it as a homecoming.
Science tells the same story in its own language. The atoms that make up your body were here long before you, and they will be here long after. They will return to soil and sea and sky, become trees and clouds and sparrows, and perhaps, in some far-off age, new stars. Nothing of us is wasted. Stardust to dust, and dust to stardust again.
The Preacher of Ecclesiastes completes the circle: “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7). The word for breath there is ruach, the same wind that brooded over the waters at the very beginning. The spark that was lent to us goes home to its source.
Before there was dust, there was love. It was love that hovered over the waters, love that knelt in the mud, love that looked at all of it and called it very good. “God is love,” says the First Letter of John (1 John 4:16). Whatever the first flaring forth was, faith dares to call it love bursting into being. And whatever waits beyond our last breath, we will return to that same love. We are held at both ends.
From love we came, and to love we shall return.
The Peace in Between
If we are held at both ends, then the stretch in between, our very lives, does not have to be lived in fear.
That was the heart of Sunday’s sermon. Fear tells us that life is scarce and death is the enemy, so we clutch, hoard, guard and armor ourselves against everyone and everything. But when you know where you came from and where you are going, you can loosen your grip.
The peace in between is not the absence of trouble. The Hebrew word is shalom: wholeness, every thread woven in, nothing missing. It is the peace Jesus offered his friends on the night before he died: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you... Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” (John 14:27). And it is the peace that makes the abundant life possible: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
Many of us have sat at a bedside and watched someone we love make that final turn toward home. Sometimes, near the end, a quiet settles over the room that I can only describe as holy. I believe that peace is not meant only for the last day. It is meant for every day between the first breath and the last. That is what it means to get busy living.
The Spark in Every Neighbor
If this is true, it changes how we see one another. Every person you meet is living their own in-between: made of dust, carrying the spark, on their way back to love. The neighbor whose yard sign you can’t stand carries the Divine Spark. So does the stranger sleeping in a doorway, the child at the border, and anyone whose language, color, faith or outward physical or cultural expression differs from yours. Each is a piece of the first light.
That is why human dignity is not a political talking point for me. It is a theological claim: our dignity is the Divine Spark within us, our innate worth, our gift of original blessing.
Barbara A. Holmes argued that a universe this deeply interconnected exposes racism as a failure to see reality as it truly is. Christena Cleveland names what happens when we picture God in only one image, white and male: we come to believe that only some people fully bear the image of God. I have had to unlearn that in my own life, and I am still unlearning it.
The spark can be buried under grief, shame or other people’s contempt. But in my years of ministry, I have never met anyone in whom it was truly gone.
Tending the Flame
So here is my invitation from the porch this week. Howard Thurman urged us to listen for “the sound of the genuine,” first in ourselves and then in others. Listen for it in the mirror, especially on the days you feel least worthy. Listen for it at the grocery store, at the school board meeting, in the pew beside you on Sunday. And when someone’s light has grown dim, lean in and breathe a little warmth their way. That is what the Spirit has been doing since before the stars were lit.
Fear tells us to hoard our light and guard it from everyone else. Abundant living trusts that the spark in me is not diminished by the spark in you. Shalom settles deeper into our souls when we authentically honor that spark in others as we wish it to be honored in ourselves.
This is how the Beloved Community comes. Dr. King dreamed of it, and Thurman, his mentor, prayed toward it. It will not arrive all at once from on high. It arrives one encounter at a time, each time we see the Divine Spark in another person and honor it.
May the breath that moved over the waters move in you. May the fire that lit the first morning of creation warm your heart. May you remember that you are dust, and that the dust is beloved.
May you know that from love you came and to love we all shall return, and may you live in peace in between. May you see, in every face you meet, the image of the One who made us all.
Amen and Asè.
For Further Reading
For those who want to sit longer on the porch with these ideas:
Matthew Fox, Original Blessing. The case for beginning with God’s “very good” rather than with original sin.
Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story. A cosmologist and a priest tell the story of creation, from the Primordial Flaring Forth to today, as a sacred story.
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis. Swimme’s memoir of learning to see the universe as still being born.
Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ. Why creation itself was the first incarnation, and what that means for how we see everything and everyone.
Barbara A. Holmes, Race and the Cosmos. How the new science of an interconnected universe exposes racism as a failure to see reality.
Christena Cleveland, God Is a Black Woman. One woman’s journey to unlearn the image of God as white and male.
Howard Thurman, “The Sound of the Genuine.” Thurman’s short address on listening for what is true in ourselves and in others. Easy to find online.
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited. The book Dr. King reportedly carried with him, and a doorway into the Beloved Community.
More from the Porch
The Divine Spark has been showing up here for a while. If you want to walk the path that led to this post:
Ruach: The Hebrew word for breath. Hearing the wind in the trees as the breath of God.
Swaying Within the Web of the Eternal Divine. How all of creation is woven together.
Ubuntu Please! “I am because we are,” and honoring the spark in one another.
Invitational Eternal Love. Loved into being with the breath of life.
Towards a Renewed Theology of Human Dignity. What happens when our institutions lose sight of the spark.