2024.09.01 | Remember and Reconnect

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“Remember & Reconnect”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, 
September 1, 2024
Joint Worship in Pioneer Chapel with San Lorenzo Community Church UCC
James 1:17-27 & Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9

I’d like to introduce you to the gentoo penguin. I’ve never thought of myself as a big penguin lover, but I recently came across some interesting information about this particular species of penguin, and I’d like to share with you some facts. The gentoo penguin is the third largest of all of the penguin species after the emperor and king penguins, standing about 2 ½ feet tall. They are also the fastest underwater swimming birds. They can go about 22 mph which doesn’t seem very fast when you’re late for work, but it’s awfully fast for a swimmer. They are also able to dive really deep, and they even slow down their heart rate from 80 to 100 bpm all the way down to 20 bpm to allow them to stay underwater longer and dive deeper. They are mostly monogamous and they often bond for life.

There is actually a famous gentoo penguin couple, whom you may have heard about in the news lately. Their names are Sphen and Magic, and they live at the Sea Life Sydney aquarium in Sydney, Australia. They are a bonded pair that are both male. They have been together for six years, and they have actually raised chicks together. The keepers at the aquarium provided them with first a dummy egg to give them practice at parenting, and when that went well, gave them a foster egg to raise and hatch. They have been excellent parents. Sadly, Sphen died in the last couple of weeks, which is why you might have heard about them in the news. I love how this story teaches us about the wonderful diversity of creation, and that same-gender pairing is not unique to the human species. 

All of this is interesting about the penguins but there’s this last little detail that fascinated me the most and which I think it’s most relevant for our topic today. The gentoo penguins have an interesting ritual that they use during mating season; the scientists call it “pebbling.”

Gentoo penguins live on these very barren, rocky islands off the coast of Antarctica, so they build their nests out of pebbles. When it’s mating season a male gentoo penguin will seek out a perfect stone, a stone that he particularly likes. He finds a lady friend, offers her the pebble, and, if she accepts it, they become a pair. The engagement pebble becomes part of the nest that they build us together. They usually have two eggs, and they take turns sitting on the nest, and then they raise the chicks together, taking turns keeping them warm and feeding them.

Psychologists have picked up on this behavior of pebbling and have decided that we humans do this too. Think about it. Have you ever been out and found just the right little gift, a little trinket that you know your partner or best friend would love? You don’t have a particular occasion to give that person this little gift, but you buy it anyway and you give it to them just because—just because you love them and you know they’d like it. That's pebbling. Have you ever texted your partner or a friend out of the blue in the middle of the day because you found a funny meme or  snapped a goofy picture of the family dog, or a saw photo memory that came up in your social media feed of a trip you took a few years ago? That’s pebbling. Have you ever put a little love note in your children’s lunch boxes—a little note of encouragement or some small fun thing for them to find during lunch? That’s pebbling. Did you ever make a mixtape back in the day, recording your favorite songs on a cassette tape to give to a friend, just because? That’s pebbling. 

Simply put, pebbling is the sharing of simple, thoughtful gestures that we use to show our love and affection. It's a thoughtfully intentional way to remember our loved ones and strengthen our connections with them. It helps us remember, tend to, and maintain the connections we have with the people in our lives. 

This theme of remembering and reconnecting is addressed in both of this morning’s scripture texts.

The book of Deuteronomy begins as the Israelite exiles have reached the eastern shore of the Jordan river, and are waiting to cross into the promised land. They’ve been on the way for 40 years, for two generations. There are some young people in the group who have no memory of leaving Egypt. And so Moses retells the story of the Exodus. He recalls everything the people did as they moved out of slavery in Egypt and made the long hard journey to the edge of the river. He asked them to remember this history, to remember it and teach it to their children and grandchildren. He asks them to remember all of the behavioral guidelines and rituals that have been given to them by God so that they can be a community together and so that they can remember the covenant they have with God and with each other. They are asked to keep that covenant and continually reconnect with each other and with God.

In the epistle of James, the writer reminds us that our very lives are a gift from God. Echoing the words of Moses, the epistle writer also urges people to remember the word—to remember the behavioral guidelines and the rituals that help the community stay in covenant with each other. “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves,” the writer says. “Do what it says.” The more traditional translation of the text is, “But be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” It’s not enough to just sit and listen and nod our heads. We have to do something in order to be a community.

Both of these texts ask us to remember; they ask us to look back to our shared history, remember the lessons learned by our ancestors, to remember the stories that they told us, and then bring them forward in new ways, to give new life to the stories for our children and our grandchildren. They ask us to remember that we are a community, that we have a covenant with God and with each other. These texts ask us to reconnect with each other, to reconnect with God, and to reconnect to the principles and the rituals that make us a community.

This is all really good and important work for us to do in our communities of faith. But if we are only remembering our own history and only connecting with the people we know, we will never build the kin-dom of God as Jesus proclaimed it. 

Building the kin-dom always sounds like big work. Building an institution. Helping hundreds or thousands. Or hundreds of thousands. But I think that building the Kin-dom starts with something as small as pebbling—with simple, thoughtful gestures of love. An aphorism that’s often attributed to Mother Teresa goes something like this: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” What if we can begin by practicing pebbling as a small act of community-building and community-connecting? What would shift in our world if we began to share a pebble in our community each and every day—each pebble a small act of kindness or generosity or joy?  What would happen if those pebbles built up, one by one, like a penguin’s nest, becoming a place that nurtures new life?

Friends, may these pebbles remind us to remember and reconnect, and that, like pebbles dropped in a body of water, each small gesture of love ripples out and becomes a wave that changes the world. Amen.