Osmosis

A sermon on Luke 6:17-26
Preached Sunday, February 16, 2025 at Saratoga Springs UMC.
Video available here. (Sermon begins around 11:25)

Would you pray with me?

God of blessing and God of challenge, thank you for bringing us safely together to this time and this place. Make your Spirit known among us today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

As some of you learned last week, I am from the foothills of North Carolina, where you have to travel an hour up the mountain to get a foot of snow in a year, much less in a day. If this storm came to my hometown, the grocery stores would be cleared out of bread and milk three days before it hit and we’d all just stay home until the sun came out or the plows found us, whichever came first. Certainly, no one would drive while it was snowing. We refer to events like this as Snowmaggedon and treat them like their namesake: the end of the world.

Joking aside, I do love my state from Murphy to Manteo, as the jingle says. From the mountains to the coast, these are my people. Their fights are my fights, their wins my wins, their losses my losses. I have stained my fingers with the red clay of the western piedmont and covered myself with Carolina blue since as long as I can remember. No matter how long I’m away, my heart is tied to that place.

I even (and this a bit nerdy) love the state motto: esse quam videri, which means “to be rather than to seem.”

That is North Carolina at its best: we are who we are and we don’t pretend. It’s a real salt of the earth statement, and that’s who I know many people to be. Salt of the earth folks who would pull over to help you change a tire, offer you cucumbers from their garden, and gladly accept tomatoes from yours, even if they’ve already got a stack at home. (Tomato season is tough, y’all. There’s only so many sandwiches you can make.) Folks who don’t treat anyone with suspicion, unless they think they’re selling something.

Now, I’m not naïve. I know our history and I know our present. I know where the Cherokee began walking the Trail of Tears. I know that North Carolina sent the most men to die for the Confederacy in the Civil War. I know how those same salt of the earth people put on white robes and burned crosses and did worse. I know about the Wilmington massacre, the violent coup of the city’s biracial government in 1898. I’ve received threats from modern-day white supremacist movements active in the state. And I can’t look away from any of this. I have to hold all this in tension, because this is my place. These are my people. Esse quam videri. We can’t pretend to be something that we’re not.

And I have to hold that love for these people even if I disagree with them, even if I’m irritated with them, and even if I’m harmed by them. And I know this is stuff you all know already. You know how love can be difficult. (Though, if you’re lucky, you know how love can be easy, too.) And sometimes it is so easy to love my people! And then sometimes, I remember that I was taught only the most cursory information about the theory of evolution in high school biology because my teacher didn’t believe in it.

At least he stuck to his morals, I guess.

And I had so many other good teachers! I had so many people who instilled a life-long love of learning in me, and the education I received in public schools all the way up through undergrad enabled me to be the person I am today! I have to hold all this together, in tension. And despite the failings in the evolution department, I did learn biology in my high school biology class. I know about kingdoms and phylums, all the way down to species. I know that mitochondria are the power house of the cell. And I know about osmosis, and not just from the Bill Murray flick, Osmosis Jones.

This all comes back to Jesus, I promise. Just stick with me.

Osmosis is a type of passive membrane transport where water, specifically, diffuses from a region of higher water potential to a region of lower water potential across a semipermeable membrane. If that sentence stressed you out, don’t worry. We’re going to break it down. Just like when systematic theologians say something like, “Proper differentiation between the economic and immanent trinity has the potential to lead not only to orthopraxy but also orthopathy,” the goal isn’t to confuse you. The goal is to be accurate. And when you study something for a long time, you learn a lot of words that help you say what you mean. It’s just that not everyone else has learned those words, so if you want to tell other people about what you’ve learned, you’ve got to break it back down, even if it means losing some of that accuracy.

Back to osmosis. Think about a cell. It’s a tiny bag of stuff floating in a liquid of some kind. But the outside of the bag, the cell membrane, isn’t completely solid. Some stuff can pass through, can permeate, the membrane, but not everything. That’s what makes it a semipermeable membrane.

So we’ve got a tiny bag of stuff in water, and some things can go in and out of the bag. Now, imagine this cell is in, say, saltwater, water where it’s not just H2O molecules in there, there’s also NaCl molecules, salt molecules. (Osmosis can happen in fresh water too. This is just an example.) If there’s the same density of salt molecules, the same number of molecules in the same volume of water, inside the cell as outside of the cell, everything’s fine. But if there’s an imbalance, osmosis will start to spontaneously happen.

See, in general, things tend to move toward homeostasis. If something is uneven, things move to balance out. You see this when you open up a balloon and all the air rushes out. There was a lot of air packed into a small space, but when it gets the chance, it’s going to escape and spread out, it’s going to diffuse, into a larger space to make things even again. And the universe runs on processes like this. Homeostasis is part of how stars work, it’s part of how our bodies function, and it’s part of how osmosis works.

Back to our cell in the salt water. If there’s a higher ratio of salt to water inside the cell than outside of it, water will, on its own, without anything else forcing it to, move from outside the cell to in it. And the reverse is true: if there’s a higher ratio of salt to water outside the cell than in it, the water will move from inside the cell to outside of it. And this is a passive thing. Nothing has to happen to make osmosis occur in situations like this. It’s going to even things out, without any energy or force required.

Osmosis, by the way, is how plants get water up from through their roots, by letting an imbalance work itself out.

And this is also how the beatitudes work.

(I told you it would come back to Jesus.)

See, in the beatitudes, these blessings that we read here in Luke today, in the sermon on the plain, Jesus insists that there is a kind of divine osmosis at work. Those who are hungry, without enough food, will be filled. Those who are poor, without resources or means, they will receive a kingdom. Those who weep will laugh. The concentration of comfort and privilege will flow until those who have not receive abundance.

And on the flip side, those who have too much will have less. That’s how it works. And Jesus knows, as we know, that for the rich of all kinds, losing what you have brings out tears.

But goodness, how natural it is for blessings to flow to those in need! We actually see this in action in verses 18 and 19 from our gospel reading this morning, where those in need of healing and soothing come Jesus and touch him, just as the woman with the issue of blood touches his robe in Mark, and just as in Mark, the power goes out from him. Luke says, “power came out from him [Jesus] and healed all of them.” Osmosis. It flowed from where it was stored to where it was needed through, if you’ll forgive the stretching of the metaphor, the semipermeable membrane of Jesus’s holy body here on earth, incarnate God in human flesh.

And here is the lesson in all of this, here’s what we need to remember: you have to work real hard to fight the beatitudes.

That’s why the word “passive” is so important in that original definition of osmosis. There is active membrane transport, where energy is required to move things into and out of the cell, but osmosis, the way that every rooted plant brings in its water, osmosis is just the way of things. You have to put in energy to work against osmosis.

The rich have put in energy to achieve their consolation, or at least, one of their ancestors did. No one is naturally rich. The powerful have worked to achieve and maintain their power, in whatever form it takes. No person is naturally powerful. No one’s barns are naturally filled with grain, no one’s treasure chests are naturally full. And even if you acquire wealth or power or status, you have to work to maintain it or it will come crashing down. It’s an uphill battle.

Now, I know it doesn’t feel that way. Right now, it feels like you and I are the ones using all our energy to resist the powerful when they act against the least of these. It feels like injustice is coming down like snow and we are the plows, just trying to get access restored. It feels relentless. It feels like the blessings are upon the rich and the full and the laughing and that they will always stay this way.

But that’s not what the gospel teaches us.

The blessings are on the poor.

The blessings are on the hungry.

The blessings are on those who mourn.

The blessings are on the hated, the excluded, the reviled, the defamed.

This is what the Word of God Made Flesh has declared. This is the way of things, the way of the one from whom goodness and mercy and love flow as naturally as the waters of osmosis through a semipermeable membrane. This is what will be.

So take heart. Be courageous. The powerful will not triumph forever at the expense of the vulnerable. Even the rich will one day go away empty. For now, we live in the tension, in our place, amongst our people. Esse quam videri. We do our best to be and not to seem. We dig our fingers into the dirt, we love people through it all, and we welcome in our blessing: Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man, who calls you to care for the least of these. You are doing the Lord’s work.

Amen.