Becoming
What does it mean to remain yourself while everything around you—and within you—is changing? This sermon reflects on the mystery of becoming through childhood memory, the rhythms of creation, the parable of the fig tree, and God’s promise to make all things new. God’s order is not the stillness of a museum but the living abundance of a garden, where grace patiently nurtures us into fuller life.
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
Mallory and I were going through some boxes earlier this week. We came across some newspaper clippings from high school,
notes and papers from college, and old pictures of me as a child. Pictures from the first couple years of life: some with my parents, with my aunts and uncles.
I snapped a picture and sent some of them to Stuart.
He particularly like one in which I was doing that baby stare.
How is that little person still me?
Almost everything has changed.
The cells that made up that infant body are gone.
My voice is different. My hands are older.
I have forgotten whole stretches of life that child had not yet lived. And yet, I don’t look at the photo and think: That was someone else. Somehow, despite every change, something remains.
It is one of life’s mysteries.
We call it: identity, consciousness, self.
Pointing back to my last sermon: a listening heart, treasure, soul— not as some hidden object buried inside us,
but as life God continually breathes into us.
Virginia Woolf wrote,
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”
We know this instinctively about some aspects of life.
I’d be alarmed if my boys (who are turning 13 today!)
looked exactly the same as they did ten years ago.
Why, then, do we get anxious when life changes us?
Why do we assume that faithfulness
means remaining exactly as we are?
Or achieving imagined standards that prove that we’re enough? I wonder if we confuse God’s constancy with our own need to stay the same, with our own immobilities and rigidities.
Job stands before creation.
Thunder rolls across the heavens.
Snow falls, as God demands it.
Rain waters the earth. And animals retreat to their dens.
Human work pauses while creation continues in its mysterious rhythms. Nothing is standing still.
The world is alive.
What Job is being shown doesn’t completely make sense,
maybe it’s even unpredictable.
But he is being invited to witness a creation that is endlessly moving, a creation that is also deeply held.
God’s order is not the absence of change.
God’s order is mysterious, always forming, always at work.
The psalm also stretches our imagination.
Long before we knew a thing about the true expanse of space, the psalmist looked at the heavens and wrote,
“they will perish, but you will endure.”
Everything we sense is changing.
Mountains slowly become valleys.
Saplings grow, die, and return to the soil.
Bodies age. Relationships deepen and drift. Communities change. Even the stars are not permanent.
Only God remains.
The constant presence through whom all seasons receive life.
We misunderstand stability.
We imagine it means control.
We imagine happiness in securing enough, producing enough, achieving enough.
So Jesus tells a story.
For three years a fig tree has produced nothing.
The owner has had enough and decides to cut it down—
enough waiting, enough wasted time, enough wasted resources. But the gardener sees it differently.
“Give it more time…I’ll get my hands dirty…I’ll care for it…we’ll see.” The gardener takes notice that transformation takes time.
He doesn’t want to replace the tree. He doesn’t want to give up. He takes a risk. He believes this tree may yet become
what it was created to be.
The tree—its trunk, branches, leaves, root system—remains itself. Its future remains open.
Cultivation is slow. It is gentle.
It can smell like manure. And it is often uncomfortable.
The gardener disturbs the soil because life cannot grow
in ground that has become too hard, too stagnant.
For “the home of God is among mortals” and all things are being made new. One tree is not discarded in favor of another.
All things are being made new.
All of creation. All lives. All bodies.
Because God created all things and said, “It is good.”
God does not abandon what God loves.
God renews it.
The story of Scripture is restoration, resurrection.
We get caught up in the idea of God shaping chaos into order, of the binary of light from the darkness, form from the void.
But divine order is not the same as rigid control.
We lose sight of the patient, faithful, loving draw of creation toward its fullness.
The order of God is not the order of a museum
where nothing may be touched.
But, like we hear again and again in Jesus’s stories,
Scripture imagines something much wilder:
God’s order is a garden.
A place where seed splits open.
Where branches are pruned and decay becomes nourishment. Where rain falls and roots benefit from all life in the soil.
Where change isn’t the enemy but the way in which life takes shape.
Take a deep breath. Where do you find yourself today?
Perhaps you are grieving the person you used to be.
Has life changed in ways you wished it hadn’t?
Maybe your faith, the way you see and understand God [this church stuff] looks different than it did ten years ago…and it’s a little scary.
Or you worry that so much has changed you no longer remember that baby stare.
The Scripture we return to week after week offers you something. The God who has remained faithful through every season still sees you. The gardener still knows the tree.
The One who laid the foundations of the earth still calls you by name. The One seated on the throne is still making all things new.
Even now. Even tomorrow.
Holiness is not becoming someone the world demands, someone we imagine, or remaining someone we were expected to be.
There are seasons of pruning, there are seasons of fruit,
yet we always remain held by the One who remains constant. Not so that we stay the same,
but so that we may continue to become more fully alive.
Amen.
Rev. Dr. Brandon Nonnemaker
August 9, 2026