Sermons

We live in a world of abundance. God is everywhere. Grace abounds. And yet, all too often, we bring to our experience of the world a perspective of scarcity. We think it is a choice of seeing the glass half empty or half full, when the reality is that the glass is completely full to overflowing. The paradox, of course, is that how we see life is how we experience life. If we are surrounded by a lake filled with beautiful, pure, clean water, and what we see is desert sand, we will still die of thirst because we don’t know to drink.
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Sometimes I find myself feeling so confused and frustrated I simply don’t know what to do. It gets way too overwhelming. The broken pieces of the picture just keep piling up and it isn’t pretty. It has become an almost daily occurrence -- some item in the news that sets my teeth on edge. I’m not even talking about the stuff where there’s room for honest disagreement -- like whether or not the war in Iraq was necessary. We can discuss and debate those some other time. I’m talking about the stuff which is simply beyond any reasonable standard of acceptability -- like torture, prisoner abuse, and violation of basic human rights. . . . This is not the world I want to live in and yet, all too often, we seem to be giving it our quiet acceptance. I have a growing sense of being powerless and hopeless. All of which leaves me sad and frustrated, scared and confused.

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It was almost exactly seven years ago. I was spending a week at Holden Village above Lake Chelan on a personal spiritual retreat. One afternoon while cross-country skiing I came to the edge of an open field, with the river beyond and the mountains forming a backdrop for the whole scene. The air was full of snow. And suddenly I was “in” the moment. I wasn’t looking at it from the outside. I was a part of it. Everything became more intensely and vividly real. Language has always eluded me when I’ve tried to describe this experience. The best I’ve been able to come up with is to say that God was present -- fully and intimately present.
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