Sermons

We forget! We get busy. We get distracted. We get overwhelmed. And we forget to celebrate the blessings of life. The blessings don't stop coming just because we forget. Indeed, it is my firm conviction that we live abundant lives in an abundant world. The bounteous gifts of God are beyond measure or comprehension. But all too often we forget to notice. And in so doing our experience of life is diminished. Our experience of God is diminished. It's a bit like starving in a room full of gourmet food because we were too busy to look around and see that it was there. Remembering to celebrate keeps us in touch with the fullness of life and helps us integrate the blessings into our living.
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We live in a time when despair seems always to be threatening - waiting for us around every corner. Everywhere we turn there are signs of fear, violence, oppression, poverty, disease, abuse of power, environmental degradation, and on and on the list could go. The sheer volume of such information we are exposed to can quickly become overwhelming and disheartening. Our thought that "it's not supposed to be this way" gets lost beneath the onslaught of "there's nothing we can do to make a difference." It can seem so inevitable that we might be inclined to believe things are the way they are because "that's just the way life works." Sometimes we are even tempted to drag God into the fray. We may not take things to the same extreme as Fred Phelps, with his message that "God hates America" or Pat Robertson proclaiming that the attacks of 9/11 were God's judgment. But many of us, at one time or another, have wondered, at least to ourselves, why God allows such suffering to continue. There are times when it seems like we are left with a choice between a God who is punishing us and a God who just doesn't care.
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We are connected to God and to each other. It is who we are. It is at the very heart of what it means to be human. When we remember this most basic of truths we tend to experience the fullness of life - abundance, community, support, hope. When we forget we tend to experience the darker side of life - isolation, fear, frustration, despair. Jesus speaks of "blessings" and "woes" - the consequences of how we choose to orient our living. Our blessedness is not determined by the outward circumstances of life, but rather by an awareness of our connection with God and with each other. Whatever comes our way, we can face it when we remember that we do not have to pretend to be brave and strong and self-reliant. We do not have to draw exclusively on our own resources. We are most fully and truly blessed when we catch a glimpse of the bigger picture of which we are a part - when we are open to the true reality of who we are. And the flip-side of the blessings also flows from our choice of life orientation. When we lose sight of our connection and fall into the trap of thinking we are self-sufficient, we cut ourselves off from all the benefits of being connected to God and each other. The blessings are still there, but we can't see them. It's as if we are standing in a field filled with sunlight, and we choose to close our eyes and stumble around in the dark. If we believe that meaning and purpose and comfort and strength for our living extend no further than our own skin, then woe unto us - we are in for hard times indeed.

Because we human beings seem to have a tendency to forget, it is helpful to engage in practices which encourage us to remember. We need to be reminded from time to time that we really are connected. When we celebrate the ancient Church tradition of the Feast of All-Saints, we intentionally draw our attention to what the writer of Hebrews called "so great a cloud of witnesses" - all those who have gone before us but who are connected to us still.
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