Intimate, Ever-Present Mystery

Psalm 95: 1-7 & Luke 24: 13-35

Roger Lynn

August 18, 2019

Breakfast Under the Big Sky (Outdoor Worship)

(there is no audio or video this week)

God is all around us all of the time. Sometimes we miss this amazing reality because we limit the places where we look for God. Imagine how much more vital our lives might become if we could expand our awareness of God’s presence to include every moment and every situation of every day. We can, but it takes practice. We have at least two big obstacles standing in our way – hectic, busy lives, and a culture which values head over heart, thinking over feeling. There is nothing wrong with being busy and there is nothing wrong with intellect. But when they become the exclusive patterns for our living they tend to crowd out other equally important ways of perceiving the world around us, including the presence of God. It takes time to notice the little things around us through which God’s presence can be revealed. It takes an imagination of the heart to see beneath the surface of those things to discover God’s presence. 

This is not the same as worshipping the things themselves. The rock is not God. But God can certainly shine through the rock, if we will open our eyes and our hearts to that possibility. 

John O’Donoghue was a parish priest in the remote far west of County Galway in Ireland. He sought to see the world in such a way so that “as we walk through a landscape we may feel not that we are moving through a dead world of inanimate objects but that the landscape we are walking through is alive and that in a very intimate way it is our sister.”* Alistair Maclean expressed it this way in a prayer, “As the hand is made for holding and the eye for seeing, Thou has fashioned me for joy. Share with me the vision that shall find it everywhere: In the wild violet’s beauty; In the lark’s melody; In the face of a steadfast man; In a child’s smile; In a mother’s love; In the purity of Jesus.”* One of the great gifts which we find in perspectives such as Celtic spirituality is a sense of the intimacy and immediate presence of the Holy. We can find God not just in grand spectacles and official rhetoric, but in the everyday, here and now things of life. George MacLeod was the man largely responsible for rebuilding the spiritual Center on the island of Iona off the coast of Scotland. He expressed this understanding when he said, “Glory to God in the High Street is as much a part of the Christian message as Glory to God in the highest.”* David Adam describes this attitude this way, “The Celtic church did not so much seek to bring Christ as to discover Him: not to possess Him, but to see Him in ‘friend and stranger’: to liberate the Christ who is already there in all his riches.”* As we learn to practice this approach to life, to re-invest the ordinary and the everyday with a measure of sanctity, to value the little things and to find God in the trivial details and the common tasks, we begin to discover that even our hectic pace and our intellectual pursuits are transformed. When we recognize that God is everywhere, then nothing remains the same. A fresh, new energy surrounds our jobs, our relationships, both our play and our pain, even our dreams.

In the story from Luke’s Gospel, the men walking down the road to Emmaus spent the whole day in the presence of Christ and didn’t know it. Not because Christ was absent, but because they weren’t used to looking for God in unexpected places. God is all around us all of the time. We just have to pay attention and notice.

So, why am I telling you all of this while we are gathered here in this beautiful outdoor setting? Because I believe it is at the very heart of why we come to settings such as this in the first place. If all we wanted was for things to continue on just like they always have, then we would be worshipping at the corner of Winne and Oakes this morning. But we chose, instead, to be here. Sometimes we have to break out of our routines in order to make room for even the possibility of something new. To see God in a new way we have to begin seeing the world in a new way. It takes practice. It might even be uncomfortable. Laying down new patterns requires some persistence. But in the end I think we will find that the whole of our living is re-vitalized as God begins to flash forth from every nook and cranny of our world. Faith becomes not so much an intellectual exercise to be explained and understood as a relationship to be experienced. 

And with that I want to stop talking and invite you to start practicing. For the next few minutes I encourage you to experience the world around you as if God is waiting just beneath the surface (which I believe is actually true). Try to let go of the need to “think” about it too much. Open yourself to simply experiencing the mystery of God’s intimate presence. Take a moment to watch the clouds. Or listen to the birds. Or look at a bug. Or feel the wind on your face. Where is God seeking to break through into your life in this moment?

(spend some time paying attention)

May we learn to practice watching for God in every moment of our lives. After all, God is everywhere, just waiting for us to notice.

* (quoted in The Celtic Way by Ian Bradley)