This sermon was preached for the Feast Day of St. Andrew on Sunday, November 21, 2021 at St. Andrew's, Wellesley. The texts for this sermon are: Deuteronomy 30:11-14, Romans 10:8b-18, Matthew 4:18-22 and Psalm 19.
Part of training to become an Episcopal priest is a stint as a hospital chaplain - and part of hospital chaplaincy training is a practice called “verbatims.” It’s when you sit down with some fellow student chaplains and analyze a conversation you’ve had with a patient. Now, as the name suggests, this is done quite literally word for word. Let me tell you, having your colleagues pick apart your words is just as intense and vulnerable as it sounds. One of my turns, a colleague pointed to a prayer that I had prayed a million times – something like “Be present, God, with this family.” “Hang on,” my colleague said, “Why do you ask God to be present? Doesn’t this imply that God might not be there yet?”
I couldn’t stop thinking about his critique as I went about my days all through that next week. I began to notice that every room I walked in, God was already there. God was here in the room of this dying man. God was waiting for me beside this woman in anguish, that bored teenager, these anxious family members. Wherever love was, God was already present. And even where love seemed most absent – in the rooms choking with loneliness, in the never-quite-totally-silent evening wards, at the busy, stressed nursing stations, God was there, too.
I began to change how I prayed. “Teach us to see your presence, God.” “Help them to know they are not alone.”
Moses says, “the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart.” Paul echoes, “the word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.”
The psalmist sings, “the heavens declare the glory of God…although they have no words or language…their sound has gone out into all lands and their message to the ends of the world.”
Creation is infused with the presence of God. All of creation reverberates with the divine: from steady crash of ocean waves to the hum of the bee’s wing to your own aortic pulse. Creation speaks in a different language than we are used to hearing, a different frequency than we are perhaps normally attuned to receive. Yet God is here, speaking.
The Word is Very Near to You is also the title of one of my favorite books by one of my favorite theologians, Martin Smith.* In it, Smith emphasizes that prayer is a conversation. Most crucially, it is a conversation that we do not have to begin. We only need to respond to what God has been saying all over creation, all over our lives, in our heart and in our mouth. In prayer, we align ourselves with what love is already saying to us and doing with us.
In my time as a chaplain, I came across several patients who felt reluctant to reach out to God. They admitted that they were embarrassed to speak to God after going so long without praying or thinking about God. How dare I ask something of God now when things are at their worst, when I never bothered to connect with God when things were good? It was as if God was a long-lost friend and they couldn’t bring themselves to pick up the phone and dial, after so many years of silence. I totally, totally got where they were coming from. But to hear Martin Smith tell it, the phone’s been ringing off the hook day in and day out. God’s been reaching out, in so many, many ways. God never stopped calling. All we need to do is pick up the phone.
The call story of good old Saint Andrew may be a familiar one to you, we do read it every year. The story of two brothers fishing on shores of the Galilean sea, who drop everything to follow Jesus. If we focus on the fishermen, though, we can overlook the miracle of Jesus, of what the fact of his incarnation itself truly means.
The heavens may declare the glory of God, but in Jesus, God speaks through a human life. God walks on the seashore. God gets close to busy fisherman, so close that his voice carries over waves and wind, so close that the water soaks the hem of his tunic and the sand clings to his ankles.
Moses says, “Neither is [the word] beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear and observe it?” In Jesus, the Word is standing, right here, on our side of the sea, right up next to our nets. Close enough to be heard – if we listen.
In Jesus, God comes into the human experience. In Jesus, God declares that there is nothing we can endure that God is not willing to take on, too. There are no depths we can sink to that can separate us from God, no decision we can make that can remove us from God’s love. In Jesus, God enters and sanctifies every aspect of what it means to be human, even suffering, even grief, even humiliation -- even death on a cross.
Each year, I tell my confirmation classes about the time in my life when I could no longer accept the existence of a divine creator. Once, I remember telling someone I did not believe in God. They didn’t let it faze them. They simply shrugged and said, “That’s okay, God believes in you.” It meant nothing to me at the time, but it stuck with me anyway.
Now, looking back over my life, I see God there, believing in me, even when I couldn’t believe in myself. I see the word, very near, guiding my heart, even when I couldn’t hear it.
Our building here on the corner on Washington Street stands as a sign of God’s desire to be in the life of everyone who walks past. When our emails pop into your inbox or our Facebook live notifications ping your phone, our work together here serves as a possibly annoying reminder that God will never stop reaching out for connection with you. And when you bring a friend along with you to youth group or invite your roommate to church, when you share a moment of prayer with a friend in need, you speak God’s language of love into the life of another.
The word is very near you, in your heart and in your mouth. God is already here.
So let’s try that prayer again.
The Lord be with you. And also with you.
God, open our eyes to your presence in our lives. Help us to feel your word near us, in our hearts and in our mouths. May we eagerly respond to the conversation you’ve begun with us in the language of creation, human history, and the life and words of Jesus Christ. Teach us to speak your language of love into the lives of all who encounter us. Amen.
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