If, as the Apostle Paul told the Athenians, God is not far from any one of us (Acts 17:27), then there must be circumstances, events, or occasions in which God's nearness is especially discernable. The preacher's task includes, at least in part, an effort to rummage through the cascading clutter of the time being to discover and uncover such moments. The greater part of the task is to interpret these moments from the perspective of God's self-disclosure in Jesus of Nazareth. The best, and the hardest, part of the preacher's task is to enable a congregation to embrace these moments with deep reverence and unspeakable joy.
Fred Craddock was a master storyteller. He taught us that what makes a good story good is it's power to awaken in us an appreciation for our own stories. A good story evokes a response of recognition and participation. "Something like that happened to me once. I remember that feeling. That story is my story too." So the sermons I have gathered here, and the stories and events they convey, are offered in the hope that they invite you to celebrate your own stories of occasions of the nearness, perhaps, of God.
The circumstances, events and occasions woven into the fabric of these sermons, if not commonplace, are at least commonly accessible. They are ordinary moments more or less, moments broadly shared. There is a sermon delivered the Sunday before the Olympic Games began, and another for the Sunday before Thanksgiving Day. There is a sermon noting a successful day for the Hadron Collider; another for the Sunday after I painted my front door; yet another for the Sunday after a long-lost Renoir masterpiece was recovered.
Of course there are also sermons occasioned by the familiar celebrations of the church year: Pentecost, All Saints Day, and Christmas Eve. Some of the sermons mark occasions during what the church calendar calls Ordinary Time: Sundays when the Lord's Supper was served; and of course Mother's Day. And in several of the sermons in the collection, the "occasion" is embedded in the Bible story itself: the day Jesus healed a blind man on the second try; the day estranged brothers met after twenty bitter years apart.
I have gathered these particular sermons because they are each, in some way, tethered to a moment, event, or real-life circumstance. They cover a wide variety of themes. But if there is a common thread running through these pages, it is that God shows up in a lot of places where you wouldn't ordinarily expect God to be, does a lot of things that you might not expect God to do, and loves a lot of people that you might not expect God to love.
The Psalmist declared, "I was glad when they said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord!" (Ps. 122:1) The Gospel is good news. "Aren't you glad you're here this morning?" I often asked. As you will see in the pages ahead, I wasn't reluctant to ask folks to follow me into the tall grass or down a rabbit hole. Occasionally folks would greet me after worship confessing, "I didn't know how you would ever dig yourself out of that hole." I knew what they were thinking. Their bewildered glances and puzzled expressions told me when to ask. "Aren't you glad you're here this morning?"
The sermons assembled in this volume are presented essentially as they were first delivered. I have resisted the temptation to tidy them up. They are now what they were then: conversational, occasionally awkward, and seasoned with the incidental banter I enjoyed with a congregation whose names I knew, whose Sunday morning faces I cherished, and whose friendship I will ever treasure.
