October 26, 7:00pm (Kevin Westling)
We may not be authors or poets or musicians or any kind of specialist at all… We may be clumsy with words or pitiful at description and woefully untalented. But… every single one of us can learn to listen, can learn to see and hear, the extraordinary in the ordinary.
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SERMONS @ TRINITY
Sunday October 18, 2009
God in the Bathroom
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
Good evening.
I hope you don’t mind the extended readings
in place of the more supple and sublime poetry.
Here is what I love about Anne Lamott.
She is so incredibly neurotic
and astoundingly open about her neurosis,
that it opens me up to my own
in such as a way as to laugh at them.
Anne Lamott is so open about herself
I find myself getting embarrassed for her sometimes,
and then suddenly,
I realize I am embarrassed
because of my own fragile foibles
that are airing out in the sunshine of her openness.
And then there are the little gems…
“Some people think that God is in the details,
but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.”
Or…”patience is when God – or something else –
makes the now a little roomier.”
Or…most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of people.”
Or…This is in fact what I think God may smell like,
a young child’s slightly dirty neck.”
What makes this all so juicy
is that you and I could have observed or said
the same things.
We could,
if God and spirituality and religion,
did not seem so elegant and extraordinary,
learn to see
and think
and hear the same kind of things,
and then be able to say them out loud.
We may not be authors
or poets
or musicians
or any kind of specialist at all…
We may be clumsy with words
or pitiful at description
and woefully untalented.
But…
every single one of us can learn to listen,
can learn to see and hear,
the extraordinary in the ordinary.
That’s what Anne Lamott is doing.
That is what poets do.
That is what prophets do.
That is what you and I can learn to do
if we are patient
and do not pretend that God is so far beyond
our capacity to perceive
that we will never get a good fix on the holy.
We can in fact,
touch and taste and see and smell and hear the holy.
But the holy hangs out in the ordinary –
right in front of our eyes,
right under our noses,
right below our radar
and always within the reach of our many senses.
God is not in the details
or high-fluting theology of religions,
but in the bathroom
where all of us experience our humanity
and live with our mortality.
The very kind of ordinary place
where the holy hangs out
and is available to us
if we have the eyes and ears to perceive.
So I invite us to practice our Anne Lamott skills
and observe God in the kookiest
and most ordinary elements of our lives,
and then risk embarrassment
by telling others what we have seen.
And I also invite us to come forward now,
and light a candle or two
for the incredible presence of God
in our midst…
even here…
even now.
