Two of the sermons in this
book reference one of the many "treasures” strewn about my house,
specifically a little brown rock about the size of a meatball. It’s kind of
lumpy and hard and drab. It’s chipped and cracked. But it has a heart-shaped
hole in the side.
I have come to see this
little treasure as a symbol of the human-God relationship. We too are small,
lumpy, often hard-headed, stiff-necked, and wounded by the inevitable
challenges and suffering of human life. In comparison to God, more like a
little brown rock.
But we do have a God-shaped
hole in the side of our tiny, frightened, wounded and often hard human hearts.
Nothing can fill that hole except God. God put it there with great love and
tenderness to help us know whose we are.
And that's Incarnation and
that’s what makes it possible for us to love God and our neighbor as ourselves,
to care for others—even those we don’t like or who frighten us, to reach for
God and to find God, right here on earth, in each other and in creation and in
the very ordinariness of our lives.
I think you’ll find that
theme running in the background of many of these sermons.
