The “active ingredient” of relationships is “presence!” Your presence changes another…for the better or worse…your presence alters someone else. Welcome to “The Love Paradox.”
I’ve always been humbled at what happens when I enter a difficult context like someone dying, for example. People express appreciation and even relief – even though the situation appears unchanged. When I bring a non-anxious presence, there is greater calm in that place. When I bring an anxious presence there is greater angst. People change when you show up.
Things really change when the Lord shows up. Earth is not only changed, it actually “is” when it previously “wasn’t.” Stuff comes into existence. Missions are born. Forgiveness is pronounced. Relationships are created, then redeemed, then sustained by the Presence of God in the Holy Spirit!
When God is manifest in you, great things happen. The Presence of the Holy Spirit, “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17.28) brings life to Life; brings eternal joy from temporary happiness; supplies meaning to every realm of existence; provides faith, hope and, of course the greatest of these, love! (1 Cor 13) All of it flows from ordinary people in regular or broken families, from chance encounters to planned dinners; from the happiest of life circumstances to the most tragic. When God is manifest in you, great things happen.
Come to worship anticipating God being manifest in the ordinariness of regular, flawed people, as well as regular bread and simple wine. However, we’re going to set bread and wine aside for the purpose celebrating the Presence of God in Jesus Body and Blood, in, with and under the elements. We’re going to witness and experience what happens when the Presence of God intersects with the ordinary – and extraordinary things occur.
Then, it’s all going to work its way into our lives in our going, so that God in our living, moving and having our being (Acts 17.28 again) things will change as God shows up in, with and through us!
2 Comments
Pete Grund (sub deacon)
I think that was part of my theme on 12/30. We are all ordinary sinful people until God shows up. He makes the ordinary – extraordinary. God took the ordinary shepherds, the ordinary May and Joseph and the very ordinary setting in Bethlehem and made it the most important day in the history of the world to that point in time. As Paul writes, “we are his offspring” and therefore he is never far from us. How much more peace we would experience if we would just remember to go to God more often. That is were the body of all believers can help us each Sunday morning as well as other times.
PastorKarl Author
Yes, Pete, thanks for seeding my last sermon with yours! 🙂
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