Nobody imagined it would be fifteen months, but here we were, our congregation gathered again for socially distanced but in person worship. Even the hydrangeas in the church garden were celebrating.
Like other "returns to normal" there were more feelings than one could keep track of, but the event kept one too busy to worry about that. Who knew that singing in a mask fogs your glasses - though my glasses would have fogged anyway from the emotion of hearing voices all around once again, and in four part harmony no less! But I have to tell you about the sermon by our indispensable rector - she who prepared us so wisely for the sacrifices ahead at our last service together, March 15th of last year, and at more zoom gatherings than anyone anticipated in the meantime.
She had recently traveled to see her son who lives in Arizona, and she'd been to see the Grand Canyon for the first time. Some had counseled against going - it's just a view you can see in pictures, they said - but she's glad she went. Words failed, of course. Some say they feel eternity there, she told us, something vastly older than we are which will be the same long long after we have passed on, and it is indeed very old. There are layers going back billions of years, sometimes with unexplained gaps. But it's also always changing and always has been. A sublime experience, quickened when she noticed words someone had written on the stand of a defunct viewing scope: you are loved. She didn't know who wrote them or why but in the face of the vastness of deep time and change, these words resonated.
The sermon worked through some other things, including the day's gospel - Mark 4:26-34, the famous parable of the mustard seed and the parable preceding it: The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.... The kingdom isn't a destination but the present, ever transforming and grace-filled, as the Colorado River carves the Grand Canyon. But, she said (I'm mangling her fluent narrative), here we are. And standing in the pulpit looking out at our reunited congregation was, she said, like beholding the Grand Canyon.
I haven't done the sermon justice [you can listen to it here, starting about 22 minutes in], but I hope to to have conveyed some of the wow of that moment, as we experienced sharing a grand 3-dimensional space again, after an epic-seeming period of nameless change and loss, a yawning gulf of time, everything now familiar and yet, we at some profound level know, nothing the same. Amen.
