Let’s begin with a prayer for these days we are living in, using some of the words the choir just sang (from a song by Gretchen Haley and Jason Shelton):

Spirit of life and love, these are intense times we are living in.
Some days it seems life is coming at us in a thousand different ways,
and still, we are here. We are here, together, and we pray
let your Spirit of love and beauty hold us in their warm embrace,
here, in this hope that we make, together.
We are here, drawing close to one another, breathing in and breathing out,
here with the invitation to simply be, with one another, here, in this time, together. Amen.

Our worship theme for this month is “The Way of Interdependence.” And it’s true—we are connected to one another, and affected by one another—this way of interdependence is a fact of life these days—whether we like it or not.

And the other day, I wasn’t very happy to realize I’d be preaching on this particular theme. And I was one of the people who chose it! But these days I’m struggling with the fact that our progress out of this pandemic is being held back by people who refuse to listen to science and get vaccinated, who put their personal beliefs and biases above the common good.

Several of you have told that lately you’re been feeling a greater range of emotions these days— more sadness or worry, but also times of peace and gladness. You say that life in these days is opening you up—to more sorrow and to more joy, and you’re trying to just be present to these feelings, and hold them as best as you can.

I’ve been experiencing this too. Worried in some moments, happy or peaceful in others. And isn’t it true, that as we expand our capacity for touching and holding sorrow, we also increase our ability to feel joy?

I wonder, how many of you, at this time of year, have some plants parked in front of your windows? It’s kind of nice, isn’t it, to have some green and growing things indoors? To say nothing of having a tree in the house! Now that’s something special and heartwarming, isn’t it?

Do you know the word “heliotropic?” It’s a scientific term for what some plants do—they turn toward the sun. If you have plants in your window, you may have to rotate them from time to time, because they grow toward the light.

Do you ever get a line from a song stuck in your head? Or a phrase that keep coming back to you? For me lately it’s the first line from a prayer by the Jesuit philosopher and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, and those words are: “Above all, trust in the slow work of God.”

Years ago, we joined a local group of friends and invested in a CSA farm share – CSAs are food co-operatives where each individual person or family pays an annual fee and then receives weekly allotments of fresh produce. We would all go and pick up our shares on the same day and then gather at someone’s house to make dinner. Over time, this event evolved into what would affectionately be known as chaos co-op. The chaos – referred to the invitation for us each to bring some random ingredients from our kitchen cupboards – cans of beans, salsa, curry sauce, pasta – whatever we had lying around. No one knew what the others were bringing and we’d put our all our offerings on the counter, along with that week’s harvest, and figure out how to put it together into a meal.

I’ve been struck lately by how early the sun is setting these days; how quickly the afternoon gives way to evening. Why am I surprised? It happens this way every year! Maybe I’m just dense. When my wife Tracey was about to give birth to our second child, and her labor was going a lot faster than it did the first time, just before our daughter was born I found myself struck by where we were, and what was happening. “Oh my God,” I said, “we’re going to have another baby!” Like it was some kind of surprise! Like we hadn’t been down this road before, or it hadn’t been obvious for months that Tracey was pregnant!

“What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?” Those lines we just sang were written a hundred years ago by the Welsh poet William Henry Davies. It was about fifty years later, my mother tells me, that my kindergarten teacher said something quite similar. One day she told my mom, “I think it’s sad that children these days don’t have much time to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.” And life hasn’t gotten simpler or slower since then, has it?

In her beautiful sermon last Sunday, Tori said something that got my attention. Talking about the slow process of coming out of COVID, she said, “I have grown a bit weary from hoping alone. Hoping things will get better. Hoping our recovery will hold. Hoping our world starts to find solutions to the larger social problems we face. This hope, at times, has been hard to access and sometimes feels too light a response.”

I have to confess that lately I’ve been feeling some weariness too. Because this pandemic journey we have been on, some days it feels endless, and some days it has felt like traveling without a map. Or with a GPS that needs its software updated. Things have changed, the way forward is unclear, and I kind of like knowing where I’m going! Don’t you?

When my kids were little, people recommended a lot of parenting books to us. We had recently moved to the area and didn’t have much of a support system yet and life was hard. There were so many of these impossible moments when one of us would be upset and we couldn’t figure out what was wrong and if we did, didn’t know how to fix it. A lot of these books only made me feel worse. I tried all the ideas they offered and here we still were – mired in overwhelm. One of them, though became a touchstone for it pragmatic, easy to incorporate, and creative ways to engage with our kids. It is a now somewhat dated book called, “how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk.” It had all these little cartoons in it that showed ways that a parent or caregiver could reframe difficult moments to encourage better dialogue and cooperation. Some of these were like magic – in fact I found myself using them at work meetings, with friends, and relations.