The Beautiful Ordinary

 

When you hear the word “Ordinary,” what comes into your mind?  Maybe the box of cereal you’ve been buying since the Carter administration.  Maybe you hear other words like “ho-hum” or a day that has all the flavor and nutritional content of Wonder Bread.  Ordinary in a world that worships at the altar of splashy and spectacular, where every day must have something Instagram-worthy, or we will lose followers, ordinary feels boring.  Yet, ordinary is where we live our lives and our faith.  While every Sunday is a celebration of the incarnation of Christmas (God’s love in the flesh and breath of Jesus) as well as Easter (God’s new life being written on our souls), we miss what God is up to in our lives when between holidays and Holy Days.  For me, the analogy is that you are constantly creating new skin cells, but you don’t usually look into the mirror each day and notice you have over 40 million new skin cells since yesterday.  At least, I don’t!  We miss the traces of grace and movement of love because we are distracted by news blaring, bodies aching, people saying stuff that frustrates us, and making sure we get milk at the grocery store.  We miss traces of grace and movement of love because the kindness of the store clerk who checked us out is covered by brash bullies whose egos feed off our attention and energy.  We miss traces of grace and movements of love because we don’t trust God fully to be God.  Historically, a branch of Christianity was Deism: the idea that God was like a clockmaker who made this elaborate creation around us.  God set the clock ticking and then stepped back.  The problem with Deism is that Scripture shares that God is intimately involved in our lives.  Genesis 2 preaches and proclaims this promise.  God sinks God’s fingertips into the soil of your soul every day to fashion and form you.    

 

God invites you to be open, awake, and aware of God amid all the other voices that speak/shout into your life, including your own.  As humans, we are given free will.  We don’t have to listen to God.  We don’t have to love.  We don’t have to do anything; our inner toddler screams whilst stomping a foot in protest…you can’t make me! 

 

The holy practice of staying alert to God is one that the church is called to cultivate and curate and help you practice.  But sometimes amid the administration, broken toilets, stewardship campaigns to plan, people who are grieving and hurting to visit, and oh yeah, a sermon to write; I can put this task of prayerfully living my life in the category of, “I will totally get to that…later…when I have time…after I try to save the world and fix this darn toilet…again!” 

 

How might you stay alert to God?  In monasteries, they pray at set times, like a reset to remind them that God is already and always there.  During COVID, I encouraged you to pray the Lord’s Prayer when you washed your hands.  Or maybe taking a deep breath on the hour, every hour ~ saying the words, “Here I am, God.  Here You are, God.  Here we are together.”  I pray this week, and the whole month of September, we might find ways to open our sacred imagination to the holiness of the ordinariness of these days.  Amen.