Dear church family,
As I mentioned in a recent sermon, I’ve been reading Wendell Berry’s acclaimed novel Jayber Crow. It’s a bit slow-going, but it packs a punch. And I think that’s the point: Berry describes life in a small town in which simple, mundane exteriors often reveal profound encounters with eternity. Take, for instance, this passage:
“As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.”
Berry is describing, through his narrator Jayber, what John Calvin called common grace: the power and presence of God in ordinary things – such as fields, sheep pastures, roadsides, and riverbanks – that we often fail to notice due to our hurriedness, distraction, and preoccupation. Indeed, this sentiment reminds me of the documentary film Godspeed, which many of us watched and studied at the church several years ago. “There is no place without the potential for unearthing holiness,” the film declared, and I think Berry would agree.
As summer continues and we make our way through Ordinary Time, let’s slow down and pay attention to the holiness that surrounds us – whether at a Fourth of July cookout, a baseball game, or in casual evening worship – so that we might catch up with ourselves, one another, and certainly with God.
Yours in Christ,
Blake
