Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 1, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last week I told you of my belief that God’s truth can be found in non-Christian spiritual traditions as well as in Christianity. So I was pleased to be reminded this week when I read the passage in Acts from this week’s lectionary readings that one of the lines from that reading that is truly foundational for my own faith and spirituality is actually a quote from a non-Christian and non-Jewish source. The line is Acts 17:28: "In him [God] we live and move and have our being." Luke, the author of Acts, attributes the line to Paul speaking in Athens; but in it Paul is quoting a Greek source. We have an ancient Greek truth taken up into Christianity and, as it were, baptized, made Christian.

God is the One in whom we live and move and have our being. God can seem so far away some times. And the Christian tradition has become so triumphalistic that it has made God so transcendent, so far above us, as to be remote and inaccessible. But Luke’s Paul got it right. God is not, or at least not only, far away, utterly transcendent, remote, inaccessible. God is all around us all the time. In God we live and move and have our being. It’s like God is another dimension of reality that we don’t perceive in the same way we do other dimensions but that is even more real than they are. Everything that is, is in God. We cannot actually distance ourselves from God, although we can certainly cut ourselves off from God by failing and refusing to recognize God’s continual and pervasive presence in us and in the world. When we do that it’s our doing, not God’s. That’s why every week I begin our worship by inviting us to open our hearts and minds to the presence of the Holy all around us and within us. In God we live and move and have our being. We can recognize that divine, saving reality or not, but it’s real even when we don’t recognize it.

In God we live and move and have our being. God is always present, and one of the goals of worship is precisely to make us more aware of that always-present God. In the Christian tradition one of the most powerful ways that we do that is through the sacraments. In our tradition we have two of them, baptism and the Eucharist. Today we joyously celebrate both of them. We all know the word sacrament, but just what is a sacrament really? One classic statement of it s that it is the outward sign of an inward grace. We can amend that, I think, to say that a sacrament is an outward sign of the pervasive presence of God. In the mundane elements of the sacraments-water, bread, and wine-the spiritual presence of God that is always there takes on material form and becomes real in a way we can feel, hear, see, and taste. The sacraments make the presence of God manifest. They don’t bring about the presence of God. God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being and is always present; but in the sacraments the presence of God emerges in visible form. The elements of the sacraments connect us to God directly, immediately. In the sacraments we become more aware of entering into the presence of God.

Baptism is the sign that we belong to God. We belong to God whether we’re baptized or not; but in baptism we see and celebrate the fact that we are God’s, and we become part of God’s church. The Eucharist is the sign of Christ’s presence and grace. Christ and Christ’s grace are always with us. Jesus is with us whether we take Communion or not, but in the Eucharist we see and celebrate the presence and grace of Christ and affirm our baptismal commitment to live as Christ’s disciples. In the sacraments the One in whom we live and move and have our being becomes present in a special way. They are a powerful way in which we live our life in God. Amen.