Saturday, October 04, 2008

The River of God

Leah posted these words of St. Isaac of Syria on her blog:

"As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of all flesh as compared with the mind of God. Just as a strongly flowing fountain is not blocked up by a handful of earth, so the compassion of the Creator is not overcome by the wickedness of His creatures."


It reminded me of the last sermon my Dad wrote. (He didn't really write them. He preached from a skeletal outline.) The last few years of his life his preaching was very poor. It was, I think, more a lack of prayer and studying than the effects of age, though his physical discomfort certainly played a part. But this last sermon was different than the others of those last few years. First of all, it was new. He prayed and studied to prepare it. He didn't just pull notes from a decades old sermon out of a drawer and re-hash what he said to an congregation in the 1960s. He was't being the professional preacher. He was being a Christian excited by the Gospel, and that made all the difference, even overcoming his physical pain. The verse of scripture he preached on was Job 28:10

"He cutteth out rivers among the rocks; and his eye seeth every precious thing."


and one of the points my Dad was making is that God does not let the things of this world keep Him from saving people. He tied it into Jesus saying he is the living water, that he is the river of life. It is a theme he built on for about 1/2 an hour. And, amazingly, my then two year old son Anslem paid attention to the whole sermon. Later that day and for several days thereafter, Anselm Samuel would pile pillows in the hallway, shout "The river of God cuts through the rocks", and then run and crash through the pillows.

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