Trusting God to Write a Sermon

Such a hectic week! I took a couple of days vacation and intended to take more except our senior minister is sick--first a cold, then an upper respiratory thing, now so complicated by vertigo that he called me Thursday and said he can't sit up at his computer to write a sermon. I agreed to preach on Sunday. A bit later I thought, well, perhaps we can ask someone else---I'm coming home and collapsing from exhaustion, and I know I should rest more. But then I read the lectionary, and Colossians 3: 1-11 intrigued me.

I had a few things of my own to attend to (our first Friday concert series), which meant I couldn't start writing immediately. By yesterday I was really stressing out. The Thomas Merton: A Book of Hours helped, although I still had an upset stomach and was short with my husband.

With only one day left, my inclination is to skip any quiet time and go straight to the sermon writing, but I resisted that inclination this morning. And I'm glad I did. This morning's kyrie from the Thomas Merton Book of Hours is this:

This is what it means to seek God perfectly:
To have a will that is always ready
to fold back within itself
and draw all the powers of the soul
down from its deepest center,
to rest in silent expectancy for the coming of God.
Poised in tranquil and effortless concentration upon the point
of my dependence on God,
to gather all that I am, and have all that I can possibly
suffer or do or be,
and abandon them all to God in the resignation of a perfect
love and blind faith and pure trust in God,
to do God's will.

So instead of writing this sermon strictly on my own today, relying on past experiences of God (and often being surprised when God shows up in the middle of the writing!) let me begin now by finding that quiet center within me, where I am poised and tranquil, where I can abandon my neediness and illusions and simply wait for the coming of God. Perfect love. Blind faith. Pure trust. To do God's will. May it be so this day.