...is the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday.
My sermon is called "In the Presence of God".
All the readings and the collect refer, in one way or another, to being in the presence of God.
I want the Parishioners and me to long for the presence of God.
I tell a them about my last conversation with my father--who had been senile for 3 years. He was in the hospital and we had the best conversation we'd had in all those years. It was as if we were in the presence of God and God gave me my father back for 45 minutes.
By the time I got home, the hospital called and he had died.
I went back to sit with his body. A Catholic priest came by to ask if I wanted him to give Dad 'last rites'.
My father was a Baptist and then a Methodist, but my experience of that last conversation let me be open to anything.
So, he had Catholic 'last rites'!
I'll tell people tomorrow that we are 'in the presence of God' when the bread and wine are blessed and become the Body and Blood of Christ.
I pray they'll believe me, because I believe it so profoundly.
