Yesterday I preached on five words.
They come at the very end of a Wendell Berry poem called “The Wild Geese.” Geese cross overhead, the sky closes behind them, and Berry lands on this:
And we pray, not for new
earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
Read that again. He prays not for a new heaven or a new earth. For a person of faith, that can sound almost backwards. Aren’t we the people who long for the kingdom to come, for God to make all things new? So it struck me too. But I don’t think Berry is saying those prayers are wrong. I think he is saying something harder. In this moment, under these particular geese, the present is enough. What we need is here.
That is not an easy thing to believe. It is much easier to count what we lack. More people. More programs. More money. More energy. The list writes itself, and every church I know keeps one. Scarcity is a loud voice. It tells you that the good thing is always somewhere else, some other season, some other version of the congregation you wish you were.
Berry prays a different prayer. Not send me elsewhere, but make me quiet in heart and clear in eye, right here. Help me see what is already in front of me. Because what we need is here.
I believe that about Emmanuel. Not as a slogan, and not because we have everything we might want. We don’t. But we have enough. We have one another, these neighbors, these partners, this building, this table, one another, and more importantly, we have a God who is with us. (Since that’s what Emmanuel means, it should be a constant reminder!) We have a God who keeps showing up in bread and wine, in caring relationships, at potlucks, and so many other ways. If we spend all our strength grieving what we don’t have, we will miss the abundance sitting in the pews.
Here is where it comes home. Next month we begin our annual Emmanuel Stories worship series, when we set the traditional sermon aside and listen to one another instead. People stand up and tell the truth about where they have seen God at work in this place. Every year it humbles me. Those stories are not nostalgia. They are evidence. They are us practicing exactly the thing Berry is after, growing quiet enough, clear enough, to notice that what we need has been here all along.
So come and listen this October. Come be quiet in heart. Come see clearly. And if you have a story, tell it, because someone in that room needs to hear that God is not finished with us.
Read the whole poem for yourself. It is short, but is worth more time than it takes to read. You can find “The Wild Geese” in Wendell Berry’s New Collected Poems, or online by searching its title or its last line, “What we need is here.”
Peace,
Pastor Ethan
P.S. If you have a story you’d like to share in October, please reach out to me.