The Eternal and the Transient

There is a story told about Bishop John Hines of Texas. He was a powerful preacher; not many can do the kind of communicating that he could do. He was talking to his own clergy about the art of preaching. He was making a point about the length of a sermon, pushing them not to go on for too long. He told them, “My fellow clergy, a sermon, to be immortal, need not be eternal.”

Would that I apply the wisdom of it. I am quite certain that the quality of Bishop Hines’s sermons always surpassed their length. In the church, we think and develop in our consciousness things immortal and eternal. This is true even though we live in a world that makes us entirely familiar with things earthly, things that are passing away. The four seasons of nature show us a perpetual cycle of emergence, growth, decline, and death. The human cycle is the same, we know that we are born and that we die. The inevitability and hard reality of these truths move us to explore possibilities of resurrection, new life, and eternity.

Sometimes lost in the minutiae, anxiety, and confusion of earthly life, people of faith with great intentionality take hold of things eternal. We trust God through our belief in Christ that there are things that do not pass away. Taking heart of what Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount, we endeavor to store up for ourselves “treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.” (Matt. 6:20) These eternal and incorruptible things are not just in a future beyond death, they are realities touching us in the here and now.

This week the storm called Nicholas is bearing down on us with a sack full of things for which we never wished. With storms comes anxiety. Our heart reaches out to the God of love for reassurance. God has made a connection with us through the Spirit. The Holy Spirit residing in you is the reality of God; as a result, you are not lost in temporal things, you are coming to love what lasts forever. All of this is the language of the Collect of the Day assigned to this Sunday. Let us make it our prayer now.

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.