Filling the Emptiness

Several weeks back, our seminarian Evan Clendenin gave the sermon at the 10:00 a.m. Eucharist. It was November 8, the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost. The readings are important, of course, but what resonated with me then was his powerful evocation of the nature and manufacture of glass. “I like glass,” he said. “Those who know me and engage me in conversation know that I almost always find a way to talk about glass.”

Evan described one glass making process that involves a wax mold surrounded by sand. When you pour the hot, molten glass into the wax, the wax disappears and what remains is the glass object you’re working to create. “Something better takes the place of the wax…as God fills the emptiness in our lives.”

Evan went on to note that our worship spaces are mostly empty -- large, cavernous building interiors. Then he drew us back to the Old Testament reading from the book of Ruth in which we learn about how Ruth became the wife of Boaz and about the relationship of Ruth to her mother-in-law Naomi. “God is strangely invisible in the Book of Ruth,” Evan tells us. But “it is in the words that people speak out of their miraculous abundance that God’s presence is apparent.”