The 14th Sunday after Pentecost
August 30, 2026
This season, we’ve been answering the prompt “What brought us to Seekers and how that has informed our spiritual development” from the pulpit. I’m so thankful for the generosity of replies we’ve heard so far. Both of those questions have very quick answers for me, I thought, but today I’m going to try to go deeper on each of them.
When I first considered the first part of this question about “What brought me to Seekers”, the answer seemed simple and obvious– what brought me to Seekers was that I noticed it! I had just moved to town in 2020 and I liked the building’s exterior aesthetic, specifically that white font on the brick wall, so I started finding myself daydreaming about what might happen in here, and looked it up online, and decided to check out a service!
I love telling this story of chancing upon a place that would become something so significant as my spiritual home, because my theology can generally be summed up as “God is Chance” (not to be confused with Octavia Butler’s not dissimilar “God is change!)” In this world, there’s the explainable and the unexplainable. And in that element of unpredictability, well what is that but God? I love the idea of God as chance. I feel closest to him when I’m surprised by something or in awe of something, and that’s exactly what I feel when a slim chance happens, or when things line up just right and at the right time. My friend Laura put a word to that for me– synchronicity. What brought me to Seekers was a moment of synchronicity– finding a spiritual home because I liked the font.
But we’re going deeper! And going deeper, what does the chance of stumbling across this place mean about my spiritual understanding of the world? A dinner with Kim the night before I was asked to preach (there’s a moment of synchronicity for you!), helped me identify why that series of events was able to happen.
It’s because for me, believing that God will lead me to what’s right for me or where I’m needed next doesn’t make me sit back and wait for his guidance, but on the contrary, as Kim pointed out, I wait for his guidance by saying “Yes”, a lot. I stand with arms open wide like a fishing net, and as opportunities are caught in them, I take each one and turn to God and ask “keep or throw back?”
You’ve heard me say before that “turning to God” often looks the same as turning inward, for me. I ask God, I ask my gut. I feel like I can be sure of myself and my decisions because they’re his. When I found Seekers, I actually wasn’t looking for a church. But I was open to finding one, and Gut-God felt good about this community.
But if I’m saying that everything that got me here was some chance series of events, what does that mean for commitment? I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m a speck floating along, waiting to stick to anything that grabs me or has a pretty building… This system works because of my belief in commitment without exclusivity. As I demonstrate in many areas of my life, I believe that commitment can be sure, strong, and true without exclusivity involved, and that has allowed me to be sure in this community without fearing that saying “Yes” to this meant saying “No” to others. In fact, I think this makes us stronger. I think a network with lots of arms extending out of it is a stronger one than a closed circle, and I celebrate the ways we each bring a tendril outward to this community.
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When it was time to start thinking about the second part of the question- how my spiritual growth has been impacted by being here- I was having a hard time thinking of what to say, so I did what I always do and called my sister. I asked them “have you seen spiritual growth in me in the past few years?” What Becca said was that my spiritual self didn’t look all that different, but that I had never talked about it so much.
They know and I know that I have believed in God my entire life. When I was a toddler, I gave this drawing to my Dad, and when he asked “oh what is this?” I said, solemn as I always was, “That’s God”. When I was questioning the lessons I was getting in catechism in third grade, I asked my mom why we went to catechism, and she said “to learn how to have faith.” I replied “Oh I think I was born with that”. She let me leave catechism after that. But what Becca noticed was that after toddler-hood, I didn’t talk about God or faith much, despite its centrality in my choices and worldview.
Even when I was hitching rides to my second home 4 hours up north at the Self Realization Fellowship center every school break in high school, I was coming home and being quiet about what happened there. At my progressive school, and later in my friend groups in circles centered on punk music, DIY art culture, activism, and cooperative living, it felt to me like there was no place for talk of the spiritual or divine, save a few sacred conversations with a few sacred friends. But now, I would say, Seekers has given me more confidence and language to be able to articulate what was already there for me.
And if we’re going deeper… I think the fact that I am citing these interpersonal conversations so much is a precise example of the concept that how being here has informed my spirituality is by the relationships I have within it. I learned a very personal and private faith as a child with a transcendentalist dad and four years of training with the Self Realization Fellowship, but as I’ve grown, it’s become newly more important to me to experience it with others, even though that itself is a very old idea.
Dr. Rev. Sam Wells says that God’s purpose is to be in communion with us. He describes the gospels as being “templates and training manuals for how we are to be with each other” based on how Jesus was with us. I think that was summed up as the “golden rule” when I was the age of drawing out my faith in crayons. So if you were to ask me deeper how Seekers has informed my spiritual growth and I started at the surface my sister noticed – that I “talk about God more” – I would say yes, that I am now able to talk about God, here where I am in fellowship with people who are following the same templates for relationship with God via our relationships with each other.
I can’t believe I’m talking about the gospels right now, because I actually haven’t really read the gospels, and in fact I never owned a bible until Trish passed Pat’s down to me last year for a School for Christian Growth class that was actually about money.
But for you, I’ll try to touch the bible readings for this week. We’ll see together if there is synchronicity there. In Exodus 3:1-15, God gives his name as “I am” and tells Moses to tell the Israelites that “I am” is who sent him. So- God is telling a human that * I am * is who he is. This, plus the notion from Romans to “Honor one another above.” assure me in great synchronicity that I am not so off track to believe that God is within me and also within you, and therefore by leaning as close to you as I can, the God within us both is honored.
But whether we’re using the gospels as our shared language or not, I feel in this community that we are intuiting copacetic “templates and training manuals,” which I’m assured of every time I am affirmed for something I simply couldn’t help but do. Jeanne did this for me over a year ago when she lifted me up into planning the Day of Prayer and Conversation – which we’re coming up on the one year anniversary of!– that led us all into the Call to Evolve Project, and our work has been consistently affirmed by the Servant Leadership Team. Affirmation of one’s gifts and call is how we seem to share with each other that we are honoring the God within each of us, and that’s what I saw that made it feel like I heard God say “keep!”