We who were brought up in the church may be surprised by the thought that Christianity has spiritual practices like other religions we admire – like Buddhist and Judaism, to name two. Some of us thought the only practice of Christianity was the practice of belief. We were taught that the only way to be Christian was to believe.

In the Bible, in our sacred scriptures, there is an historical account of the evolving ways the people of Israel governed themselves through time.

My sermon is a simple and short sermon, and it has one point. We are God’s and when we are in trouble, if we call on God by so simple a way as breathing in the life force, God will save us.

One day, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton left the monastery to run errands in nearby Louisville, Kentucky. And there, between the dry cleaner’s and the grocery store, he had a religious experience. He writes in his journal,

A couple of months ago now, we passed a new mission statement. A small group of us worked on it, trying to the best of our ability to represent what we knew of the larger body. We presented it at our annual meeting in January, and it didn’t pass—there was pushback, because, lo and behold, you actually cared what kind of words we used about you, the claims we were to make about ourselves as a community, to the rest of the world.

There is a moment. There is a second, an hour, a day. There is a year between the last breath, and the rest of life.

The other morning I lay in bed, pondering the resurrection of my body from it, and listening to the radio. The radio announcer reported that to save money during the recession, the Commonwealth has decided to turn off the decorative blue lights on the Zakim bridge, to the tune of 5,000 clams per month. I was crushed. I grew up in Boston, and waited 14 years for those lights to go on. They started the Big Dig when I went off to college, and finished it when my second child was born. Every time I drive over the Zakim bridge, I delight in those lights. They make me feel like I can fly.

When she got the diagnosis of diabetes, it became her enemy. She remembers the day of the diagnosis. She said that day, after blood tests, but before she knew for sure, she ate a meal thinking this was the last meal she would eat as a normal person, though she had not been normal for a while. And then the diagnosis, the phone call, come to the hospital, pack bags for four days, don’t eat anything, she and her mom went to the hospital, crawled onto the hospital bed together, and cried for four hours. Diabetes.