Rev. David L.S. Robertson

Passage: Isaiah 40:9-11 & Luke 1:67-79    

  Description: It’s a mild Saturday afternoon and in the spur of the moment, I decide to put up my outdoor Christmas lights. I’m kind of pumped about this for a couple of reasons: it’s not -20C and it’s not the 3rd week of December! I collect the tools I need, the extension cord and set them aside. All I need is the lights. And for the life of me I can’t find them. I look in all the right places. In all the right boxes. In a low state of frustration, I ask Susan if she knows where the nice LED multi-coloured outdoor lights are. She says, “David, what do you mean?” I say, “What do you mean, what do you mean”. And that’s when I realize even though I have the clearest picture of the lights, and where they are that in fact, they don’t exist anymore. They went down the river. I sit rather amazed at this transaction. 2 ½ years later, I’m still looking for things that I can’t find because they left the house long ago. There’s a blessing in this because, on the upside I don’t have to blame my mental pause on my age. I can blame it on the flood.

Passage: Joel 2:21-28 & Mark 4:1-9    

  Description: My grade 10 science teacher was the one who introduced me to the mystery of soil. Now I’m a farm kid so I already had a pretty good awareness of the soil, but what struck me in class was the image of the world’s arable land covered with about 8” of soil, compared to the kilometres of rock and magma beneath it. It is such a tiny thin film of life-giving, crop producing, forest making, animal-feeding, microbiological mass of mystery that remains powerful and vulnerable all at the same time. The image has stayed with me while I rototill the garden and drive past grain-fields and pastures. When I go back to where I was born, I am aware that it is the soil there that fundamentally brought forth my life, provided for my family, for chickens, and our family’s dairy herd. We are creatures of the soil. Now I actually find comfort in that. If we take the literal Hebrew root of Adam’s name it means earth creature. There is a part of me who claims home as the soil. It’s where I come from and where I will return.

Passage: Colossians 3:12-17 & Luke 17:11-19    

  Description: Stop, sit, breathe, give thanks. Simple instructions for us. But maybe not easy. As I think about our community of faith and the life that we have together, it seems to me that one of the best things we can help each other do is a reminder to take a moment and just stop what we are doing, stop what we are thinking or fussing about. It takes a kind of intentionality to stop especially, when we are gerbil wheeling. You know, the moments when we are caught up in the momentum and we just can’t stop.