As more and more of us worship from home, we are most of us establishing a new discipline. We are loving our neighbor by sacrificing the easy, rhythmic habit of gathering together.

Today’s poem is a reminder that we are the church, worshipping a God who is everywhere present, and “Whose only now is forever.” Whenever we come before God in worship, and however we come before God in worship, we do so along with all the saints everywhere and throughout all of time.

It also plays nicely with this Sunday’s lectionary readings, so I’ll be reading it as our call to worship tomorrow, as I lead worship online for the first time. May it call you into “the deathless truth of [God’s] presence.”

Landscape with Church Spires and Trees by Max Weber

i am a little church(no great cathedral) – i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving (finding and losing and laughing and crying)children whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature – i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence (welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

— e.e. cummings