sermons
All Of Us
When God is Here
Steve Watson
Dec 14, 2025
I’m mostly a pretty optimistic and happy guy, but I catch these kind of depressive seasons, where I get sadder and less motivated for a while. I share this not to trouble you. I have good support systems, but this is part of my life.
I was talking to a friend about this recently, someone a couple decades older than me who’s had similar experiences, and he said that one thing that has helped him was having something to look forward to every day, just for him, even if was small, like five minutes with a cup of hot chai, savoring the smell and taste and heat. He’d try to have bigger things to look forward to each week, each month, each year, but even the small things each day shifted some things inside him, made his life work better.
And I thought:
I’ll try this.
There wasn’t anything the next day I was looking forward to yet, but I remembered I’d bought a carton of egg nog, and decided I’d have my morning coffee with egg nog in it the next day and that I’d take a few minutes quietly just to just enjoy the sweet, hot coffee in the morning.
I went to bed that night frustrated at myself for all the things I hadn’t quite accomplished that day, but I told myself:
that coffee tomorrow morning is going to be great. Enjoy that.
And then the next morning, I made the coffee. I heated up some egg nog in a big mug, poured the coffee over it, and sat down on the couch for a few minutes.
We lower the heat at night – too much, our kids say – so our house is cold in the morning. But that means that to put a blanket around me and cradle that hot cup in my hands feels so good. And normally, I take my coffee with a little milk, no sugar. But friend, egg nog and coffee – wow, it is a dream combo. Highly recommend.
And I found myself thinking about where the coffee comes from – the rich, tropical soil in which it grows, the multitude of farmers and merchants and shippers who make it possible for us to have coffee up here in Massachusetts. And that got me thinking about the water I used to make the coffee. And the tragedy and the wonder of the Quabbin Reservoir that supplies most of Greater Boston’s reservoir. I thought about the people of my grandparents’ generation that built it, and laid all the pipes and systems that got that water into my house, the miracle of all they accomplished, and I thought about the people who had to move and lose their homes for that reservoir to exist, and the indigenous Nipmuc people who came before them and fished the Swift River.
And I thought about all the people and places I was connected to as I sipped my coffee, and I felt grateful. This big and wide tapestry of life across time and place that sustains me. What a gift, what a gift. I call the life and love behind all these gifts God, and so I thought and said out loud:
God is here. Thank you, God.
And that didn’t change the whole season I was in, but it was a good moment, and it helped. To remember and experience: God is here.
And friends, that’s what I want to explore for a little bit: God is here. It’s a phrase that’s at the heart of this season of Advent, and at the heart of the guide we’ve prepared for you called All of Us. The hope, the faith, the experience that God is here.
One scripture that shows up three times in our beautiful Advent guide is Psalm 139. For a few weeks after Christmas, Ivy and Lydia and I are going to teach on praying with the psalms, so this is a little preview of that as well.
Let’s read this Psalm together in its entirety, and explore the power of remembering, believing that God is here.
Psalm 139 (Common English Bible)
139 Lord, you have examined me.
You know me.2 You know when I sit down and when I stand up.
Even from far away, you comprehend my plans.3 You study my traveling and resting.
You are thoroughly familiar with all my ways.4 There isn’t a word on my tongue, Lord,
that you don’t already know completely.5 You surround me—front and back.
You put your hand on me.6 That kind of knowledge is too much for me;
it’s so high above me that I can’t reach it.7 Where could I go to get away from your spirit?
Where could I go to escape your presence?8 If I went up to heaven, you would be there.
If I went down to the grave, you would be there too!9 If I could fly on the wings of dawn,
stopping to rest only on the far side of the ocean—10 even there your hand would guide me;
even there your strong hand would hold me tight!11 If I said, “The darkness will definitely hide me;
the light will become night around me,”12 even then the darkness isn’t too dark for you!
Nighttime would shine bright as day,
because darkness is the same as light to you!13 You are the one who created my innermost parts;
you knit me together while I was still in my mother’s womb.14 I give thanks to you that I was marvelously set apart.
Your works are wonderful—I know that very well.15 My bones weren’t hidden from you
when I was being put together in a secret place,
when I was being woven together in the deep parts of the earth.16 Your eyes saw my embryo,
and on your scroll every day was written that was being formed for me,
before any one of them had yet happened.17 God, your plans are incomprehensible to me!
Their total number is countless!18 If I tried to count them—they outnumber grains of sand!
If I came to the very end—I’d still be with you.19 If only, God, you would kill the wicked!
If only murderers would get away from me—20 the people who talk about you, but only for wicked schemes;
the people who are your enemies,
who use your name as if it were of no significance.21 Don’t I hate everyone who hates you?
Don’t I despise those who attack you?22 Yes, I hate them—through and through!
They’ve become my enemies too.23 Examine me, God! Look at my heart!
Put me to the test! Know my anxious thoughts!24 Look to see if there is any idolatrous way in me,
then lead me on the eternal path!
A few years ago, a friend of mine, Rabbi Toba Spitzer, published a beautiful, powerful book called God is Here – Reimaging the Divine. We did a little teaching series here at Reservoir after the book came out. I still think about this book a lot.
Toba writes about how some traditional views of God are hard to believe in these days. If our picture of God is an old man in the sky looking down on us, or a heavenly ruler on a throne who is controlling everything here on earth, well, that kind of faith doesn’t line up real well with our experience anymore. And sometimes the Bible portrays God as the great cosmic patriarch, meting out rewards and punishments based on our behavior. And that shouldn’t surprise us – the Bible is a long and ancient collection of the experience of our distant human ancestors in the faith. Not all of its details still work for us.
But Toba shows us how the scriptures teach many other things about God – how God is like water, and like rock and cloud and fire, and sacred space and beckoning voice, and so many other images that invite us to wonder about the great, persistent force of love and life in everything.
This is the kind of God this psalm evokes – a spirit who is profoundly attentive to creation. Who celebrates the growth of life and birth of children, who studies our thought life and words and vision, a god who is already there, no matter where we are.
If God was dangerous or mean, a strict, harsh ruler, this would not be welcome news. It can be a terror to not escape the presence of a controlling, abusive parent or spouse, and a violent, harsh god would be no different.
But this God the psalmist appreciates is a creative force for good. This god seems to steady the troubled soul. Receives disordered or anxious thoughts and offers help reshaping them more positively and fruitfully. Creatively looks for ways to bring good out of every bad, life out of every death.
This is the God that came into my awareness when I treasured my egg nog coffee on a cold, early winter’s morning.
God whose universe has this little planet that so teems with life – the soil and plants that can grow these beautiful, caffeinated little beans. The chickens whose egg inspired the nog. The God who sometimes seems to inspire our species to such imaginative productivity and generosity, to build clean water systems and transport treasures to be traded around the globe, so that billions of us enjoy a hot beverage in the morning most days.
God is here. Sometimes it just grips you in the goodness of life.
But if God is here, it’s not just in the glorious gifts, good and small. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once.
The psalmist says,
even if I go down to the grave, you would be there as well.
And toward the end of the psalm, a little unexpectedly, a little jarringly, the psalmist leaks out the threatened, angry, maybe a little depressive state they’re in as they pray.
Kill the wicked, God. There are so many people out there that are against you, so many people to hate!
These are not the thoughts of peaceful, early morning coffee-drinking gratitude.
But they’re in the psalmist’s heart and mind, and they are in the Bible’s prayerbook, because this so-called darkness is very much part of our experience as well. And God is here in all this stuff as well.
We paired part of this psalm the other day with the words of the 13th century Franciscan teacher St. Bonaventure, who wrote: In everything, whether it is a thing sensed, or a thing known, God himself is hidden within.
In the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, our ancestors in the faith proclaimed that God has taken on flesh. It was a bold but natural claim for them. The Jesus they knew and remembered was so secure, so present, so wise and authoritative in teaching, so compassionate and kind and effective in healing, so very good and awesome, that they thought:
this is what God is like. This is what God as a human would look like.
And sometimes, we believe God is here, because we encounter or appreciate something so good, so powerful, so arresting in beauty, so tender in love, that a part of us feels it comes from a goodness that’s better and power that’s bigger and love that’s fuller than any person or thing. There must be a god who is here.
But our incarnational faith, that says God has in fact joined us in all things, that God is present for good everywhere, dares us toward hope and faith, that God is here in all things.
That the ugliest parts of ourselves are home to God’s Spirit.
That the dirtiest, nastiest, most unjust and broken corners of creation are home to God’s possibilities for good.
That our failures and disappointments, and every place of every kind of death, can be the site of future resurrection.
I think of two people I know and respect who’ve encouraged me toward this kind of faith. People who have critiqued a sentimental Christmas, or a romanticized, privileged Christian faith that can only say God is here when things are calm and bright.
Candles are a big thing in Advent. I have a pine-scented green Yankee Candle at home by my couch where I drink my coffee and pray. We have these professionally made big purple and pink and white candles here, that are the tradition in churches for this season. But my friend Mariama was telling me about how she and her community make soy-based candles from scratch every November for this season, and they make them in recycled containers. Sometimes they come out funny looking, or they burn unevenly, but it’s a reminder to them that God doesn’t need us to show up in a certain kind of way for our light to shine. God is here and God works with all kinds of bodies and shapes and sizes and cultures and gifts.
God has room for our whole selves – our fit and happy and successful selves, and our injured and out of shape and anxious and depressive and failing selves too.
Whether we would call someone or something good or bad, beautiful or ugly, or anywhere in between, God is still hidden within.
I also remember a teaching I heard Christena Cleveland give, where she challenged the Western habit to meditate only on images of comfort and ease – like our happiest memories, or our sunsets and waterfalls.
- If God is here in the clean water system of the Quabbin, then how is God here in the dirtiest, rustiest water systems of our failing infrastructure?
- What does it mean to meditate on the lead pipe that’s giving someone’s children unsafe drinking water?
Well, I don’t know that. I’m not practiced yet at dirty pipe meditation.
But in my own year, I’m trying to bring the God-is-here faith I have with my morning coffee to some of the sites of my disappointments and fears. I’m trying to do that through a spirituality we encounter in Romans 8, the scripture in today’s December 14th entry in our Advent devotional guide.
In that passage, it talks about how two things are true at once, how all of creation is frustrated, how there is so much decay, so much suffering. But also how all of this suffering and loss and death might also be the site of future resurrection.
The passage dares us to hope that our depressive sighs, and our groans of frustration might also together be a kind of collective groaning of labor pain. As we hope for what we don’t yet see, and as the Spirit of God is with us in our weakness, turning our every groan into a prayer.
Friends, I think this is a good word for us. It’s a good word for me at least.
That God is here in the lumpy, seemingly not-good enough parts of my life that look more like a homemade craft project than a professionally made candle.
That in the people we love who we can’t seem to help, let alone control or save, God has not abandoned them, but will bring them help and favor in new forms that can speak to them.
That God is here in our lost jobs and lost hopes and lost relationships, conspiring for a new chapter that can be written after the disappointing ending of the last one.
In everything, whether it is a thing sensed, or a thing known, God himself is hidden within.
So friends, I encourage us to find something to look forward to each day, where it’s easier to remember that God is here, and to say thank you.
And I encourage us to in the part of life we do not look forward to and would never have chosen, to groan our hearts and voices out. Tell God, tell a friend, tell a loved one, we are sad or scared or mad about where life finds us these days. But as we groan, let’s groan with a little hope that God is here too, whatever our here is. That this day is this day, but is not the last day. That today’s sufferings still do not compare for the glory that yet awaits us all.