Sermon for Sunday, September 20, 2026 || Proper 20A || Exodus 16:2-15 || Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace
Today is the third of five Sundays in our Season of Creation. Two weeks ago we listened to Pope Francis reminding us that humanity and nature are not two separate things. Last week, we recognized humanity’s tiny cameo in Planet Earth’s 4.5 billion year existence, we asked Earth for forgiveness for human domination, and we began the action of our repentance. This week, famed activist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry guides us with his down-to-earth wisdom, as we embrace the spiritual practice of awe.
We’ll get to Wendell Berry in a bit, but first let’s remember in our bodies what it feels like to experience awe. Think back to a time in your life when something filled you with awe. Perhaps you felt awe in the midst of the natural world: the glittering ocean stretching to the horizon, jagged snow-capped mountains thrusting up from the earth, a staggeringly large full moon hanging low in the sky. The last time I remember feeling awe when gazing out at the natural world happened early in the morning in the desert north of Jerusalem. The sun rose slowly at first, then all at once, and dawn lit the desert hills with the fresh pink and orange hues of a new day. Far from being an empty, barren landscape, the desert was full of the presence of God.
If not the natural world, perhaps something else fills you with awe: an astonishingly beautiful piece of music played with tender attention and skill, a rocket ship blasting into the sky sending out plumes of smoke as it races against gravity, the impossibly small fingers of a newborn baby. I think the greatest feeling of awe I’ve ever had was the moment the nurses placed both of our newborns in my arms at the same time. I wasn’t crying so much as leaking, like my tear ducts needed a plumber. I held those two bundles of new life and felt awe both at their presence and at my responsibility to them.
What does awe feel like? Here’s my attempt to describe it. Awe feels like an involuntary inhale of breath. We breathe in, but not out. The breath hovers in our lungs, lengthening the moment of awe. This is what it means to be “awe-inspired,” literally a breath of awe. The sudden inhale makes us stop, makes us hold, wait, watch. We become hyper-aware of our surroundings, as if our brains instinctively know that this is a moment that must be captured and stored in the core memories. The brain captures the raw data of the moment because, in the moment of awe, the mind cannot sort or categorize or comprehend the awesome stimulus. Since our brains are not equipped to comprehend awe, we remain in the moment longer than we otherwise would. We remain longer in the moment of awe because, in those moments, awareness does not bow to cognition. We encounter. We take in. We receive. We simply receive. Awe, then, is a state of openness, of reception. In the moment of awe, we receive unexpected gifts from God.
Imagine the Israelites in the desert in the days after their frantic flight from Egypt. As described in today’s first reading, they have gotten over the honeymoon phase rather quickly, and now they’re complaining that they had it so much better back in Egypt. They remember eating their fill of bread, while conveniently forgetting that they were enslaved. Moses brings their complaints to God, and God says that the sky is going to rain bread. Moses and Aaron tell the people: “In the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord.” The next day, God makes food appear in the desert. Imagine their awe when they left their tents and saw the manna flaking on the ground as the dew evaporated. They don’t try to explain the appearance of the manna. They just receive the miracle as a gift from God.
Because awe bypasses human cognitive processes, it serves as a wonderful corrective for human arrogance. Moments of awe remind us that we don’t, in fact, have everything figured out; that we don’t, in fact, have to pretend that we’ve seen it all before. In today’s reading, Wendell Berry says, “We must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.”
Standing in awe is a spiritual practice. It is a cultivated willingness to engage in wonder at the world around us. (More on that next week.) If awe is a state of reception, then the spiritual practice is the tuning of our internal dials to God’s frequency. Or for the younger people in the church today, the waving of your phone around until you have full bars. There’s no way to test this, but I think our ancestors most likely had a more natural facility to feel awe than we do. They were closer to the Earth than we are. They had no layers of scientific interpretation demystifying nature.1 They had no cell phone cameras photographing potential awe-filled moments rather than simply reveling in them.
But we do, and so we have to be careful. We have to practice our spiritual attunement because there are so many distractions in our lives distorting the signal. Case in point: when Leah and I went on a photo safari for our honeymoon, we spent several days taking pictures of dozens and dozens of incredible creatures in South Africa. But one day we intentionally left our cameras in the room. We witnessed the wildlife without the scramble to get a good shot. And fifteen years later, that is the one day of the honeymoon that I can remember with perfect clarity.
This memory from South Africa helps me understand Wendell Berry’s next words: “We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation,” he says, “and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
In the end, the state of awe is a symptom of humility. Without humility (which literally means “get close to the ground”) – without humility, we get sucked back into the perspective of the Earth as an object for us to exploit rather than a subject for us to tend. We get sucked back into the desire to dominate, to extract, to hoard.
But awe teaches us another way, the way of reception, of receiving rather than taking. And that brings me to my invitation for the week. I invite you to think about the posture with which you come to the communion rail. Do you come feeling entitled to something you’ve earned by sitting through this sermon and all the praying? Or do you come feeling humbled by the gift you are stretching your hands out to receive? The gulf between these two intentions is the difference between “taking” communion and “receiving” communion. We do not take. We receive. We reach out empty hands with the humble hope they will be filled. And the good news is that they are. They are filled with the presence of Christ in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. This is truly a moment of awe embedded in our weekly rhythm. As you receive communion today, think about how you move through the world. And ask God for the grace to move through the world as a receiver rather than a taker, as one who cultivates moments of awe in order to remember our proper place in the web of life.
- Sometimes scientific explanations can make things more awe-some, like the example of the clonal aspen forest I talked about last week. Knowing that 40,000 trunks are all actually part of the same organism is awe-inspiring.
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