Tuesday, November 11, 2025
Memorial of Saint Martin of Tours, Bishop
Veterans’ Day
Miles Tomita’s birthday (2016)
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Soap bubble
I will bless the Lord at all times,
I will bless the LORD at all times.
his praise shall be ever in my mouth.
Clarence Heller wrote this short but sweet yesterday:
Perhaps it’s like touching a soap bubble:
God avoids overt contact
In order to sustain our existence.
I read this and then my friend couldn’t talk because she’d been vomiting all night. “I haven’t been this sick in years!” she told me before going back to bed. I hope she can sleep. I prayed for Jesus to touch her sickness and heal her.
All this was accomplished by texts, and it felt more satisfying, actually, than a conversation would have. Who wants to talk after they’ve been throwing up in the bathroom all night? But a text? Not so impossible. She even used the Old English word “alas,” which gave me a warm historical feeling.
So sweet, those warm historical feelings, very different from casting our car out into the lake of young Asian culture filling the Sunday night parking lot at Kura Revolving Sushi for our November birthday party. We spent awhile at the Daiso Japanese Dollar store first, blinking in bright lights and miles of aisles of $2.25 items we could definitely do without. Touch and see, Â and turn away. Looking for God in all the wrong places.
Perhaps it’s like touching a soap bubble:
God avoids overt contact
In order to sustain our existence.
Clarence didn’t hear the sermons on Romans 5 that we heard from Matt this week and last. Our existence, temporal, eternal, and no longer in question is guaranteed by God’s “touch,” if we choose to accept it. His mark gets us in the Gate. David’s Soap Bubble is no longer in danger of popping, delicate as it may seem to me.
I think of friends, neighbors and countrymen who don’t believe this for a second. Praying for all of us, I want to share my certainty with them. How? God showed Paul how in no uncertain way, and in spite of Paul’s many mistakes and everlasting mixture of shame and pride, he wrote Romans.
When you have done all you have been commanded, say,
“We are unprofitable servants;
we have done what we were obliged to do.”
Today’s gospel text doesn’t go over easily for me. I think my aristocratic blood is thin to middlin’, nearly nothing … but not so fast. Paul’s type of pride certainly shows up in me. I deserve/expect/respect. I am happy to acknowledge the goodness in me, but I am learning to sincerely brag about God rather than take the credit.
Jesus would like to stop thinking about this inner stuff altogether, and  just live one day and then the next, doing what I’m called to do without thinking about myself. When I do think, Jesus wants me to be thinking about the master, the Master, the Master. Like the butlers in those black and white movies. Yes sir, no sir. The butlers might be all-the-while thinking about their next day off, or even disdaining their master behind those hooded eyes.
But Jesus tells me to get over that. He wants the best for me, which actually does come as I want the best, sincerely and without question (without thinking twice), for my Master. And in this way I will know the infinite and eternal peace God wants to share.
Does it sound like groveling? Maybe, butthis seeing myself as an “unprofitable” servant turns out to be the one path through the eye of the needle, the mature movement of entitled adult to child-again of God, into the “obedience of faith.” Now I can see myself as created rather than creator, bearing the “image” rather than being God.
Whoever loves me will keep my word,
and my Father will love him,
and we will come to him.
My soap bubble is precious to our Father. Yours is too. Can’t you see us all in this heaven of a a tubfull of warm soapy happiness, splashing each other, laughing, praising God? Obedient and living the dream?
(Wisdom 2, Psalm 34, John 14, Luke 17)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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