"My Days are Many Coloured, but God is Constant" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday July 12 and 19, 2026 – Flower Services
Scripture:  Psalm 27:1-14 and Romans 8:38-39
Dr. Seuss Connection:  My Many Colored Days

This year we are having a “Seussian Summer” – each week during the story for all ages, we will be reading a Dr. Seuss book, then pairing it with scripture to see what wisdom we might find within its pages.

I was a kid in the 80s, and I grew up in a family of readers in a house with lots of books, and when I was planning out this summer’s worship I thought that I knew my Dr. Seuss.  We had some of his books at home, others could be found at my grandparents’ cottage, and still others we borrowed from the library at one time or another.

But until this summer, I had never read My Many Colored Days.  In fact, even the title was unfamiliar to me before I started doing some research.  But when I finally got my hands on a copy, the pieces fell into place.  If you look here on the dedication page, you’ll see that it is Dr. Seuss’s wife, Audrey Geisel – Dr. Seuss’s real name was Theodore Geisel – but it was his wife Audrey who wrote the dedication:  “To Ted, who colored my days… and my life.”

And after that, I realized that while Dr. Seuss wrote the text in 1974, the book wasn’t published until 1996, 5 years after his death, and more than a decade after I was reading my way through the Dr. Seuss catalogue.  So I hadn’t just missed this book as a child – it hadn’t been published yet!

And that is one direction that I could go with this sermon for this year’s Flower Service.  I could talk about how the lives of the people we are remembering today made our lives more colourful, more vibrant, and how this is reflected in the vibrancy of the flowers we are using to build our bouquet of memories.

But instead, I want to talk about the message of the book itself.  It’s a fairly simple text.  There’s not really a story like the story we read last week in Green Eggs and Ham.  But it’s a book that reassures the children who are reading it, or listening to it being read, that we feel different things on different days, and that is OK.  And maybe that can be reassurance for the adults who read or listen to this book too.

Some days we feel excited.  Some days we feel down in the dumps.  Some days we feel a quiet contentment.  Some days we feel flat.  Sometimes our feelings can change from hour to hour, or even minute to minute.  And all of this is OK.

And if we were to bring together the message of My Many Colored Days with the scripture readings that we heard, I think that a new message can emerge.

Some of you know that I have many, many favourite scriptures, and Psalm 27 is close to the top of my list of favourites.  And the psalmist writes:
         The Lord is my light and my salvation,
                  whom shall I fear?
         The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
                  of whom shall I be afraid? …
         For God will hide me in their shelter
                  in the day of trouble;
         God will conceal me under the cover of their tent…
         Even if my father and mother forsake me,
                  the Lord will take me up.

The psalmist is confident in God’s help and in God’s protection.  Which is similar to the message we heard from the apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Rome:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

If I were to re-write Paul in the spirit of Dr. Seuss’s Many Colored Days, I wonder if it would sound something like:

Not death, not life, not anything,
can steal the love of God our king.
When we are sad, when we are glad,
when we are still, when we are mad,
If we dance and if we sing,
if we fly up on a swing,
If we climb atop the hill,
then God – yes God – is with us still!

There is nothing that can ever separate us from God and from God’s love.  No matter what we are feeling, no matter what colour our day is, God’s love is with us always.  You are God’s beloved child, in all your multi-coloured beauty.  As we gather today to remember our loved ones, no matter how you are feeling – if you are feeling sad, if you are feeling mad, if you are feeling glad – no matter how you are feeling, God loves you.  And no matter how you feel tomorrow, God will love you.  And the next day.  And the day after that.  And the day after that too.

And so as we build our bouquet of memories, let us celebrate the vibrant, colourful lives we are remembering today.  And let us also embrace the rainbow spectrum of our own feelings, as we celebrate God’s presence in our lives not just today, but every day.

And may it be so.

Following this reflection, we built our Bouquet of Memories – flowers were added for the people in each church community who have died in the past year; then everyone had the opportunity to come forward and add a flower to the bouquet. Think of all of the memories and all of the love contained in each of these bouquets!

 

Westfield Bouquet / Bayswater-Summerville Bouquet / Long Reach Bouquet

"Green Eggs, Ham, and Wisdom" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday July 5, 2026
Scripture:  Isaiah 43:18-21 and Matthew 9:14-17
Dr. Seuss Connection:  Green Eggs and Ham

This year we are having a “Seussian Summer” – each week during the story for all ages, we will be reading a Dr. Seuss book, then pairing it with scripture to see what wisdom we might find within its pages.


I’m going to let you in on a secret.  Did you know that we, humans, are not very good at change?  We like to do the things that we’ve always done, in the ways that we’ve always done them.  Even when there’s a better option out there, even when there’s a better way of doing things, we usually prefer to stick with the familiar.

I’m going to let you in on another secret.  Did you know that churches tend to be especially not good at change?  We like to sing the songs we know and love.  We like to do the same outreach projects that we’ve always done.  Some people even like to sit in the same pew week after week after week… and if you don’t believe me, ask me about the time, when I was still new to my church in Thunder Bay and I accidentally sat in Dianne’s pew.

Change is hard.  Inertia, or staying where you are is easy, but change is hard.  This is a law of physics:  “a body in a state of rest or motion will stay in that state of rest or motion unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force.”  Nothing changes, unless something causes it to change.

If you don’t believe me, you can ask, the protagonist of today’s story, Green Eggs and Ham.  He does not like green eggs and ham / he does not like them, Sam-I-am.  He has got it into his mind that he doesn’t like them, and nothing is going to make him change his mind.

Nothing, that is, except actually trying the green eggs and ham and discovering that they are quite delicious after all.  In the arc of the story, being compelled to actually try them, pestered by Sam-I-Am to actually try them, is the force that causes him to change, to veer from his path of green-eggs-and-ham dislike.

Sometimes in our lives, we need a nudge from God to try new things.  In Isaiah, the people had been in exile in Babylon – now there was a traumatic change if there ever was one – the destruction of their land and their homes by an invading army then being carried away against their will to exile in a foreign land.  You can hear the grief and the trauma in some of the writings from the early years of exile:  “By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down and there we wept.  How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”

But God is a God of newness and new beginnings, and God helped the people to adapt to a new life and a new way of worshipping in a land that was far away from the temple that they were used to.  And two generations later, God is about to do another new thing.  God is going to work in the heart of King Cyrus, and the people are going to be allowed to return to their land.

But for the people who will return – I can imagine that this is a scary prospect.  After 70 years in exile, essentially everyone who is returning was born in Babylon, so they will be returning to a land that they have never seen with their own eyes, a land that their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had seen reduced to rubble.

Yet God nudges them forward and promises that this change is going to be OK – there will be rivers in the desert, and a pathway through the wilderness as they travel to this new-old land.  And maybe they will even discover in the end that they do, in fact, like green eggs and ham, I mean, the land of their ancestors.

Jesus also has some stuff to say about change and transformation and newness.  In fact, the story that is at the heart of our faith – the story of crucifixion and resurrection – is a story about becoming new, the story of moving from life into death and then moving from death into new life.  It’s not a story of resuscitation or keeping the old life going on life support – instead it is about an end to one thing so that something completely new can emerge.

I laugh at the image that Jesus shares about patching a cloak with new fabric that hasn’t been pre-shrunk before using it; and I laugh because I could share with you a picture of the first quilt I ever made, and after it had been used for many years I tried to patch it with some of the original fabric.  The only problem is that the quilt had been so faded by the sun that the same fabric that had been sitting in a cupboard all those years was a completely different colour!  Instead of trying to use the still-new fabric to patch the old, I should have used it to make something completely new.

I wonder what Jesus would have had to say to Sam-I-Am’s friend?  Probably something about setting aside his old dislike of green eggs and ham, and actually trying them, and allowing himself to be transformed by the experience!

So what is the wisdom of Dr. Seuss – and Jesus – for us today?  I think that maybe it has to do with opening ourselves up to newness – opening ourselves up to be transformed – rejecting the inertia of same-old same-old, and allowing the Holy Spirit to push us towards the new.  For God is a God of newness and new beginnings; and God is always doing a new thing in our hearts and in our lives.  And so rather than stubbornly staying with the old, why not jump in, feet-first, into whatever new things are placed before us, trusting that God is the one leading us there, and accompanying us all the way?

Say, I like new ways to be!
I do, I like them, Sam-You-Be!
And I will like them in a boat
And I will like them with a goat!
And I will like them in the rain
and in the dark and on a train,
and in a car and in a tree,
New things are good, so good you see!
I do so like new ways to be!
Thank you! Thank you, Sam-You-be!

 

 

Thank you, Dr. Seuss!