"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