God’s Presence in Our Worship: The Manger is Empty

Summary

God’s presence in our worship…we continue with our theme of God-with-us this morning, with the boy Jesus in the temple. Each week, we come to worship, expecting, hoping, longing to find God here; wondering perhaps how it is that God is here; wondering if God is here. In our worship, we offer to God all of who we are, our songs of praise, our prayers of lament, our longings, our hopes, our fears. Worship is our life-long practice of coming into the presence of God and offering back to God the stuff of our lives. It is our lifelong practice of making sense of how God is present in our lives and in our world. It is from this place of worship that we go into the world, to enact our faith through our daily lives; to make the presence of God real in our world.

This morning, I want to tell a condensed version of a story by Walter Wangerin called, “The Manger is Empty”. May this story remind us of the many ways in which God comes to us.