A few months ago a friend of mine sent me a message, “OK… it’s Saturday night and I have planned your future!” Sometimes God’s call comes in the midst of silent prayer. Sometimes God’s call comes during vibrant worship. And sometimes, apparently, God’s call comes through Facebook Messenger. Or at least it starts there.
Continue reading
Church
The gospel is political.
I read the comments. I know they say, “Don’t read the comments,” but I read the comments, and now I feel like I need to respond. The current comments that I read were on a Facebook post under a link to a Louisville, KY news station’s report about the response of the Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (USA) to a church asking for a review of Donald Trump’s membership in the PC(USA). (Spoiler alert: Although he was baptized in a Presbyterian congregation, he’s not currently a member of a PC(USA) congregation, so there is no membership to review or, as the headlines are implying, revoke.) Mulitple comments, however, didn’t even address this specific question. Instead they made declarations like “…we as a church have no business in politics.” And that’s what fired me up.
PC(USA) Stated Clerk responds to questions on Trump’s membership.”Leaders at the Presbyterian headquarters in…
Posted by Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on Friday, December 11, 2015
Deep breaths and a glass of red wine
I planned the first weekend of sabbatical for months. Months. I knew exactly how I wanted to spend those first 24-48 hours and nothing was going to force me to deviate from the plan. I had a wedding to perform the Saturday before I didn’t have to go to work on Sunday, but as soon as the wedding party was gone from the church I was going to set my sabbatical message on my email, shut the lights out, and consider myself “off.” Dinner and games with friends that night, brunch the next morning complete with fancy crêpes (and maybe a mimosa). It was all lined up well in advance, and the plan was carried out without a hitch.
It never occurred to me, however, to plan the last night of sabbatical. So here I sit taking deep breaths and drinking a glass of wine. Continue reading
One More Thing – A confirmation sermon on Acts 2:43-47
So last week I said something about “this one thing” – that if our confirmation students remembered, if any of us remembered nothing else about anything the church speaks into our lives, we can remember this one thing – nothing, absolutely nothing, not what we do or what we don’t do, not what we believe or what we don’t believe, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And I stand by that.
For the most part. Because it is really hard to just leave one thing there. Even a really good thing. Even the thing that I believe is the best news of all. Even the thing that I believe declares the core tenet of our faith. Even then it’s hard to leave just one thing and say, “If you remember nothing else….” because sometimes it’s hard to remember even just that one thing. Sometimes it feels like it is impossible to find comfort in even that one thing.
Ministry Snapshot – Your mess is mine
I walked in my office this morning to find this:
It should not have been a surprise since that’s exactly what it looked like when I walked out the door on Sunday after worship and fellowship. These are what my mom calls “little ones out of big ones” – the scraps left over from the flames my daughter was diligently cutting out to help me get ready for an activity we were doing in worship. It’s a mess, and a mess that needs to be cleaned up, but it is by no means the biggest mess in my office right now. It also isn’t the mess that got my first attention today. Continue reading
For Some Reason 