Presby-Musings

Family Values Week Four:  "Hospitality"   This week I am continuing my sermon series entitled Family Values: Rediscovering What's Really Important with a sermon on Hospitality. I think the best illustration of hospitality in action within the Christian community is revealed in the time honored tradition of potluck dinners.   Potluck dinners are so named because everyone who attends brings a dish to share with the community.  The idea is that when everyone brings something, there's plenty to go around and everyone gets a chance to share and sample to their heart's content.  I have had some crazy good meals at church potluck dinners. I have a confession to make, though.  I am the guy that brings Kentucky Fried Chicken to the potluck.  I bring it, man.  Straight up in the box so everyone knows what it is.  I have NEVER taken home leftovers. Church potluck dinners are almost always unfair, though.  Someone generally forgets or brings very little.  Someone else

Putting Away Childish Things: A Tale of Modern Faith by Marcus Borg ; HarperOne, 2010 I first discovered Marcus Borg when I was attending McCormick Theological Seminary and enrolled in a class, "The Quest for Jesus."  It was in this class that I was introduced to Borg's works, Meeting Jesus For the First Time and Jesus.  I also learned about Borg's involvement with The Jesus Seminar, a much-maligned, groundbreaking, oft-controversial group of scholars, theologians, sociologists, etc. that focused on discovering the historical Jesus.  Borg's scholarship has been alternately praised or attacked, depending upon which sort of Christian community happens to be reflecting upon it.  Putting Away Childish Things is a work of fiction--Borg's first novel, to be more precise.  Borg describes it as a "didactic" or teaching novel.  The characters within the story struggle with issues of life and faith in an academic setting and within the context of our emer

Image via Wikipedia When I was a kid we had this rotary phone on our wall.  You had to dial the number.  You would stick your fingers into the hole on the rotary that corresponded with the number and you would give it a whirl around until it stopped.  Then you would release your finger and let the dial do it's work.  Then you would repeat.  I used to mess up and would have to hang the phone up to start over. There was one phone in our house with one line.  If I wanted to talk to my girl, I had to make sure that no one else was planning on using the phone.  When we finally got another phone in the house with a line in my room, my dad would often pick up the other extension and tell me to get off the phone, sometimes when I was in the middle of working some serious game with my special lady friend. Image via Wikipedia A few years ago, I was working with a group at the church I was serving to clean out some of the junk in the church's attic.  We discovered a huge monstrosit

This week I am actually preaching on just two verses.  I know. It's kind of a Baptist move. Sue me. I used to be one. In a culture that is filled with uncertainty, we need to rediscover some family values that help us understand what is truly important.  This is the purpose of the sermon series that I'm working on for the rest of this month.  The topic this week has to do with getting your priorities right--especially your priorities as they relate to your family.  I think that one of the greatest foes of the family in our culture has little to do with what most folks would consider "moral" issues, and everything to do with what we give or don't give to our families of ourselves and all that we have.   The title of the sermon is sort of misleading---but in a good way.  The bottom line, the take-away, the main point that I am hoping to make is simply this:  There is no excuse for not giving your family your very best.  But in order to give your family y