Presby-Musings

  Today I found myself pondering the following line from the Lord's Prayer:  "Give us this day our daily bread..."   It's a strange thing to pray, isn't it?  I mean, most of us have prayed those words before, either in church or in some other religious context.  Maybe we've even prayed them on our own---in a moment when we couldn't think of what to pray, and the Lord's Prayer came to mind, so we prayed it... along with those words.   What does that line even mean, though?   Was Jesus teaching his followers to focus on actual sustenance, or something deeper and more spiritually focused?  Was he reminding them to not be so preoccupied with having enough that they lose themselves in materialism and greed? Even though those are all possible implications of his teaching, I believe that Jesus was thinking more deeply.   Let me explain by first sharing some thoughts on the Lord's Prayer by Thich Nhat Hahn, the renowned Vietnamese...

I've been tired lately---the kind of tired that you feel inside, but not in your bones, more like in your spirit, or in your head, or your heart... if that makes sense.   I know it's a deep kind of tiredness because I have been daydreaming about taking naps--really long, satisfying naps.  And not just any naps anywhere, mind you, I am talking about the kind of naps that are ingrained in my memory, the naps I took in special  places in the world... holy  places where I rested mind, body, and soul.  On the green summer grass of a garden next to Christ Church College in Oxford England.  On a chair on a patio outside a cafe in the Vatican, overlooking one of the papal gardens.   On a warm, sun-drenched rock in neck-deep water near the shore of Lake Tahoe On my grandmother's living room couch, which was across from a window fan that hummed and gently blew cool air over me.  On my old bed, on a fall Sunday afternoon after my mom died--the wind...

I've been reading In The Shelter , the excellent spiritual memoir by the Irish poet and author Padraig O'Tuama.   O'Tuama outlines his journey of faith as a process of welcoming or saying "hello" to the various obstacles, challenges, and triumphs that are often encountered when we stumble after the Divine.  He also eloquently describes how his faith journey has been and continues to be an exercise in learning to surrender, embracing wonder, and finding comfort in impermanence.   One of the poems O'Tuama included in the book spoke to me, and so I  wrote down the stanza with which I felt a real sense of resonance and connection.  Here it is:  And he is inching towards glory With only his own story on his back  He has patched up holes that opened Where his coverings have cracked  And some shoes were never meant for hiking so  He left them far behind There are simple things he needs  On journeys such as these Food and love and drin...

Today we are concluding the sermon series This Is My Story.  This series has been focused on this basic idea:  In a world where it's hard to know what is true---your story makes all the difference.   Our focus today is something that a lot of us need to hear:  No matter where your story has led you, it's not over--the ending hasn't been written.   In other words, you may have things in your past---things that have happened to you, mistakes that you have made, decisions that you wish you could do over... and you might feel like you are damaged goods, or you missed your moment, or that you are somehow disqualified from being used by God...  And I want you to know right off the bat---none of those things are true.  Your story isn't over, not by a long shot.   Sadly, it's hard for most of us to internalize this simple and beautiful truth, mostly because we are far too busy creating a false narrative about ourselves that we tell ourselve...

This week are continuing the sermon series This Is My Story. The idea behind this series is pretty simple...   Trust is hard to come by these days.  We have learned the hard way not to trust a lot of news sources, or at the very least, we question many things based on our lack of trust in the news media, and pretty much most of the things our friends and acquaintances post online.  So in a world where it's hard to know what is true---your story makes all the difference, especially the story of your faith journey, your experiences with God, your connection to a faith community.   Today we're going to be learning how you might be a living invitation for a better story, and how that just might change someone's life or a lot of someone's lives.   The Trust Project - gathering data on the decline of trust in our culture.  The number one reason people gave a couple of years ago was that they were worried about getting misinformation and sharing it....

I'm not sure how things are going in your neck of the woods, but in mine, it's mid-summer hot, and the cicadas are out in force.  Last night, it sounded like a whole passel of cicadas was right outside my window, making all kinds of cicada racket.  I stepped outside to hear them better, closing my eyes at one point to listen.  There's a strange kind of beauty in their song, to be honest.  I have to say, I've fished a few of these critters out of my pool, and they're pretty monstrous-looking. Just to be real... If one of them fell out of a tree and landed on me, I'd probably freak out a bit.  I was reading yesterday about what's happening with the cicadas and why they are all over the place right now.  The 2021 Brood X of these slow-moving and noisy bugs has been a long time in the making. This year, billions of cicadas burst forth from the earth after a 17-year gestation period.   They emerge from 17 years of darkness to crawl, then fly, and then ...

At a recent meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, a convening of delegates from the largest "Protestant" denomination in the U.S., a debate ensued regarding the SBC's stance on racial injustice.   The debate was inevitable because conservatives within the SBC have been angry and outspoken about what they perceive as a "takeover" by their more moderate colleagues within the denomination.   One delegate decried what he believed to be a capitulation by the SBC to "woke culture," and even offered up this little gem:  "Jesus wasn't woke."   Another delegate rose during the debate and said this:  "If [the moderates] were as passionate about the Gospel as they are about racial justice, we would win the whole world for Christ."   Thankfully, the moderates seemed to win the day in the end.  But those comments bugged me for a lot of reasons---not the least of which is that it's not the first time I've heard them or ones like...

After my mom died, I took the glasses that she used to wear when she was reading or scrolling through Facebook on her phone, and put them in my office.  I am not sure why I wanted her glasses of all the things she left behind, but I did.   They have been sitting on a credenza for the past four years on top of a book that she got me for my birthday the year before she died--- a book entitled "My Son I  Love You Forever, for Always and No Matter What."  The other day on a whim I decided to try them on.  They were completely smudged, and so I sat down at my desk with a cloth I use to clean my own glasses and started to wipe them down.   I realized all of a sudden that the smudges I was wiping away weren't exactly smudges---they were her fingerprints.   She would always dirty her glasses up by taking them on and off, picking them up wrong, dropping them, and grabbing the lenses.  Her glasses were always cloudy with fingerprints. ...

I was watching a TED talk on creativity and courage that actor, director, writer, and musician Ethan Hawke delivered, and he said something that resonated with me.   He was speaking about the fear that so many of us have to use the gifts we have because we've been told somewhere along the way that what we have to offer isn't good enough.  Here's what he said:   If history has taught us anything, it's that the world is an unreliable critic.  I think the reason that line resonated with me so much is that I know what it's like to create, write, speak and put things out into the world that could very well invite criticism.   In fact, I have received my fair share of it over the years.  Some of it was warranted, mind you.  I'm not perfect, so I make mistakes from time to time.  And sometimes the things I write or say in public are sure to offend some folks, or at the very least generate a negative reaction for one reason or another....

Before last year, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about and planning for the future.  I like having a plan, or at the very least, having some idea about what's coming next.  So, I used to go to conferences, attend webinars, and read books about the future of leadership, the future of the church, the future of culture... And then last year happened, and just about everything I'd learned about the future became obsolete overnight.   If you were wondering, that sad fact has been a bitter pill to swallow for someone like me who likes to envision and plan for the future to be one or two steps ahead of the rest of the pack.  But all of the events of last year have brought home a realization that I believe I've needed.  All of my planning and all of the efforts I used to make to exert control over the future were simply perpetuating an illusion.   I never had control.  I might have been able to predict some things, but I sure as heck couldn't...

Five years ago tomorrow, I was practicing my sermon in my office on a Sunday morning, when I saw a news flash appear on my phone that would rock me to my core.  The church where I served then was just outside of Orlando, Florida where a mass shooting had occurred in the early morning hours.  The shooting was at the Pulse nightclub---a club frequented by many of the young members of the Orlando LGBTQ+ community.   Omar Mateen, a severely disturbed 29-year-old man, who had become brainwashed by radical Islamist propaganda, entered the club at 2AM armed with an assault weapon and began shooting.   When it finally ended three hours later, after police shot and killed Mateen, there were 49 people dead, and 53 wounded.   Investigators learned later that Mateen had scoped out the nightclub, and planned the attack because the club catered to the LGBTQ+ community.  It was not only a terrorist attack, it was also a hate crime, motivated by the kind of ...

I remember the first time I went back to church after five-plus years of giving up on God, Christianity, and anything that resembled a church.  Let's just say, I didn't go willingly.   My wife Merideth insisted that we needed to find a church to attend even though I was insistent we didn't.  My arguments against it were pretty sound, in my opinion.   You see, I'd had enough of Christianity (at least the form of it I had grown up with). I also had decided that the judgemental, demanding, vengeful God of my youth didn't deserve one moment of my belief, so I had cut that God out of my life.   It was kind of liberating, actually.  I found I was perfectly content without that God in my life, along with the people who found that God so enthralling. And church... Yeah, I definitely  didn't miss church.  What I didn't know at the time, was that the God I didn't believe in didn't exist, and the churches I'd grown up in didn't represent every...

In The Song of the Bird , his excellent little book of parables, Fr. Anthony de Mello tells the story of a man who found an eagle's egg, and then put it into the nest of one of his backyard hens.   The egg hatched, and the eagle grew up thinking it was a chicken.  It clucked and cackled, scratching at the ground like the other chickens.  The eagle would flap his wings and fly only a few feet off the ground.  The eagle grew old, and one day as he was scratching at the ground with one of the chickens he saw a magnificent bird flying high above him.  "What is that?" he asked.  "That's an eagle the king of the birds," his companion replied.   "He belongs to the sky.  We belong to the earth--we're chickens."  The old eagle went back to scratching.  He lived and died a chicken because that's what he thought he was. This parable speaks to me---let me tell you why.   Far too many of us deny our true nature, our destiny, a lif...

I've always been a task-oriented kind of person.  Assign me a task, and set a deadline, and I'll get some stuff done... you can count on it.  And if there's no one to give me something to do, I'll assign myself tasks and set my own deadlines.  Sometimes, I assign myself too many tasks and set unreasonable deadlines, but let's not dwell on that for the moment.   There's this sense of satisfaction that I get when I am hustling and checking things off my lists that is hard to beat.  But I'm a pretty terrible supervisor for myself.     I will often look back on my day when I get to around 5PM and if I haven't completed enough tasks, I'll either begin berating myself for being a slacker or make myself work overtime.   And there's no one to complain to because I'm also the HR representative for myself, so any complaints won't really get very far.  Even if they did, I'm also the CEO of myself, so there's that.   Let me tell ...

Yesterday the church where I serve as lead pastor held its first congregation-wide, in-person, indoor worship service in over fifteen months.  It was awesome to see our sanctuary filled with people again.   I was chatting with some church members after the service yesterday and the comments they shared were heartwarming and bittersweet.  They said things like, "I can't believe how good it feels to be here again."  "I've missed this so much!"   One of them also said, "I didn't know how I would feel when I came back, I was kind of nervous about it, but then once I got here and sat down... it just felt right."   After a long year of isolation brought on by fear, caution, anxiety, and no small amount of dread, it felt good to be in familiar surroundings, to smell the familiar smells of the church, to see friends, to share hugs (with those who were willing and vaccinated), to laugh, clap and even sing.   It also felt good to realize that...

Fr. Thomas Keating once wrote an essay on a parable he'd heard about a Sufi master who lost the key to his house and was found by his students looking for it outside.  "Where did you lose the key, Master?" one of the students asked.  "Inside the house, of course," the Master replied.  "Then why are you searching for it out here?" another student queried.  "Isn't it obvious?" the Master shot back.  "There's more light out here."   If you think this parable sounds more like a joke, you would be right.  But it's a joke with a deep meaning that speaks to the way that most of us search for happiness, fulfillment, and even connection with God.   The house can stand for a lot of different things, I suppose, but for me, it represents "home," whatever home might mean for us at the moment.  Sometimes, home can be our own soul, our very being.  It can also be our community of faith.   The point is, we often lose the key t...