Presby-Musings

It's hard to forgive people who have wounded you when they are convinced they've done nothing wrong. Or worse, they gaslight you into thinking that it was somehow your fault.   We've all been there at least once in our lives.  A loved one, friend, co-worker, or colleague does something or says something that hurts us, and then when we confront them with it, they make it seem like we are to blame for being so sensitive. We get responses like this, perhaps:   "Well, I'm sorry you got your feelings hurt," "You need to stop wearing your feelings on your sleeve," or "Seriously? I'm the one that should be upset because of _________ that you did." That last one is especially hard to take, isn't it?  And yet, even though these people refuse to accept responsibility for the things that they've done, we are compelled to forgive them if we will wholly follow Jesus.   In fact, Jesus told his followers that they needed to forgive repeatedl...

  Today we're launching a new sermon series entitled "The Words Of The Prophets."   In the weeks leading up to Advent, we’ll be listening to the voices of the Old Testament prophets from the Lectionary readings as they prepare for the coming of the Messiah. The inspiration for this series is a line from the classic song "The Sound of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel.  The line goes like this:  The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls..." Biblical prophets aren’t predictors of the future; they hope to shape it. They used their words to either project a hopeful future or one full of hardship---all based on what was happening at the moment.   And the words of the prophets can come to us from some unlikely places at times.   We just have to have our eyes open, our ears ready to hear, and our hearts ready to be transformed.   Prophetic imagination helps us see beyond our reality and God's reality.  We get glimpses ...

One of the dark gifts I was given as a teenager by the religious authority figures in my life was a distrust of my feelings.   In my church youth group and chapel services in the Christian school I attended, I was taught I needed to guard against improper feelings of all kinds, including, but not limited to, the following:  Feelings of lust--the kind that might lead to all manner of avarice and dancing. Feelings of doubt--the kind that might lead me to forsake my faith and become something terrible like a Presbyterian.  Feelings of rebellion--the kind that would cause me to reject the authority of the Bible, my pastors, parents, youth leaders, or anyone who would keep me from sinning profusely.  The list was longer than this, but you get the idea.   Sadly, scores and scores of teenagers raised in the dominant forms of Christianity in our culture are still being taught the same things.   They are trained to distrust so many of the feelings the...

Years ago, when anyone and everyone began to create Facebook pages and join Facebook groups, I started discovering scores of old friends I had known when I was a young man working at Walt Disney World.  As I began fielding friend requests as well as sending a few of my own, almost every one of these people I had known back then had the same question for me:  "Are you really  a pastor?"   They knew who I was when I was a twenty-something young fellow who had never met a party he didn't like.  And there were stories they could tell about many things I had either forgotten or didn't want to remember, if you know what I mean.  I also discovered that there were more than a few people to whom I  owed apologies because of my ungentlemanly, boorish, and uncaring actions during that time.  It wasn't much fun, but I did my best to make things right.    But there was one friend from long ago who had a different kind of story to tell. ...

There was another school shooting this week---this time in Central St. Louis.   Two people were killed in addition to the gunman, who was said to have been thwarted in his efforts to kill more people because of the lockdown procedures the school had in place.  The news of this shooting was buried on most major news outlets' websites underneath news of the death of actor Leslie Jordan, a story about Senator Lindsey Graham, and a host of others.  I know this because I checked.  Meanwhile, we'll all collectively shrug our shoulders and decide everything will be all right since it didn't happen in our neighborhood.   That shrug of resignation is practiced more in our culture than all of the combined efforts we might exert to change or transform the world for the better.  There's a line from a song by Matt Kearny that speaks to this denial of our shared suffering:  You could try to run from what runs in your blood But you still gotta share it....

I really do have the most interesting conversations in my line of work.  The other day, I talked about meditation and prayer with some folks, as you do.   The conversation shifted to how difficult it is to meditate or pray so that you let go of your consciousness and, along with it, your worries, anxieties, sense of time, etc.   We all nodded sagely, and a few of us even looked off into the distance like we had figured out the meaning of life. At that point, I made a confession.   I told the group that one of the most challenging things for me is that whenever I try to meditate or pray for any length of time, I fall asleep.  I fall dead asleep--the kind of sleep where you drool, snore, and your head bobs around like you're a bobblehead on the dash of a New York City cab.  You should have seen the relief that came over the expressions of most of the people in the group.  Many of them nodded in agreement.  And one of them said, "Me, ...

Today's sermon is one I prepared to preach several weeks ago as part of the little series I was doing entitled, "Lessons From The Road," but I decided to wait on it so we could do the "I'm All In!" series.  But I wanted to preach this sermon, so I'm super glad I get the chance before our next series, which will be pretty cool.  This sermon was inspired by a lesson I  learned about my need for control throughout my summer-long sabbatical.   There are so many things in life that we can't control--but that doesn't stop us from trying, does it?   I learned on the road this summer that I couldn't control much of anything, really...  I had issues with:   Weather - Thunderstorms are not all that fun to drive through.  Roadwork - It looks like that infrastructure money that most of the leaders in the southern states didn't vote for is funding A LOT OF ROAD WORK. Detours - GPS can come in handy when detoured all over creation and back. ...

I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh's fantastic book Coming Home, an exploration of the intersections between Christianity and Buddhism when I came across Hanh's  excellent teaching on Jesus' Great Commandment:  This is the true meaning of loving God with all your might.  You do not reserve for that object of your love only a few minutes or one hour a day.  You have to devote twenty-four hours to touching the Kingdom of God, to touching the ultimate dimension that is deep in you.  You can only love your God with all your might when you are really a full-time student or practitioner.  First of all, this teaching comes from one of the great Buddhist teachers of our time, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by none other than Martin Luther King, Jr.  It's also one of the most challenging and convicting things I've ever read about what it means to follow Jesus and to keep the Great Commandment.  I've been thinking about this since I read it thi...

Fr. Anthony de Mello shared this brilliant little parable in his book The Song of the Bird :  A Christian scholar who held the Bible  To be literally true was once accosted by a scientist who  said, “According to the Bible the  Earth was created some five thousand  years ago, But we have discovered bones  that point to life on earth  a million years ago.” Pat came the answer: “When  God created earth five thousand  years ago, he deliberately put those  bones in to test our faith and see  if we would believe his Word  rather than scientific evidence.”  If you are reading this and you wonder how someone could be so obtuse in their thinking and that this is most likely a hyperbolic story, think again.  I've heard these things my whole life as (primarily) well-meaning people seek to justify their belief that the entire Bible is not only literally true but also inerrant and infallible.   The view illustrated in d...

Matthew McConaughey is my spirit animal.  There, I said it, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.  The reasons for that first statement are legion.  Start with the fact that I live in the same town as Matthew---albeit in starkly different neighborhoods.   Add to that the fact that he's starred in some fantastic movies that I love ( Dazed & Confused, Tropic Thunder, Amistad, Free State of Jones ) and my favorite detective show of all time ( True Detective ).  He also spouts Texas-style, zen-soaked, spirit-filled, plain-spoken wisdom with just about every doggone thing he says.  Some of these take a bit to understand, but it sounds incredible when he's sharing them.  So there's that.  In fact, many months ago, when I was reading his memoir, Greenlights, I wrote down this quote from the book:  The sooner we become less impressed with our life, our accomplishments, our career, our relationships, the prospects in front of us—the sooner we beco...

The other morning, I did something I'd done far too many times.  I sat in front of my computer, drinking my coffee and thinking about the day before, and became overwhelmed with regret.  I got to thinking of all the things I'd missed, the things I'd said and done that may have caused harm to myself and others.  I wished I'd done things differently on a bunch of decisions.  I started overthinking everything and was in a funk over it before too long.  It's funny how easy it is to give advice to other people and so difficult to hear it yourself.  Because at that moment, I heard my voice saying things like, "You've only got today." or "Don't look back; you're not going that way."  Then I kind of muttered out loud, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is different."  Maybe you've had those kinds of moments, too.  I am inclined to believe that we all have.  Living in regret is one of the many things that keep us from becoming the peopl...

Many people talk about truth as if it's concrete, set in stone, not at all relative, abundantly evident, and crystal clear.   The problem is there doesn't seem to be much consensus about what constitutes truth in our culture, and even less when it comes to things that might be considered universally true.   Truth has been politicized and weaponized by not just political organizations but also religious ones---each seeking to gain a monopoly on the truth to support their own agendas.   Even we regular folk have a hard time knowing what's true and what isn't anymore because there seems to be so much misinformation on social media platforms, cable news, the internet, and such.    And what some of us believe to be accurate might be grounded in absolute fantasy, wishful thinking, and outright delusion.   Still, if we are told repeatedly that a thing is true by sources we believe to be truthful---it's hard to dissuade us otherwise.  There...

I remember the first time I started to doubt that the faith I had been raised to embrace as my own wasn't all it was cracked up to be.  I was in the 6th grade, and my Bible teacher at the Christian school I attended taught Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus.   In the parable, the rich man wakes up in Hades after he dies and can see Lazarus (a poor man who used to beg outside his house) hanging out with Abraham in Paradise.  Because I'd been taught that the Bible was literally true, I assumed (like everyone else in the room) that even though the story was a parable, it was somehow accurate. I wondered to my teacher how Heaven and Hell could be so close.  My teacher then told us that in Jesus' day, Sheol (or Hell) and a place called Paradise were both at the center of the earth, separated by a barrier.  He even drew a diagram.   Interestingly, he was merely echoing beliefs about the afterlife that existed in first-century Judaism, particular...

Today we're going to be concluding the series that we started four weeks ago entitled "I'm All In!"  This series has helped us see more clearly how we can live an "all-in" kind of life as we seek to follow Jesus together.  Over the course of this series we've learned what it means to be invited, included, and involved and now today we're going to learn what it means to be all-in with our community of faith by being invested.  As I revealed last week, we've been leading up to some things with this sermon series---today is the day when we're going to be challenging our members and friends to get involved, and invested with your time and talent.   Next week, we'll be asking everyone to go all-in with their financial commitments as we join together to lay the foundation for the incredible growth as a family of faith that I just know we're going to experience this year.  Growth in numbers, sure... but also growth in faith, hope, and love. ...