Presby-Musings

The other day, I got a mailer from a politician who isn't one of my representatives and doesn't even come from my state.  This politician was decrying that America was going to hell in a handbasket, and they were the only person in the way of that becoming a reality.   The mailer then went on to list all of the reasons for America's impending doom, none of which had anything to do with the common good or anything that might make anyone's life better.  Everything on their list was related to what they called a "battle" in the "culture war" that was being waged in our country.  Of course, they wanted me to donate money to keep them fighting for what "really matters" in our society. After placing the mailer where it belonged (in the garbage), I thought about the whole "culture war" terminology used by the politician.   I've heard that phrase bandied about by politicians and preachers my whole life. Still, I never considered why i

St. Augustine once wrote, "God loves all of us as if there were only one of us."  There's a beauty in that statement that resonates with me and perhaps you, too.  But how do we know  this to be accurate and not just opinion or wishful thinking?  The more we ponder these things, the more our heads spin, which is precisely why most of us don't want to think too deeply about why we want to view God as love--we desperately don't want to be wrong about it.  Because we know how fickle we can be as human beings.  We know that what might seem like love for one person may not feel like love to another.  Or we wonder about the feelings we call love and sometimes doubt, deny, or wish to be rid of them.  It's almost impossible to imagine that God could love purely, intensely, without reservation or conditions because none of us seem to be able to do so.   It is actually disorienting to realize that the love we hope of God is filled with wild abandon, self-sacrifice, and u

Today is the first Sunday of the Season of Lent.  Lent is a word that originates in the Latin word for 40. It is connected to a significant "Forty" in the Scriptures, namely, the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness after he was baptized and before he began his ministry.  Throughout the Scriptures, "forty" is a number that signifies preparation, testing, working through challenges, and being made ready.  In the Genesis account of the Great Flood, it rains forty days and forty nights.  The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years.  Psalm 40 is a psalm that speaks to relying on God when we are going through times of challenge... the list goes on.  During this season of Lent, we will be focusing on what it means to be prepared to follow Jesus wherever Jesus leads.  And to be prepared to follow Jesus, we need to learn to Live Differently, which is the title of our Lenten sermon series.  And during this series, we will focus on The Counter-Cultural

I love poetry.   There's something freeing and beautiful to me about reading great poems, filled with incredible imagery, shaped and fashioned to make the most of language and rhythms of speech, and that convey emotions and ideas in creative and thought-provoking ways.   I  have this excellent book that I was given recently entitled "One Poem A Day," which gives you prompts to write poems of all kinds.  So over the last month, I've written a new poem almost every day.    I don't often publicly share the poems I write.  But, as I was writing this one, I felt I might want to share it in a Devo.   The prompt was: "Write a poem as one long question."   As I stared at the page, wondering what my question might be, I suddenly began to write almost before I knew what I would ask.  Here's the poem:  The Question What is that You really  think of us from wherever  it is that You ponder  such things, as if You pondered,  which is to say, sat and  thought, or b

Stop me if you have ever had this experience...  You know that you need to have a conversation with your [coworker, relative, spouse, child, or friend], and you know the conversation will be challenging, so you keep finding excuses to put off having the conversation.  Or this one...  You have a task that you need to get done, and it's the one task that you know will be the most [boring, difficult, draining, or impossible] task you have to do for the week, so you keep moving other things up the to-do list, so you don't have to do it.  Meanwhile, you can feel the guilt gnawing at you inside.  You fret about it, and it never leaves your waking thoughts.  You can't stop thinking about what you should be doing or who you should be talking to, and then you start losing sleep on top of everything.  If I have described anything familiar, guess what?  It means you're human. Because we all do this from time to time, but when we do, we lose the opportunity to learn from the hard t

A couple of weeks ago, when Central Texas shut down due to a massive ice storm that swept the state, I found myself trapped in my house for several days, which was fortuitous in many ways.  To be fair, my experience was unlike many people in my community because I had power for most of the time I was sequestered.  So I was warm, had a refrigerator full of food from my pre-Icemaggedon Costco run, and had nothing on my calendar.  I had cause to reflect on the fact that my feeling was familiar because, at least for a few days, things felt a lot like they did during the height of Covid.   I remembered how I would sometimes go days back then without changing out of my "sleepy pants" and shuffle around the house all day in slippers, along with everyone else under my roof.   There's so much I don't miss about those many months, but I miss the feeling of having most of the daily responsibilities that had crowded my calendar lifted and being left with a lot of time to think (p

  One of my most poignant memories at a concert was when I got the chance to see U2 during the "Joshua Tree Tour" in 1986.   For years, U2 has ended their shows with the song "40," which is drawn directly from Psalm 40 and has the refrain, "How long, to sing this song?" which the band repeatedly sings as the song ends.  They fade out one instrument and then another until the only sound is lead singer Bono's voice leading the crowd as they sing along.  On that summer day, the sun had been beating down on us through two opening acts and then a complete set of U2's classics before it finally began to disappear, streaking the sky with a deep orange and dusky golden sunset.   By the time the band began to play "40," the crowd was exhausted but still exhilarated. And we sang the refrain that day along with Bono, even after the lights went down and the band was backstage preparing to leave.   We sang that refrain at the top of our lungs like a v

True prayer is always about getting the “who” right.  Who is doing the praying?  You or God in you? - Richard Rohr  Have you ever wondered why so many people from different religious traditions seem to do the same thing when they pray?   In one way or another, we all bow our heads and either close our eyes, or focus on the floor, a prayer book, the six inches in front of our face, or some religious icon.   In a recent article on a website dedicated to Jewish theology, this explanation was offered:   The Bible teaches that bowing, as part of the service of God, elevates a human being. It is not degrading to bow before God, because bowing does not require that we give up our power and knowledge. Rather, in bowing we come to understand the truth of the limitations of our power and knowledge. That makes so much sense to me, and it adds some deeper meaning to the ritual of bowing our heads and doing our best to stay focused on prayer.  But there is something about prayer and the rituals of

Today is Transfiguration Sunday, the end of Epiphany, the last short bridge we must cross before entering into our journey of the Season of Lent.  This Sunday, we are confronted with the truth about who Jesus is and what we intend to do about that startling and fantastic fact.  The passage of Scripture that we will be studying today contains a story where a couple of the disciples get a glimpse of who Jesus is- and they don't get it. More on that in a moment.  But first, let me share something that might seem a little convoluted at first--but stick with me; it will all make sense in a bit.  Sometimes the experience of glory is too much for us.  Sometimes, it's overwhelming when we get a glimpse of God's presence around us.  Sometimes we don't know what to do when we see Jesus for who Jesus really is.  I decided to take a page from Joel Osteen today---hear me out, hear me out.  He always has a joke in every one of his sermons.  I'll avoid the obvious thing I could ha

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.                 - Rabindranath Tagore The other day I had an epiphany of sorts when conversing with my son about whether or not dogs understand the passage of time.   I've learned that these are the conversations you have with your kids from time to time when your limits of knowledge are tested, and you either know what you're talking about or do your best to sound like it.  The good news is that I at least had a rudimentary understanding of how dogs process the passage of time from something I read once.     I told him that dogs are conditioned to anticipate future events based on past experiences and can sense when things may happen because of this conditioning.   But if you leave your dog at home when you go to work, your dog has no idea what you meant when you said, "I'll be back this afternoon."  When you come home, your dog doesn't wonder why you were 20 minutes late because you had to go

In second grade, I got paddled at school nearly every day for about a month.  First, you should know that this was back in 1975, and I went to a fundamentalist Christian school, which eagerly espoused the idea that if you "spared the rod," you would most certainly "spoil the child." So, the reason for my oft-daily whooping was that I had difficulty concentrating and forgot to bring my subject notebooks to my desk from the cubby hole where they were kept when we changed subjects throughout the day.   The rule in the classroom was when you forgot your notebook, you got a mark.  When you got three marks, you got a paddling.  I forgot my notebooks a lot.  The paddlings would occur before the end of the day at a time of the teacher's choosing, and they always happened in the girls' restroom. There would be three licks with a reasonably large paddle designed for such occasions.   Everyone in the classroom would see you being led away to your doom, listening for th

Recently, I wrote about how we often hold other people to standards that we don't apply to ourselves.  The shorthand version of this is that we judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.   But most of us also do something else that's far more destructive: We tend to believe that if our intentions are good, we are excused from any fallout that may occur when we pursue them without regard to who or what gets harmed along the way.  We also tend to fall in love with the notion that "doing good" is the ultimate virtue and that by doing good, we, too, are good because we're doing it.   Our culture of immediacy seems to reward us for appearances rather than substance.  This is why we want to shape our image on social media, crafting an idealized image of ourselves.   So we carefully curate photos and posts to show the world who we are. In reality, most of us project our good intentions onto the idealized version of ourselves as a "good" pare

The Super Bowl this past Sunday made history in a lot of ways.  It was the first Super Bowl featuring two black starting quarterbacks and the first to feature two brothers on opposing teams.  It was also the first Super Bowl to feature a halftime show with a pregnant star performer (Rhianna), which was awesome.  This Super Bowl also made history by being the first to feature high-profile ads about Jesus.  The $2 billion ad campaign "He Gets Us" surprises viewers with modern takes on understanding Jesus in our current cultural climate.  One commercial shows a slideshow of black-and-white images of migrants fleeing their homes to avoid persecution. The ad revealed that the story is actually about Jesus, his mother, Mary, and her husband, Joseph. The other ad displays black-and-white images of disputes between people over racial justice, pandemic lockdowns, and politics. The ad then states, "Jesus loved the people we hate." Recently, it was revealed that the funding fo

The other morning when I was looking at my "memories" on Facebook, I saw one that I posted from February 2017, just a few months after we moved to Austin, TX.  The post included several videos from my middle son Jackson's regional choir performance in 7th grade.   He'd only been in the choir at his school for less than two months and had already earned a spot in the regional choir, which was made up of the best singers in the city.  We were all proud of him, but no one in our family was as proud as my mom.  At that time, she was already showing the signs of the illness that would take her life just eight months later, but she was in the crowd with the rest of us, cheering Jackson on.  I still remember turning to her and seeing the tears in her eyes and the scrunched look on her face that she would get when she tried not to cry.  At the time, it choked me up, too.  She said softly, "I'm so proud of him." My dream when we moved to Austin was for my mom to

Today we're continuing our journey through the Season of Epiphany, which ends the season of Christmas (the famous "12 Days") and lasts until Lent.   To recap: "epiphany" is a word that essentially means "realization" or, more specifically, "inspired realization."  When you have an epiphany you know it.  You feel it in your bones.   It's more important than realizing that you took a wrong turn on the way to Albuquerque and ended up in Hoboken.  That would be a seriously wrong turn.   An epiphany is when you realize something that has the potential to change your life, the way you think about things, your future, and maybe your past... in other words, it's pretty momentous.   So why should we care about an entire season in the historical church traditions dedicated to having an epiphany?  It comes down to what it means concerning Jesus and, more specifically, what it means because of the Incarnation.  The Incarnation is the theology of