Presby-Musings

One of the more fascinating aspects of Christian theology is how human beings are meant to be co-creators with God.   From my experience, when I talk about this concept in sermons, classes, or even in spaces like this, some folks are puzzled by it.   Thinking about this notion can feel jarring if you were taught that God created the universe in six days and rested with everything completed.   This is what I was taught to believe in Sunday school, youth group, and the Christian schools I attended in my youth.  I was taught the "Young Earth" theory, which meant that the universe, including Earth, was only 6,000 years old.   The first humans, I was told, were created as adults and were fully capable in the areas of language, art, music, the ability to farm and have herds of already domesticated animals, etc.  The answers were ridiculous when I asked questions about things that troubled me.  What about dinosaurs?   Pshaw! They...

One of the most beautiful parts of every worship service I lead happens at the end.   Many folks may agree that the most beautiful part of every church service is the end, but I digress.  What I'm referring to is what is known as the Benediction or the "sending" part of the worship service. The Benediction is the "last word" people hear before leaving the Sanctuary.   Every pastor I know has a preferred way of offering a benediction to their congregation, the words they've come to love that send the people out into the world with a blessing.  I have one that I use, and I have employed it for at least the last fifteen years.  "Go out into this world in peace, and go knowing that the God who sends you out into this world does not send you alone.  This God goes before you, is behind you, is all around you and in you." Then I recite the Aaronic blessing from the book of Numbers:  "May the Lord bless and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shi...

Today's Devo is one from the archives that I've updated a bit.  It is still speaking to me, and I hope it speaks to you today, too.   One of my favorite things to do each day is to check the "Memories" link on my Facebook page.  Each day, I will get a glimpse of what I was doing on the same day in years past.   These daily excursions down memory lane are often bittersweet, funny, downright sad, and occasionally instructive.   The other day, I saw a post that a former church member had posted many years ago. She was thanking me for a sermon I preached.  She went on to publicly extol my virtues, telling me what a great pastor I was and how much she appreciated my leadership.  That particular memory made me chuckle a bit because not even a year after she posted that panegyric message, the woman and her husband angrily left the church.  When I reached out to them to find out what was wrong, I received a blistering reply about how I was ...

I was thinking the other day about the concept of freedom.   When I say "freedom," I don't mean the degraded version of the word dragged through the muck of the politics of our day.   Far too many people in our current culture seem to be basing their political affiliations on which party they believe will either preserve or fight for their personal freedom.  And yet, they unwittingly will then vote against their own self-interests, against the very notion of freedom they espouse, and align themselves with ideology that actually reduces their freedoms.   For all those who seem to be occupied with that version of freedom, no one seems to be talking about the concept of freedom itself, nor are they talking about what it actually feels like to be free.  I tried to remember a time when I felt completely free, and I had to go back to when I was a child, again as a teenager, and then as a young man.   Most of us would do the same.  There's...

  There's this quote from author and poet Wendell Berry that I've read just about every day for the last few years.   It's one of the most challenging quotes I've come across. It's both troubling and comforting, which is what makes it such excellent wisdom:  Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.  At first blush, this might seem a bit of a rose-colored-glasses sentiment, but it's far from it.  This is no "Don't Worry Be Happy" kind of jingle (although I love that song); it's a bit more misty and mysterious.  "Be joyful" is most certainly the kind of exhortation that you would expect from an overly sentimental meme with kittens and flowers that you might see on your overly Christian friend's Facebook feed.  But few churchy folks would hardly ever include the last bit: "though you have considered all the facts."  This quote implies that things are not as they ought to be.  The facts reveal it to be so.  You mi...

Some months ago, I was thinking about what it meant to take a "leap of faith."  The phrase had been going through my head, and I was trying to figure out how to best describe it.   I have some idea of what it means.   I've taken a few of those leaps in my life. In fact, there have been more than a few moments when I decided to leap, hoping beyond hope that whatever faith compelled me to do so would sustain me if I fell on my face.    Then, one day, I decided to write a poem about taking a leap of faith, letting the feelings and images in my head guide me.  Here is what I wrote:  Leap of Faith There's no safety net in this  circus tent, no trampoline  below to stop the fall, and  send you springing to your feet  to the sound of thunderous applause.  Instead, there is only a sawdust floor and an aisle paved with the good  intentions of those who now stand  below, staring upward with an  open-mouthed, incr...

I was thinking today about the nature of our dreams.  Not just the dreams we experience when we sleep (at least those we recall) but the dreams we have about the future, our lives, the world, and more.  The poet Carl Sandburg once wrote:  "Nothing happens until at first we dream."  That's a beautiful sentiment, and hundreds like it in art and literature.  There is truth in Sanburg's words and a not-so-subtle exhortation to follow our dreams wherever they lead us.  But what if the dreams we have are too big to put a sentiment around.  What if they feel impossible?  What if we believe our dreams are beyond our reach because of who we are or who we've become?  My favorite quote about dreams is from a comedian, the late Mitch Hedberg:  I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later. That always makes me laugh.  It's one of the most authentic quotes about dreams I've ever read...

Have you ever had a moment when you were dealing with a difficult person, and you said to yourself, "I wish they would just grow up!"? I was at my son's basketball game the other night and made the mistake of sitting near some of the parents from the opposing team.   The guy sitting behind me would not stop chirping at the refs, shouting in my ear, and saying awful things about the kids on my son's team.  At one point, he focused his ire on one of our players, shouting derogatory things about him at the top of his lungs.  As fate would have it, the boy's mom was sitting not far away, and she came over to confront the man.  "That's my son you're talking about," she said to him calmly.  "Maybe you need to remember that they're just kids playing a game."  What ensued was a lot of blustering from the unruly guy, whose wife actually stepped in and pushed him farther down the bleacher away from the other woman.  He kept at it after she re...

Season of Epiphany - Series: The Light The Light of the World has come; what do we do now? This series will help us learn more about walking in the Light and being lights in the world.  Today is the Third Sunday of Epiphany  We will read one of the accounts of Jesus’ calling his disciples and examine how remarkable it was that Jesus called them, and they answered the call.  But first, let me ask you a serious question.  Have any of you at any time in your life had a fantasy about being rescued from your job---when your job stinks?  And when I mean rescued, I mean rescued like Debra Winger in An Officer And a Gentlemen type of rescue.  Which was parodied in an amazing way on The Office.  I used to sell appliances at Circuit City.  I worked 5 days a week, many of which were "bell-to-bell" shifts.  This meant I was at work before the store opened and stayed there until it closed.  There was a lot of standing around.  I have to say, if ...

  Some time ago, I included a Walt Whitman line from one of his poems in a Daily Devo, and a reader reached out to share their favorite Whitman poem, "A Noiseless Patient Spider."  Whitman (1819-1892) was one of the most influential of all the American poets. He was known as the "father" of free verse and part of the movement known as Transcendentalism in 19th-century literature.   His poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider" highlights the depth employed in the transcendentalist approach to poetry, which takes the reader from the ordinary to the extraordinary in just a few lines.   It also reflects the longing that each of us has as human beings for deeper meaning, purpose, and direction in life:  A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. ...

Growing up in the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist wing of the Church, I was fed a steady diet of misinformation about the "war against Christianity" in America.  We were repeatedly told that "the world" was against us, and we were also told that this should fill us with a sense of pride.  To be hated by the world was what we should strive for because we were called to be different.  The key verse for this philosophy came from Jesus in John 15:18, which reads like this: “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you." So, suppose you are a biblical literalist who refuses to dig any deeper into what Jesus was saying here in John's Gospel. In that case, you have what is essentially carte blanche to be as controversial and awful as you want as long as you drape it in a Christian flag.  If anyone disagrees with you or reacts negatively to you, you are covered.  Their offense simply proves your worthiness.  But a simple perusal of the ...

I thought today would be a good day to write about grief and loss.  I don't know why, but it's on my mind and heart, so there you go.  I've learned over the years that grief doesn't go away; it fades for a while and then resurfaces in the weirdest ways.  Today, I woke up feeling the losses of the past few years more deeply for some reason.   I'm missing my mom, for starters.   It's been almost six years since she passed away, and there are moments when I want to talk to her so badly that it aches.  On days like this, I sometimes find an old video of her just to hear her voice and remember what she sounded like.   And then there are other losses that I grieve because all our losses and all our griefs are connected somehow.  In my experience, feeling one leads to feeling them all.  Today is one of those days, I'm afraid.   For me, it's best to just let the grief in rather than trying to fight it.  Fighting grief is...

One of the more puzzling stories in the book of Genesis (and there are many to choose from) from the Hebrew Scriptures is the story of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden in Genesis chapter 3.   The passage reads like this:  22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side[e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. There's a lot to unpack in this passage, for sure.  To begin with, we need to recap what happened to get to this point in the story.   The Scripture tells us that "the serpent" tempts Eve to eat fruit from the one tree in the Garden of Eden that she and A...

Season of Epiphany - Series: The Light The Light of the World has come; what do we do now? This series will help us learn more about what it means to walk in the Light and be lights in the world.  Today is the Second Sunday of Epiphany  And we’re going to read a story about Nathaniel, a skeptical disciple…  And we’re going to learn about how the Light of World often comes from places we’d least expect.  What’s the worst town you can imagine living in—at least in your humble opinion? How do Americans rate the worst cities—an inexact poll.  Crime, Poverty, Cost of Living compared to Income, Services  Florida City, Florida  Detroit Michigan  Gary, Indiana  St. Louis, Missouri  Albany, Georgia  Kansas City, Missouri  Baltimore, Maryland  Flint, Michigan  Birmingham, Alabama Memphis, Tennessee  Little Rock, Arkansas Pine Bluff, Arkansas Milwaukee, Wisconsin Spartanburg, South Carolina What if someone from one of the w...