Presby-Musings

"As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. 'Follow me,' he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him." - Matthew 9:9 When Jesus called Matthew to be one of the twelve disciples, he was really stretching the good will of the other eleven.  Matthew was a tax collector, which meant that he took advantage of his own people in order to line his pockets.  And worse yet, Matthew was one of the tax collectors who set up on the docks and taxed the fishermen who were coming in from fishing all night.  Since most of Jesus' followers were fisherman, they probably already knew and couldn't stand Matthew.   But Jesus called Matthew to follow him, and it says in the text that Matthew simply got up and followed.  He left behind his booth, his livelihood, and his old life, and embraced a new way of living and a new set of traveling companions.  That text tells me that Matthew must have been longing for ...

I had this dream the other night.  In the dream, I was about to preach in front of a large audience, clutching only a handful of my written notes.   Oddly, the monstrous, stone pulpit I was to preach from was on a hill down the street from where the crowd was gathered.  I climbed the stairs leading up the hill and stood in front of the pulpit, which towered over my head.  I glanced behind me, and noticed where I was standing happened to be on the edge of a steep cliff that fell into the ocean.   Inside the pulpit was a small fireplace (kind of like a hibachi) that was flickering and warm.  I spoke into the microphone, "Can anyone hear me?"  A voice shouted up from down below, "Loud and Clear!"  I laughed nervously, "This is the weirdest place I've ever preached."  From a block away I heard the crowd erupt with laughter.  Suddenly, I had the overwhelming desire to put all of my sermon notes into the fire.  I reached out with...

I am in the middle of preaching a sermon series on "happiness," or more specifically how to discover what it means to find true happiness in life. This week we are venturing into the arena of the workplace, which I think has become the unreachable and unknowable Font of Happiness for many people in our culture.  Most of us live under the mistaken impression that if we just do the right sort of work that we will find fulfillment and happiness. We have been trained by our dominant culture to believe that there is a career out there, a job, a profession that is perfect for  us.  And if we can only find that job that is perfect for  us, we will find fulfillment, we know happiness. What if we're wrong about this, though?  What if instead of thinking of "good work" as something created to give us fulfillment, we found fulfillment in the knowledge that we  were created for good work? I know.  That's pretty deep.  But even though the difference...