Presby-Musings

This week I will be preaching the last installment of the nine-part sermon series, "The Greatest Prayer"--a line by line study of the Lord's Prayer .  And yes, this sermon is on " Amen. " I debated on whether to preach an entire sermon on one word---after all, common sense would suggest that such an idea would not be wise.  But in the end my common sense didn't win (like it ever does), which in this case I think is a pretty good thing.  First, I must address something that has bothered me for some time.  On the worship bulletins at my church we put this heading above everything else inside the bulletin: ORDER OF WORSHIP.  This suggests something that is fairly true for most Presbyterian worship services:  worship is orderly.  Presbyterians do things "decently and in order," which includes their worship services, too, as I've come to understand in my 20-odd years or so as a Presbyterian.   But should we order worship?  Should we dare...

This week I am continuing the sermon series that I've been preaching on the Lord's Prayer , entitled "The Greatest Prayer."  We've been going line by line through the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, and this week we are studying "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil..." Throughout each of the sermons I've preached in this series, I've lifted up how each of the lines of the Lord's Prayer is full of meaning that we tend to gloss over on our way to other things.  As a result, we end up "saying" the prayer rather than "praying" it.  When we pray "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil"  I think what we are actually praying is, "We are forgiven but not completed."  We'll come back to this in a moment... How would you define "temptation?"  Most of us would say that temptation is what happens when you are given an opportunity to fulfill a desire---one...

This week I am continuing my line by line sermon series on The Lord's Prayer with "Our Daily Bread."  Every installment of this series has re framed the lines of the prayer in such a way that we've hopefully gained a better understanding of what they mean.  This week, our "take away" is pretty simple:  Life without the Bread of Life is no life at all.  Let's get into it. I love the smell of baking bread.  It makes me think of my grandmas.  I don't know why exactly.  Neither one of them baked bread all of the time.  I just have these memories, though...  My dad's mother was an old farm girl from Colorado.  The bread she baked was thick and yeasty and you would smear it with margarine and jelly and eat it like cake.  The smell of it would fill the whole house when she baked a loaf or two. She would always cut me a slice right out of the oven.  I can still see the steam spiraling up into the air from those pieces of bread ...

This week I'll be preaching the fourth installment of the sermon series, "The Greatest Prayer" a study on the Lord's Prayer .  We've been going line by line through the prayer so that we can gain a better understanding of what we are praying when we pray the Lord's Prayer.  I told my congregation this past week that my hope was that we would become a church full of people who are not just "saying" the Lord's Prayer, but a church of full or people who are "praying" the Lord's Prayer. The fourth line of the prayer is " Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."  There's a burning question imbedded in this line of the prayer that anyone who believes in God has asked at one time or another in their life: "How do we know God's will?"  Like we have done with each of the preceding lines of the Lord's Prayer, we need an explanation of what we are really praying when we pray, "Thy will be done...

When I was a kid I used to like to go to Burger King .  This was in the days before the Happy Meal , and Burger King pretty much flogged McDonald's when it came to kid friendly crud because they gave you a paper crown to wear. I would wear my paper crown with pride even after I left the BK.  As my mom ran errands and did her thing around town with me in tow, other children would stare at me in jealousy because they knew I had just eaten at BK.  I felt like... well, royalty. Wearing a paper crown sort of does something to your psyche when your five years old.  At least it did to me, which may tell you way too much about my psyche.  At any rate, I felt different.  There were all the poor children shuffling through the grocery store without a crown and then there was me.  King.  Ruler of all that I surveyed.  I could sit in the grocery cart and wave to them with that sort of backhanded wave that kingly people wave.  The crown, howeve...