Presby-Musings

This week we are concluding the sermon series "At The Movies" for the month of July--and if it sounds a bit familiar, you would be correct in assuming we've done something like this before.  I say like this, because this is actually the second year in a row that we have scheduled the sermon series "At The Movies" during the month of July.  We did this for a couple of good reasons:  First, July typically is the worst month of the year for church attendance and so most churches just fold it up for the entire month.  But not us.  We decided to ramp up this month for the most interactive, creative sermon series of the year.  The second reason why we are doing At The Movies again, is because as Christians we need to learn a powerful lesson about the universe:  Everything is Spiritual.  We need to be able to look at the world around us, at culture, at art, at theater, music and even movies and be able to find the spiritual core at the center of i...

One of the many things I love about my house is the fact that it's oriented so that most of the larger windows in the back of the house face east.  Today as I watched the sun rise through all of those eastward facing windows, I had an epiphany of sorts.   Before the sun rose, there was nothing but shadows, vague shapes of trees, hints of what was really out there beyond my windows, but nothing more.  But as the light began to dawn, I could begin to make out more clearly what was actually there.  Colors came into view, depth, texture, the intricacies of those former vague shapes.   Sometimes your imagination can run wild in the darkness, making the shapes into things that are scarier, and more dreadful than they are.   The light reveals their true nature, though.  The light turns a shadowy demon, ready to pounce on you into an overgrown bush.  The light transforms a menacing figure watching you in your house into a gently swaying tree. ...

As a pastor, I often find the scheduling of the Fourth Sunday of Advent to be a bit off---especially this year.  The fact that the final Sunday in this season of expectation is literally the day before   Christmas Eve offers a temptation of sorts. I'll call this temptation The Temptation of Tomorrow . Tomorrow is fairly tempting in its own right, especially when Today is not shaping up to be that spectacular, if you know what I mean. But when Tomorrow is Christmas Eve... that's a whole other level of temptation, my friend, especially since we find ourselves at the end of a very long, and difficult Advent. Let me ask you something.  Are you limping to the finish line this year?  Are you ready for all of this to be over and for December 25th to finally arrive?  Are you feeling a bit battered by the gauntlet of shopping traffic and other assorted obstacles that you have had to face each and every blessed Advent day? I feel you. And so I give you a sto...

When I was a kid, one of the characters in the Bible that intrigued me more than most was John the Baptist .  I remember reading the description of this wild man from the desert, who preached that the Messiah was coming and baptized people in a river, and my imagination was sparked.  John the Baptist looked, dressed and acted like a lunatic. It was said that he wore camel hair clothes---not the cool, hipster sort of camel hair, but real, gross, wiry camel hair that smelled like camels.  And he had a leather belt tied around his waist to hold the smelly camel hair in place.  I always imagined this belt was big and wide---the sort of belt that a pirate would wear to stuff his pistols and sword into while he swashbuckled. Then came the kicker:  John the Baptist ate locusts and wild honey.  This freaked me out as a kid. Heck, it freaks me out as an adult.  I ate a chocolate covered grasshopper once.  It was crunchy and tasted like chocolate, but...

Of all of the beautiful Advent stories in the Bible, my absolute favorite has to be the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth , the parents of John the Baptist .  In Luke's gospel we get introduced to this lovely old couple, who--we are informed--are faithful, God-fearing and childless. That last bit of information is sort of placed there in the Scripture as a glimpse into the secret pain of these two lovely people, which, by now in their life together, they had undoubtedly learned to accept.  Knowing what we know about 1st Century Jewish culture, a childless couple would have felt the weight of societal and religious pressure to have children, and perhaps may have even heard the whispered word, "Cursed!" uttered by their neighbors.   But that pain, the kind of pain that we've been talking about, probably faded to a dull ache by the time we are introduced to Zechariah and Elizabeth for the first time.     Zechariah was a priest---one of 18,000 of them...