Presby-Musings

Everyone is angry.   At least that's what it seems like when I turn on cable news in the morning.  Or when I periodically scroll through my Facebook feed.   Every time I turn around I am being asked to boycott something or another, sign a petition... It feels to me as though our culture has become addicted to outrage.  We can't live without it.  We feel threatened.  We feel afraid.  We see the world changing rapidly in front of our eyes.  We experience tragedies that could have been avoided.  We weather storms and floods and fire.   And the pain we feel often turns to anger.   In her book Braving the Wilderness, author Brene Brown writes:  "Anger is a catalyst.  Holding on to it will make us exhausted and sick.  Internalizing anger will take away our joy and spirit; externalizing anger will make us less effective in our attempts to create change and forge connection."...

Words are powerful. Words have the power to give life or to take it away.   Words have the power to heal or destroy.   "Death and life are in the power of the tongue," Proverbs 18:21 states.  In Proverbs 21:23 we read, "Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue, keeps himself out of trouble."   I am ashamed to admit that there have been times in my life when I have used my words to hurt or destroy others.   Sometimes I've done it unintentionally, but there have been more than a few times when I've used hurtful and killing words out of malice and anger.  And most of the time, the person I've said those words about never heard them.   We have this mistaken notion that the things we say are somehow harmless if the person we're referring to can't hear us say them.     What I've learned about the power of words is that even though the person about whom I am speaking my angry, hurtful words isn't within earshot---they are hurt ...

I stood at the counter in the coffee shop trying to control my emotions, and not let what was going on inside of me show on my face, which I could feel getting flushed with anger.  There she was.  The former church member who had left my church and did her best to take a bunch of other people with her.   I found myself stewing about her refusal to meet with me to resolve it all, and the nasty response to a kind letter I'd sent to try to reconcile.  I thought about everything I'd learned after her departure and how hurtful it all had been.   Those kinds of moments happen like that don't they?  When you think you've forgotten about your wounds, and then in a flash they're all re-opened as you come face to face with the person who caused them.   It's easy in those moments to wish them ill, to hope for the worst for them.   It's easy to give them power over your happiness as you begin to think of all the bad things they've done to you, and ...

This week we are concluding the sermon series that we've been working on for the past month--a sermon series entitled "Red: Understanding the Hard Sayings of Jesus."  Each week we've been tackling some of the challenging and confounding red letters of the Bible--the saying of Jesus that are printed in red, for those of you who find that last bit odd.   Some of the words of Jesus that we read in the Bible seem completely out of character for him--it's hard to imagine him saying some of them, to be honest.  Today we're going to focus on a verse from Matthew 5:22.  It's a passage that is right smack dab in the middle of the incredible Sermon on the Mount--a sermon filled with beautiful words, challenging calls to discipleship and hopeful visions of the way the world should be.   And as you are reading through the Sermon on the Mount you hit verse 22 of chapter 5 and suddenly you realize that Jesus just said that calling someone a fool is the same a...