Presby-Musings

When I was in seventh grade there was this kid named Tim, who annoyed me.  Truth be told, Tim annoyed everyone.   One day Tim and I got into a fight in class.  It wasn't much of a fight, honestly.  Tim said something insulting to me for like the fourth time that day, and I jumped out of my desk and tackled him.  By the time the teacher pulled me off of him, I had been pounding on Tim's head pretty good.   We both got sent the principals office and we both got paddled, which still happened back in those days.   I had to shake Tim's hand and act all buddy-buddy afterward, but when we were walking down the hall back to class I told him, "You keep mouthing off to me like that, and I'm going to kick your butt all over again." Tim looked at me blankly and said, "If I get paddled at school, I get way worse when I get home. Way worse."  At that moment, for the first time since the beginning of the fracas, Tim began to cry.  ...

In the Gospel of Mark, there is a short, odd story about how Jesus healed a man with leprosy.   40 A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” 41 Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” - Mark 1:40-41 One way of translating the phrase "Jesus was indignant" in Greek is by saying something like, "When he saw the man, it was a gut-wrenching moment for Jesus."   Do we get angry when we see injustice, disease, poverty and evil in the world?  Do we feel for people in gut-wrenching ways when we see them lost, lonely, miserable, sick and afraid?   Or are we too engrossed in our own lives, our own junk to notice the pain and suffering in the world around us?  Or to put it in the terms of our current culture: Are we so obsessive over what's happening in our Facebook feed that we can't even see the people who are posting on it?   Soc...

Today we are continuing the sermon series that is taking us all the way through the month of August--a series entitled #struggles: Following Jesus In A Selfie-Centered World.   Each of the last several weeks we have been exploring how technology and social media have been shaping our culture and our understanding of what it means to be content, to be in relationship with one another, to be fully authentic...  And the overriding question we've been asking is simply this: "As Christians, how do we navigate through this rapidly changing culture--a culture that is decidedly "selfie-centered."   This week we are going to be talking about Compassion--and more specifically how the rise of social media and our increasing reliance on technology have shaped our ability to show it in some not very helpful ways.  First, let's turn in our Bibles to Mark chapter 1 verses 40-41.   40 A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, “If you are willing, y...