Presby-Musings

I rode my bike to work yesterday, fulfilling a vow I made before I moved to Austin, TX.  So, roughly three months after arriving in Austin, and after a ton of research and trolling Craigslist for the right kind of "starter" bike, I pulled the trigger and bought an inexpensive bike to help me fulfill my vow.   Yesterday was the first day I rode it to work.   As I pedaled away from my house, I felt incredible.  The sun was shining warmly on my face and a refreshingly cool breeze was blowing behind me, pushing me gently down the road.   A little voice inside my head said, "You did it!  You actually pulled this off!  You're riding your bike to work, dude.  You're saving the earth, doing your part.  You, my friend are an eco-warrior!"   Then I noticed something as I gathered speed out of my neighborhood.  The road I was on was mostly downhill.  Then the little voice inside my head chimed in with this little nugget:  ...

The Way of Jesus is easily the most counter intuitive journey you will ever take.  Once you start stumbling after Jesus, it doesn't take long for you to realize that when Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world," he wasn't joking.   Think about all of the ways that Jesus said this to his disciples and they still didn't get it at first:  "Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it." (Matthew 10:39) 26 "But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— 28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:26-28) "And he said: "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."  (Matthew 18:3) This message is so completely counter-intuitive...

There is a story in the Gospels of a journey that Jesus took with his disciples to Caesarea Philippi, which was a pagan shrine north of the Galilee in the lush forests at the foot of Mt. Hermon.    Caesarea Philippi was the site of an underground spring that made its way to the surface out of a large cave.  A lot of evil things had been done in this pagan shrine over the centuries--dating back to when it was a shrine and sacrificial site to ancient Canaanite gods. When Jesus and his disciples visited there, there were temples to the Roman gods Zeus and Pan, as well as a temple for the worship of Caesar Augustus.  The sort of worship that took place there was often filled with debauchery of every kind.   As they stood in front of all of these temples, and gazed upon the scores of people worshipping and sacrificing at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus turned and asked his followers:     "Who do people say that I am?"   The disciples seemed ...

This week our daily reflections will be focused once again on one of the "hard sayings" of Jesus.  The difficult words of Jesus that we're wrestling with this week come to us from Matthew 5:22 where Jesus said, "But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, 'Raca,' is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell." There's this verse in the New Testament book of Colossians that I've always thought a bid odd.  The Apostle Paul was writing a letter to a group of Christians in the ancient city of Colossae and he's closing it out at the end with a bunch of "how-to's" on what it means to live as Christians.  The verse reads like this, "Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone."   W...

This week our daily reflections will be focused once again on one of the "hard sayings" of Jesus.  The difficult words of Jesus that we're wrestling with this week come to us from Matthew 5:22 where Jesus said, "But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, 'Raca,' is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell." In Luke 6:45 Jesus teaches what it means when our outside matches our inside--when we our words reveal what we are really like on the inside.     A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of . I've known a guy my whole life, the kind of guy I call a "One-Upper."  Maybe you've run into these kinds of people from time to time...

This week our daily reflections will be focused once again on one of the "hard sayings" of Jesus.  The difficult words of Jesus that we're wrestling with this week come to us from Matthew 5:22 where Jesus said, "But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, 'Raca,' is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell." Some of the worst moments in my life have been when I have said something hurtful to someone in the heat of an argument or disagreement, and then had to watch as my words landed on them like a body blow.   And there's a little voice inside of you that tries to tell you not to open your mouth in those moments, but when you are angry, or hurt they come tumbling out despite the protests of that little voice.  For me, it's like I hear myself say the hurtful things that are pouring o...

This week our daily reflections will be focused once again on one of the "hard sayings" of Jesus.  The difficult words of Jesus that we're wrestling with this week come to us from Matthew 5:22 where Jesus said, "But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, 'Raca,' is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell." "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." This phrase, which is uniquely American, has been passed down through the years as a way for parents to reframe and diminish the effects of schoolyard bullying and name-calling for their children who've experienced it. It first appeared in a periodical produced by the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1862, and apparently was already a popular saying even before it was printed there.   It also ha...

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...

This is the third week of daily reflections based on the sermon series, "Red: Understanding the Hard Sayings of Jesus."  This week we'll be focusing on lessons of discipleship learned from Luke 14:26, where Jesus states "Unless you hate father, mother, sister, brother, wife and children--even yourself--you cannot be my disciple."  One aspect of this troublesome verse that we've not talked about this week is the phrase "even yourself." Jesus just had to throw that into the mix, didn't he? So what does it look like when you surrender your self  to God?  For many of us this is probably the most difficult part of the whole surrender process.   We live in a self-obsessed society. We are constantly being told that we need to be better, that we can be better, that we must  be better.  We need to have the right clothes, the right house, the right kind of car, the right diet, read the right books, go to the right gym, do all the right things in ...

This is the third week of daily reflections based on the sermon series, "Red: Understanding the Hard Sayings of Jesus."  This week we'll be focusing on lessons of discipleship learned from Luke 14:26, where Jesus states "Unless you hate father, mother, sister, brother, wife and children--even yourself--you cannot be my disciple."  Surrendering your whole life to God sometimes requires a fundamental shift in the way you view not only your family, children, spouse or yourself, but also in the way you view your accomplishments, possessions and finances. For some of us, surrendering over to God the lure of success, the affirmation and comfort that comes from acquiring money, or even the things that we've managed to accumulate can be way too much to bear.    "God," we might bargain, "you control all of those things over there in my life--you know my spouse and kids, my faith and the church-going side of me... but let's just let me h...

This is the third week of daily reflections based on the sermon series, "Red: Understanding the Hard Sayings of Jesus."  This week we'll be focusing on lessons of discipleship learned from Luke 14:26, where Jesus states "Unless you hate father, mother, sister, brother, wife and children--even yourself--you cannot be my disciple."  It's interesting that in the verse we wrestled with during this past Sunday's sermon (Luke 14:26) Jesus snuck in "self" to the list of things that you need to surrender completely if you are going to follow him.   For some of us, the most difficult thing to surrender to God is ourselves. Because ultimately it means that we have to give up control of our thoughts, our words, actions, decisions and even the ways we define who we are. And none of those acts of surrender come easily to us.   The other day I was listening to a podcast of a pastor and speaker who I admire, and he was doing a teaching on breaking...

This is the third week of daily reflections based on the sermon series, "Red: Understanding the Hard Sayings of Jesus."  This week we'll be focusing on lessons of discipleship learned from Luke 14:26, where Jesus states "Unless you hate father, mother, sister, brother, wife and children--even yourself--you cannot be my disciple."  This past August, for the first time since he started college, my oldest son packed all of his belongings into his VW Jetta and drove off to school on his own to begin his junior year.   The previous two years, Merideth and I had driven up with him, our car jammed to gills with furniture, supplies, and all kinds of things to help make his dorm room "homey."  But this time we stood in our driveway watching him leave, and filled with a new kind of sadness that we hadn't felt before.   We're not "helicopter" parents by any means.  And by helicopter parents I mean the kinds of parents that hover over ...

This is the third week of daily reflections based on the sermon series, "Red: Understanding the Hard Sayings of Jesus."  This week we'll be focusing on lessons of discipleship learned from Luke 14:26, where Jesus states "Unless you hate father, mother, sister, brother, wife and children--even yourself--you cannot be my disciple."  One of my favorite daily devotional books is a year-long devotional comprised of reflections by E. Stanley Jones.  Jones was a Presbyterian missionary, preacher and best-selling author of twenty-eight books, including ten full-year devotionals.  He is said to have preached some sixty thousand times in his life, and in 1938 was called by Time  magazine, "the world's greatest missionary." What I've always loved about Jones' writing and his advice on living the Christian life is the simplicity with which he approached it.  "This isn't rocket science," Jones basically says over a hundred times or ...

This is the third installment of the sermon series "Red: Understanding the Hard Sayings of Jesus"  As we've mentioned over the past couple of weeks, the title of this sermon series is drawn from the idea of "red letter editions" of the Bible, which contain all of the words of Jesus printed in red.  Most of those words of Jesus are amazing, inspiring, thrilling and challenging.   But some of these words are absolutely confounding.  We read them and they seem so completely out of character for Jesus, that we don't really know what to do with them.  So, most of us actually gloss over these "hard" saying, choosing to ignore them or relegate them to the back of our personal canon--the things in the Bible that we read.   For example, the passage that we are going to be taking a look at today is one of the most confusing, maddening sayings of Jesus that I could find.  It occurs in Luke chapter 14 when Jesus is talking about what it takes to truly f...