Presby-Musings

Just giving people commandments on tablets and stone doesn't change the heart. It may steel the will, but it doesn't soften the heart like a personal encounter can.   - Richard Rohr  Some years ago, when I was working on my Master's degree at Florida State University, I was walking with some fellow students through one common of the many areas on campus when we encountered a street evangelist, who had attracted a crowd.  The evangelist's name was "Brother Jed," a loud and obnoxious self-appointed preacher, who makes a career out of protesting on college campuses all over the United States.    Jed's modus operandi is to say as many offensive, bigoted and hateful things as possible in order to start arguments with people, which he then records on video to post on his website.   In short, Brother Jed is a jerk.   On this particular day, Brother Jed had a huge sign that was using the word "gay" as an acronym...

This week I'll be concluding the sermon series "The Way of The Cross: Following Christ On the Lenten Path."    Each week we'll be exploring one of the core values of our church as a Lenten practice, a spiritual discipline that we can take up --both as individuals and as a community.  Our core values are: Worship, Connect, Grow, Serve and Invite.   Today we'll be talking about what it means to Invite.   When I was in seventh grade I used to go out with my youth group doing "door-to-door witnessing."  In case you are wondering what "door-to-door" witnessing is all about, think Jehovah's Witnesses, or Mormon missionaries... kind of like that.  I would be required to dress up for these occasions.  I would wear a short sleeved dress shirt, a garish clip on tie and would fix my hair with Brylcreme.  Brylcreme, for those of you have no idea what is was a kind of pomade that made your hair look slick and shiny.   Some might call tha...

The churches I went to when I was a kid encouraged (strongly) door-to-door evangelism.  In fact, by the time I was in high school I was a veteran of door-to-door evangelism.  I was also a veteran of getting doors slammed in my face.   Our technique for witnessing to people when we went door-to-door was almost completely lacking in any kind of tact whatsoever.  The opening spiel went something like this:  "Hello, my name is Leon from __________Church.  I'd like to ask you an important question.  If you died right now would you spend eternity in heaven or hell?"   As you can imagine, our success rate on winning souls was somewhere between Nothing and Zero.   I think there are a lot of Christians who so desperately don't want to seem like door-to-door evangelists that they never really develop healthy ways to share their faith.  In fact, I talk to a lot of Christians, who confess that even when they have opportunities to talk about ...

Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few weeks, you undoubtedly have heard about the latest gaming craze: Pokemon Go .  Both of my older boys played Pokemon video games when they were small, and my oldest boy collected Pokemon cards, if I recall.   So what is Pokemon (if you are wondering)?  Pokemon is a game where you capture magical/mystical animals, and then train them to use their magical/mystical powers to combat other magical/mystical animals in friendly competition.  The more experience points your creatures obtain, the more they "evolve" and develop skills to become better at the friendly competition.   Pokemon Go uses smart phone technology to take the video game out of the house and into the great wide world.  EVERYWHERE you go, you encounter pokemon creatures to capture (including my church, which is a "poke-stop").   The small town where my church is located has already hosted a night where Pokemon Go players gathered...

This week all of our Daily Devotions will be reflecting on the sermon that I preached this past Sunday at my church, the First Presbyterian Church of Eustis--a sermon entitled, "Three Chairs." We believe our church has a rich history, a vibrant present and a hopeful future. Not all churches or communities of faith feel that way, though.  Over the course of this week we'll be getting to the bottom of how that can change.   Jesse M. Bader, a leader in the Christian Church in the 1920's & 1930's once wrote,  "[As a Christian] you can be a clerk or a salesman--the clerk waits for a customer, and the salesman goes out for him. [Christians] should be ringing doorbells, instead of church bells; we have been doing by proxy what we should do by proximity; by purse instead of by person."   The interesting thing about Bader's exhortation to Christians is that it was made during a time in U.S. history when the vast majority of Americans both clai...

Over the last three weeks we have been working on a sermon series together entitled, "[Not] Your Average Church: Why We Need Real Church for Real People ."  Throughout this series we've been coming face to face with a crisis that the Church in America has yet to fully address: the fact that people have stopped coming to church. What we've been doing as part of this sermon series is studying the four biggest reasons that people give as to why they don't attend church, and then we've been turning those negatives into positives.  Our goal is to identify the ways that we, as a church, can overcome the objections that people might have as to why they don't want to go to church. People say that they feel judged when they come to church--so we said the church needs to be open to everyone and practice radical hospitality.  People say that they feel lectured when they come to church--so we said the church needs to engage in fearless conversations with peopl...

This week I am concluding the sermon series "Together," which has been focused on the core values of my church: Worship , Pray , Grow , Love & Serve. As I shared in the first sermon of this series, the reason why I've been preaching on this is twofold:  1) the last time I preached on our core values was two years ago and we've added over 150 members since then.  2) If you don't pay attention to your core values, they cease to be... core values. For the final installation of this series we'll be focusing on the last of our core values---what we call "The Five Things:" Serve. We've been asking seriously difficult questions of each of our core values over the past few weeks, and these questions have led us to some challenging places. This week the question that we are going to be asking of our final core value is simply this:  Are we building bridges of love that will hold up the truth? Read this passage of Scripture from the New Test...

This week I'll be continuing the sermon series "Together," an in-depth study on my church's core values.  Throughout the series we have asked very serious questions to each of our core values---values that we call "The Five Things."  These questions have served to get us focused on what is truly important for us to know about our values in order for us to more effectively accomplish our vision to be the kind of church that reflects and reveals the unselfish love of Christ to the world. The sermon this week is centered around the fourth of our Five Things: Love.  And the question that we are going to be asking is a simple one, but one that carries with it some series implications as to how we live our lives both as individuals and as a community of faith. Are We Loving God , Loving People and Loving the World?  Jesus said this: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this everyone will kn...

This is the fourth and final week of the most challenging sermon series I have ever preached.  It seems fitting that we would end it with a sermon on a grace-filled response to the issue of True Religion . I discovered a couple of years ago to my amusement, and slight dismay, that there is actually a clothing company called "True Religion."  This is an ironic fact, considering how Consumerism and Materialism have become neo-religions in and of themselves complete with temples, (malls), vestments (fashion/clothes), priests (designers/marketers), missionaries (stars/artists) and adherents (consumers). That, my friends, is an entirely different sort of sermon. What I am proposing today, however, is that our culture is at an existential crossroads when it comes religion itself.  In our increasingly connected and diverse society, it is impossible to ignore our neighbors and co-workers who might practice a different faith than our own.  This collision of theology a...