Presby-Musings

This Sunday is the 4th Sunday of the Season of Advent .  It's the last Sunday before Christmas Eve, and the end of a long season of expectation. The passage of scripture that I am preaching from this week is from Psalm 80.  I don't often get the chance to preach from one of the Psalms, so it's kind of a treat.  I have a BA in English Lit, which I don't get to use a whole lot in my current gig.  But when I dig my hands into the Psalms--which are essentially poetry--it really gets me going and brings out my inner Bible/Lit geek. There's a refrain in Psalm 80 that is repeated throughout the psalm in one form or another.  It goes something like this:  "Restore us, God Almighty; make your face shine on us that we may be saved." As I read that refrain and the rest of the psalm as well, I found myself asking a question:  "What does it mean to be "saved?"  I mean, it's obvious that being "saved" is pretty important to the author...

This week is the 3rd Sunday of Advent .  Christmas is almost here and I haven't even really started my Christmas shopping.  I haven't even put up my tree yet, to be honest.  The Lowe's was out of good ones when I went to buy one the other day with the wife and kids.  We could have bought a scrawny looking Douglas Fir that was losing needles like crazy, but we decided to wait until the new shipment of trees came in from "up North."  Sadly, two days later the truck still has not arrived due to bad weather.  Bah. The irony that this was not expected during a season of expectation is not lost on me. The lectionary text that I am preaching from this week is James 5:7-10.  When I chose the texts that I wanted to preach from this Advent, I purposefully chose the ones that seemed like they were shouting. Something tells me that if James was being written today and sent via email that most of this passage I'm about to share would be in all caps.  In ...

This Sunday is the second Sunday of Advent, and I am preaching once again from the Lectionary.  If you who aren't part of faith communities that employs words like "advent" and "lectionary" I know that it sounds sort of stuffy and formal.  It's not.  Christians have been celebrating the season of Advent for centuries, and the lectionary is simply a way to group Scriptures together so that they can relate to the season.  In fact, if you read the lectionary texts every single day you would make your way almost completely through the entire Bible in three years. That's my primer on church history stuff for the day... The word Advent means "expectation."  Last week I challenged our congregation to expect something incredible this Advent season.  We also learned that we live in a time that is "now" and "not yet."  The Messiah has arrived and the Messiah is also on his way.  We need to live with a sense of urgency and hopefuln...

This Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent. I am always surprised when Advent arrives.  It's a bittersweet moment each and every year because I am instantly reminded that Christmas Eve is coming, and that I am woefully unprepared.  Therpresents to be purchased, lights to be hung, a thousand things to do...   It sort of makes you tired when you think about it.  As if I wasn't tired enough already... My wife and I just drove back to Florida from North Carolina last night.  We left early after spending Thanksgiving with her parents in their mountain home.  Our baby boy had a bad cold and my wife had one of those overwhelming mom moments where she had to be at home with him.  I was driving a U-haul truck with our middle son, who is 6.  The truck was filled with furniture that my in-laws had given to us after their move.  My wife was in our car with our oldest and littlest boys.  We were on the road for over 11 hours.  My oldes...

The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith by Stuart Murray ; Herald Press (2010) In The Naked Anabaptist, Stuart Murray makes a case for Anabaptism as the "original" emerging church movement .  It's a bold assertion, and one that has merit considering it was part of the 16th-century version of the Church's 500 year rummage sale (read Phyllis Tickle 's The Great Emergence for more about this).  Murray sees modern Anabaptism as more of a theological underpinning that could easily be embraced in a variety of Christian communities.  He also sees the end of " Christendom " as the perfect time for Anabaptism to find a real foothold in Christian culture.  Murray assumes as fact that we are living in a post-Christendom historical moment--a moment he describes thusly: the culture that emerges as the Christian faith loses coherence within a society that has been definitively shaped by the Christian story ans as the institutions that have ...

This week I am concluding a two-part sermon series on the vision of our church.  I have to confess that I have sweated over these two sermons a lot more than I thought I would.  I decided at first that the best way to approach them was to think like a prophet.  But when I thought about what happened to the prophets---they were reviled, stoned, imprisoned and basically ignored---I wondered if my strategy might have a flaw in it. There is something prophetic in casting vision, though.  Especially if the vision that is being cast is a holy vision.  I imagine that sounds a bit pretentious to some, but let me explain.  When I say "holy" I just mean something that strives to be as close to God as possible.  A holy vision is one that is unmistakably God's.  There's no way that someone could equate it with anything else. In other words... it sounds a little crazy.  It seems impossible to reach.  To think about such a vision brings...

Two and a half years ago I asked the elders of my church a question:  If our church ceased to exist tomorrow... who would miss us? We struggled with this question because we knew the way we answered it would reveal a great deal about the focus, and vision of our church. Some of our elders were brutally honest back then and said, "Only our people would really miss us."   Believe it or not, that is the sort of answer that almost every church in America would have to give if they were pressed to be truthful. You see, most churches are focused like a laser on just staying alive, retaining the people they have, making everyone happy, preserving the status quo... And in our case it wasn't that our church neglected missions and ministry to people outside the walls of our Sanctuary, it just wasn't really our main focus.  It wasn't what defined us. Our elder team recently commissioned a task force to identify the defining vision of our church. We began by exploring ou...