Presby-Musings

One of the difficult things that most of us struggle with is finding our true purpose in life.   I can say this confidently because, as I do, I am drawing on my experience as a pastor for over two decades and the numerous conversations I've had with people who admit this struggle dominates their thoughts and intentions.  Every one of us wants to believe that we have a purpose for being on this earth, but what I've come to understand is that most of us walk around feeling like we either have none or we've missed out on finding it somehow.  I can't even begin to tell you how many people have told me over the years how they believe the past mistakes, the problems of their present, and their dread of the future have all kept them believing they will never find their true purpose.  I've sat next to the deathbeds of scores of people, and I can say that roughly half of the people I've talked to in their last days or moments have regrets and feel as though they accompli...

There's a lot of noise in our culture.  It's hard to find a quiet space to think and to pray.  The quiet spaces in our lives are few and far between.  In fact, even the quiet spaces we find are frequently made noisy by the cacophony of thoughts in our heads, as we are often spinning with all the things that need doing from the time we awaken until we fall exhausted into bed.  Many of us have become programmed by the programming on our phones.   We'll be sitting at lunch with friends, and a familiar "ping" will sound like a notification on a smartphone, and everyone at the table will reflexively pick theirs up to check if it is theirs.  And then once we've picked our phones up, we'll all give them the once-over while the friend who got a message responds.   We live in a noisy world, and our need to quiet our spirits increases daily.   I recently read a wonderful bit of writing from Joan Chittister (look her up, you'll thank me), and ...

Now, I have to remember you for longer than I have known you.  C.C. Aurel  The holiday season can be a difficult time for many of us who have lost those near and dear to us.  Not only did their passing leave a hole in our hearts, but that hole grows ever wider as we experience holidays without them.  My mom passed away just over a week before Halloween in 2017.  All that month, she had been bugging me to put up the Halloween decorations.  I was busy and hadn't gotten around to it, and she was fretting about it.  "You need to put up those Halloween decorations for those boys," she weakly told me one day.  And so I did.  Chastened, I went out and bought a fortune's worth of lights and decor and decorated the heck out of the front of the house.  Days before she passed away, my mom told me that she wanted to see the lights I'd put up at last.  It took two of us to get her to the front door, where she could see the decorations lit up and...

There's a lot to be upset about these days.  The world is wracked with wars being waged in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  There's no end to the saber-rattling by governments all over the world.  And over the last few weeks, we've seen yet another mass shooting, violence, and threats against Jewish Americans have risen to a new high, and the U.S. government seems like a hopeless morass of idiocy and incompetence.  To that last one, many of us might feel like saying, "What else is new?"  It's easy to get down about the state of things, and many of us find ourselves doing exactly that.  I know I have.   And yet, I took our dogs for a walk yesterday, and the cloudless sky was as blue as I've seen it in a long time, and the air was crisp and cool.  I found myself turning my face to the sun and listening to the birds in the trees, the soft padding of the dogs' footsteps, and thinking to myself.  "What a beautiful day."  The night be...

Throughout November, our sermon series will be based on the final instructions that Jesus gave his followers from the lectionary texts in the Gospel of Matthew—teachings he did right before he was arrested and crucified.  It might seem odd that the lectionary includes these texts before Advent.  Why would we want to study scriptures from the end of Jesus’ ministry right before we anticipate the arrival of the Messiah?   It’s simply this:  Throughout Advent, we expect a gift—the gift of the One who rescues, redeems, and restores.  But we need to know what to do with this great gift, and these final instructions from Jesus to his followers outline how to follow the Messiah that is to come.  oday we’re going to be exploring what it means to act in humility when it comes to our beliefs and practices as Christians And we’re going to be learning a bit more about what it really meant to be from the Galilee, like Jesus and his disciples.  Have you ever en...

This past month, I stood again on the Aeropagus in Athens, just below the Acropolis.  It was almost seven years to the date when I first stood there and read aloud the story of the Apostle Paul's speech on that site from Acts 17.   The author on the Aeropagus, October 2023 In the Acts account of Paul's speech on the Aeropagus, there is this line:  34 Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others. Let me share a bit about the traditions and historical accounts of who Dionysius and Damaris were.  Tradition holds that, at a young age, Dionysius found himself in Heliopolis of Egypt (near Cairo) just at Christ's crucifixion in Jerusalem. On that Great Friday, at the time of the crucifixion of Christ, according to the gospel, "From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land." (Matthew 27:45).  The young boy, Dionysius, was sho...

One of the most difficult things to do as a follower of Jesus is to follow Jesus.  Because following Jesus means that we surrender something of ourselves to become more like the One we say we are following.  And to do this well is something that we all struggle to do in our own way.  Perhaps the most challenging aspect of following Jesus (and the one that probably trips us up) is learning to love others in the way Jesus commanded his followers to love.  In Luke's Gospel, Jesus put it like this:  27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.  This is exactly what Jesus did.  He even prayed for the forgiveness of the very people who crucified him and treated him with unbelievable cruelty.   And the kind of love that we are talking about here is the kind that gives without expecting anything in return.  It's the kind that heals wounds ...