It has been almost a year since I last posted a blog last month. It feels like it anyway. Since then, I have been a leading part of worship services, witnessed one of my best friends get engaged in my dining room on New Years Eve, visited my father-in-law as he was diagnosed with cancer, and have had some difficult moments professionally.
I have two sermons from Christmas to post yet, and I will be getting to them soon.
The Christmas eve services were great, as they are supposed to be. I was in charge of the early family friendly services, and got great feedback! Specifically, people loved that I used Linus' soliloquy from "Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown" as my reading of the Luke 2 passage. Some folks said that that was the only moment in the service when all the children were quiet!
There was another, later, service on Christmas Eve. I assisted in the service, then was up til about 1:30 wrapping presents and sitting with Donna. Basically it was a matter of letting the adrenaline peter out of my system. My son of course was up by about 5:30, but he did a great job of being patient until we were all up. After presents I made breakfast, and then, as Donna says, I "dissapeared". I had gone back to bed.
Donna's dad was diagnosed with cancer later that week, and so we ran there for a couple days, saw him in the hospital and Donna helped her mom distract herself. His big surgery is mid-January, so prayers for him are requested. It is a slow moving cancer and is localized.
When we got back, My friend Morissa and her boyfriend Jason came to visit. Let me explain a little bit about Morissa. she and I know each other from college, and became friends after I was a peacekeeper in an Anti-Klan rally that she had helped organize. She has come to visit us almost every New Years' since Donna and I were married, even when we lived in Texas. We give her Christmas presents, she gives us Hanukah presents. We have a Mezuzah on our door, a gift from her. the last two years, she has brought her boyfriend Jason with her.
We usually have a nice New Year's Party, but because of us just having been away, we called everyone we invited and explained that we pretty much needed to crash when we got home.
We forgot to call one couple, who came over, and it was nice to have them there. They are good enough friends that the condition of the house didn't embarass them or us.
Jason was planning on popping the question to Morissa that night, as it turned out. He had worked on a digital animation to do the deed, and there was a last minute panic that our home computer wouldn't run the video. We got it worked out, though, and she was thrilled!
Because of what I do for a living, sometimes I receive the blame from the problems of the church that existed long before I arrived. There has been a good bit of that these past couple weeks, but I am blessed to be working for a church where the members know these people. They are not dismissed, but neither do they get much traction, because the source is considered. Still, I have had more than my share of sadness and anger for the first two weeks of a new year.
Here's to hoping that that was the worst distraction of the year, but I don't know. In talking with a friend yesterday, we were complaining that there always seems to be ministry that isn't getting done because there are fires to put out. I think that is partially true, but I also think it is true that to be a minister in this congregation is to walk with them as the pain of the past heals or is cut out. It would be great if 100% of the ministry is directed to mission, education, and spiritual growth, but here there is good bit of triage and the binding of wounds, too. So be it. This won't be the last church I serve where that is true, and if that is part of ministry in my time, then I'd best be about it. Mission, education, and Spiritual Formation can be the goal we work toward.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Luke 21: 29-33
Jeremiah 33: 14-16
Earlier this week, I was thinking it was going to be hard to think about Christmas. I was driving around with my window down, all my jackets hanging in the closet, no hat on, and it was after Thanksgiving. It’s beginning to look a lot like Texas!
Then, Wednesday or Thursday, the ice storm hit Dallas, and closed up the airport. You have to understand, ice storms are not unknown in Texas, but they occur once every few years. SMU, where I went to seminary, has photos of a snow covered Perkins Chapel that they use for a lot of advertising, but the photo is from the 80’s. It just doesn’t happen every year. And ice storms are a lot more common than snow.
So, winter came to the Great Plains. And then Friday, we got a humdinger of a thunderstorm here in Northeastern PA, especially for the folks up in Mountaintop. They’re pretty sure that they got an F2 tornado, and from the damage to the grocery store up there, they probably did. Three hours after the storm passed, the temperature had dropped 30 degrees.
I needn’t have worried about the weather. I live in Pennsylvania, I live in hope and expectation that winter will get here eventually. It may not look like I think it should. Winter isn’t usually announced with a big thunderstorm and a tornado. But winter is now here. It just took time and patience.
When you speak of hope and expectation of something, human nature is to construct a scenario where it will happen. Perhaps you live in hope and expectation of getting into college. You may construct the scenario in your mind you walking down the sidewalk between gorgeous ivy-covered buildings, book bag on your back. Well, the dream happens, but maybe you live off campus, and become much more familiar with the parking lots and the shuttle busses than you do the sidewalks.
Or maybe you like in hope and expectation of being cured of a disease. You might construct a scenario of never taking your health for granted, exercising better, eating correctly, and living life more fully, however that may look for you. But it happens that the cure for the disease works, but it also leaves you disabled, or altered somehow.
Or maybe you live and hope and expectation of being a grandparent, and then it finally happens. But it happens to you by kids that live 2000 miles away, or maybe it happens that you for some reason raise the grandchildren yourself.
Hope and expectations have a way of growing scenarios around them that don’t end up being true. We then find ourselves being disappointed in the midst of the achievement of what we hoped for and expected.
So it was for many who were hoping for a Messiah. The Messiah that Israel was hoping for and expecting for was a Messiah of wisdom, of strength and of power. But for those who follow the Christian faith, a Messiah of wisdom, strength and power came in the form of a baby, grew to be an adult the ordinary regular way, did not free the political entity of Israel that was under the yoke of Rome, and died as a criminal on the cross.
Not the scenario anyone would build a round a Messiah of wisdom, strength and power. But exactly as God intended, because hope grows. The things that are important, that affect us the most, are the things that grow over time.
Our children are big wrapped up bundles of parenting mistakes and successes, biology, experience and environment, the result of which we sometimes don’t see for 30 years. Professional training leads us into avenues we could not have imagined when we began our educations.
Hope grows. Scenarios fall away, and what is left is God’s will for our lives.
What scenarios are you cherishing right now? A perfect Christmas Currier and Ives scene with sleighs and snow and singing? A Norman Rockwell painting of family around a table? A Kinkade painting of Christmas trees shining through the windows of houses on rainy foggy nights?
At times, me too. I love the feeling of coming out of church on Christmas eve, near or after midnight, and the sky is clear and starry, the air is crisp and cold, and people are hollering Merry Christmas to each other as they get into their cars to go home. Their red taillights blend in with the lights on the houses they pass.
I freely admit that there’s a moment where I hope and expect that will happen. But it is a scenario that has nothing to do with Christmas as it is meant to be.
Christmas is meant to be the church’s celebration of the sending of a Messiah that will save the world. That it happens in December, which coincidentally happens with snow on the ground, makes Christmas, in our minds eye, into a scene of cold, snow, and Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” in the background. It is the scenario we build around a very serious idea—that the world has been saved by the birth of a baby. This is Christmas, when we celebrate that we have been redeemed by Jesus Christ, who was born as a baby and raised as a human being, who is one with the Father, who will, as Jeremiah says. “execute justice and righteousness in the land”, and who will, on Good Friday, die to save us. And who will, on Easter, be raised by God to overcome the power of death and sin.
It’s tough to build a scenario around that hope and expectation, but in the end it is that hope and expectation that can be relied on. And so we begin that time of thinking about and waiting for the moment this year when we see it, we get it, we feel it, again. This is Advent. When Hope grows into faith.
Jeremiah 33: 14-16
Earlier this week, I was thinking it was going to be hard to think about Christmas. I was driving around with my window down, all my jackets hanging in the closet, no hat on, and it was after Thanksgiving. It’s beginning to look a lot like Texas!
Then, Wednesday or Thursday, the ice storm hit Dallas, and closed up the airport. You have to understand, ice storms are not unknown in Texas, but they occur once every few years. SMU, where I went to seminary, has photos of a snow covered Perkins Chapel that they use for a lot of advertising, but the photo is from the 80’s. It just doesn’t happen every year. And ice storms are a lot more common than snow.
So, winter came to the Great Plains. And then Friday, we got a humdinger of a thunderstorm here in Northeastern PA, especially for the folks up in Mountaintop. They’re pretty sure that they got an F2 tornado, and from the damage to the grocery store up there, they probably did. Three hours after the storm passed, the temperature had dropped 30 degrees.
I needn’t have worried about the weather. I live in Pennsylvania, I live in hope and expectation that winter will get here eventually. It may not look like I think it should. Winter isn’t usually announced with a big thunderstorm and a tornado. But winter is now here. It just took time and patience.
When you speak of hope and expectation of something, human nature is to construct a scenario where it will happen. Perhaps you live in hope and expectation of getting into college. You may construct the scenario in your mind you walking down the sidewalk between gorgeous ivy-covered buildings, book bag on your back. Well, the dream happens, but maybe you live off campus, and become much more familiar with the parking lots and the shuttle busses than you do the sidewalks.
Or maybe you like in hope and expectation of being cured of a disease. You might construct a scenario of never taking your health for granted, exercising better, eating correctly, and living life more fully, however that may look for you. But it happens that the cure for the disease works, but it also leaves you disabled, or altered somehow.
Or maybe you live and hope and expectation of being a grandparent, and then it finally happens. But it happens to you by kids that live 2000 miles away, or maybe it happens that you for some reason raise the grandchildren yourself.
Hope and expectations have a way of growing scenarios around them that don’t end up being true. We then find ourselves being disappointed in the midst of the achievement of what we hoped for and expected.
So it was for many who were hoping for a Messiah. The Messiah that Israel was hoping for and expecting for was a Messiah of wisdom, of strength and of power. But for those who follow the Christian faith, a Messiah of wisdom, strength and power came in the form of a baby, grew to be an adult the ordinary regular way, did not free the political entity of Israel that was under the yoke of Rome, and died as a criminal on the cross.
Not the scenario anyone would build a round a Messiah of wisdom, strength and power. But exactly as God intended, because hope grows. The things that are important, that affect us the most, are the things that grow over time.
Our children are big wrapped up bundles of parenting mistakes and successes, biology, experience and environment, the result of which we sometimes don’t see for 30 years. Professional training leads us into avenues we could not have imagined when we began our educations.
Hope grows. Scenarios fall away, and what is left is God’s will for our lives.
What scenarios are you cherishing right now? A perfect Christmas Currier and Ives scene with sleighs and snow and singing? A Norman Rockwell painting of family around a table? A Kinkade painting of Christmas trees shining through the windows of houses on rainy foggy nights?
At times, me too. I love the feeling of coming out of church on Christmas eve, near or after midnight, and the sky is clear and starry, the air is crisp and cold, and people are hollering Merry Christmas to each other as they get into their cars to go home. Their red taillights blend in with the lights on the houses they pass.
I freely admit that there’s a moment where I hope and expect that will happen. But it is a scenario that has nothing to do with Christmas as it is meant to be.
Christmas is meant to be the church’s celebration of the sending of a Messiah that will save the world. That it happens in December, which coincidentally happens with snow on the ground, makes Christmas, in our minds eye, into a scene of cold, snow, and Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” in the background. It is the scenario we build around a very serious idea—that the world has been saved by the birth of a baby. This is Christmas, when we celebrate that we have been redeemed by Jesus Christ, who was born as a baby and raised as a human being, who is one with the Father, who will, as Jeremiah says. “execute justice and righteousness in the land”, and who will, on Good Friday, die to save us. And who will, on Easter, be raised by God to overcome the power of death and sin.
It’s tough to build a scenario around that hope and expectation, but in the end it is that hope and expectation that can be relied on. And so we begin that time of thinking about and waiting for the moment this year when we see it, we get it, we feel it, again. This is Advent. When Hope grows into faith.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)