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Meeting the Spirit while writing a sermon

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Sermon-writing day is rough. It’s painful, boring, heart-wrenching, soul-draining, and it makes me whine a lot. Most weeks, I’ll come home one day and be moody, agitated and despondent, because that’s what sermon-writing day does to me. I try to look forward to it. I’ll get a big glass of iced tea (or a mug of hot tea, depending on the season), turn on my favorite music, and get comfortable for what I know will be long hours of sitting at the desk. I try to pick a day relatively free of distractions, when I’ve gotten the week’s biggest tasks out of the way, so that I can have a clear mind and a clear schedule. And sometimes, if things go just right, the sermon will essentially write itself. I’ll sit down, start typing and 15 minutes later a complete outline has appeared. Most weeks it doesn’t go like that. Most weeks I sit down at that computer staring at the blank screen and the void starts staring back. I’ll go back and forth between the Bible and a commentary and journal … [Read more...]

Tagged With: preaching

Becoming more human

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I learned about a new website recently. The site willrobotstakemyjob.com determined, well, how likely it is that a robot will take your job. It picked up a lot of attention, and lots of people typed their career into the search engine to see if they were about to be replaced. Cashiers have a 97 percent chance of being replaced; pastors, on the other hand, have a 0 percent chance. Despite the fact that Christianity won’t be replaced by Robotology any time soon, I’m still concerned about the changes technology is causing in the employment landscape of the U.S. Where will this spread of automation take us? It’s an old question, I know. The printing press perhaps most closely mirrored the dawn of the information age, and I’m sure it put countless scribes and copyists out of work. It did, however, bring incredible increases in wealth and prosperity (as measured by increases in city size). And though there are calligraphers and others who make their living by writing things out by hand, … [Read more...]

Practicing the discipline of imagination

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It may disgust my parents to hear this, but some of the greatest presents I ever received were cardboard boxes. They weren’t boxes. They were spaceships, racecars, robots, trucks, or construction equipment — anything we could imagine them to be. Some of the greatest days were the days when my brother and I got out the card table and the blankets from the hall closet. We’d put those blankets over the card table set up in front of the couch, and we’d take the big yellowish-brown blanket and stretch it from the card table over the entire couch so that we’d enter the blanket fort from the floor, but could go up a level to the “loft” on the couch. We started with some blankets, a card table and a couch, but we ended up with a multilevel mansion! As the years went by, we stopped making blanket forts and cardboard box spaceships. I thought I held on to my imagination well, but by college I had essentially lost it. I remember exactly when I realized this: It was in the middle of watching … [Read more...]

Tagged With: spiritual practice

Excuse me, how do you spell “Presbyterian”?

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We asked our bloggers to share why they are Presbyterian. These are their responses. I rarely get asked what denomination I am. When I do get asked about it, it’s usually because as I’m giving the name of my employer; I’m asked about it because “Presbyterian” is hard to spell. This is just one sign of the increasingly post-denominational world in which we live. Even as a pastor, the question of my denominational affiliation rarely ever comes up. What comes up much more often is how young I look and statements about how I’m surely not old enough to be a pastor – followed by either awkward silence or a complaint about how no one goes to church anymore. Even armed with the knowledge that I’m a Presbyterian pastor, most people don’t know what to do with it. So what does it matter whether I’m Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, United Church of Christ or nondenominational? It certainly matters to me: Not only was I raised in a Presbyterian Church, … [Read more...]

Tagged With: Why Presbyterian?

Misinterpreting “The Beginner’s Bible”

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Recently I hit a wave of nostalgia and went shopping. Lo and behold, on Amazon.com one can purchase the 1989 version of “The Beginner’s Bible” for $1.23 plus shipping. Thanks to Amazon, I have on my desk today a copy of the very first Bible I ever read on my own. I remember spending a good part of a day reading through the entire thing when I was a kid, and bragging about how I had read through the entire Bible in one sitting. I’m not sure how fully I realized that there was more to the Bible than what was in my illustrated edition. Actually, there were a number of things I eventually had to clear up after reading this Bible so often. The biggest one I remember was how I misunderstood the entire book of Revelation. The last page of “The Beginner’s Bible” goes like this: He saw a new Heaven and a new earth. He saw a new city of God. A loud voice said, “God’s people will live with God now…” Then Jesus said, “I am coming soon.” And John said, “YES, JESUS, COME.” The pictures … [Read more...]

Tagged With: biblical literacy

Don’t forget to breathe

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This month we asked our bloggers to share how they are caring for their bodies and souls in the midst of the demands of ministry. Here are their stories. Wearing my helmet, goggles and jumpsuit, I stepped through the doorway, fell flat on my face, and flew. For the first time in my life, I was skydiving – approximately 3 feet off the ground. I was in a skydiving simulator – basically a giant fan at the bottom of a 10-foot-wide tube – being blown off the ground by an absurd amount of air. Looking at the pictures afterward, I was almost unrecognizable because of how the wind distorted my face. The wind didn’t surprise me; my inability to breathe did. One of the last pieces of advice the instructor gave our group before we headed to the simulator was “don’t forget to breathe – there’s plenty of air.” But when there’s so much air moving so quickly that it lifts you off the ground, it feels like you’re swimming in water. My brain started sending signals to my lungs to “hold your … [Read more...]

Tagged With: sabbath • self-care

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