As I write these words on the second Sunday of Advent, 2016 (that annus horribilis) is winding down, and I’m thinking about the letter I received recently from the church I served in my third year in seminary in the late 1970s. That third year, in those days, was designed to be an intensive internship immersing students in a ministry situation so that we learned about ministry at the ground level. Then, in a final year, we went back to finish our requirements and take comprehensive exams. My year in this particular congregation deep in the coalfields of West Virginia turned me upside down. Without it, I might have happily settled, for the rest of my life, into places altogether too comfortable. But West Virginia was a state of profound contrasts — between stunning natural beauty and industrial disfigurement, between urban sophistication and abject poverty, between the classical Presbyterianism of the church in which I interned and the snake-handling practices in tiny hard-bitten … [Read more...]

The words of my mouth and the thoughts of my heart behind the words … Almighty and most merciful God, I thank God that you are both mighty and merciful, for one without the other would still be nice, but not enough; necessary, but insufficient. If you weren’t mighty, we would sink like a stone under the weight of sin, with no one to save us. If you weren’t merciful, you wouldn’t care if we sank; indeed, you might prefer it. Honestly, I don’t know how you put up with us and, to be specific, I don’t know how you put up with me. Or why. Your mercy is the only thing that explains it. So I am bold to lay my sins at your throne of grace, which feels sometimes more like throwing up at your feet. I’m sorry for that, and grateful, more than words begin to say. But I need to say them anyway. So here goes. We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep; we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. I am a sheep. A stupid, senseless, wandering … [Read more...]

  It happened again just recently. I was going through one of those new-fangled car washes.  Not the kind I grew up with, where you drive onto a track, put the car in neutral and a chain mechanism pulls you along.  Oh no.  In this car wash there’s no track; you just drive to the middle and put your car in park. Park!  So then why does my car start moving? Immediately I slam my foot on the brake.  Holy cow, what is happening?! My car is moving and I can’t stop it! Frantic, I look out the little side window in the car wash tunnel and see the gas station sitting there; OK, it’s not moving.  I’m getting some perspective.  Could it be that I’m going nowhere, but that the car wash machinery is moving around me? True confessions: This has happened to me more than once in the last couple months.  I guess I am a slow learner.  And possibly a teensy weensy bit averse to change. And OK, I admit it, slightly given to catastrophizing.  But each time it is all so disorienting and … [Read more...]

by Paul Roberts Recently, I heard a churchgoer discuss her husband’s disdain for the church. Her husband considers the church leaders flashy. “For my husband, it’s all about the optics,” she said. Coincidentally, I’ve been reflecting on the optics of Presbyterian Church. Since our denomination met in Portland for the 222nd General Assembly, I’ve carried images of the elections of the denomination’s first co-moderators, Denise Anderson and Jan Edmiston, and first African-American stated clerk, J. Herbert Nelson II. I’ve carried less publicized but equally impactful images, too. The area in the assembly hall where commissioners were stationed was adorned with tall floor banners printed to look like stained glass. Gothic in style, none of them replicated the erroneous, racially-biased depictions of biblical characters seen far too often in our worship spaces, but were purely color stained. After J. Herbert Nelson’s election, they seemed to dance as I viewed them through tears of … [Read more...]

  SHE DOES NOT SEEM to have stepped out of her place. “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?” Commentators on Luke 10:38-42 almost always remark on the way Martha talked to Jesus. They see in it a sharpness they find surprising or off-putting. I don’t know. As someone who drove through the ‘80s and well into the ‘90s with an “Uppity Women Unite” sticker on her VW bumper, that’s not what I’d be inclined to think. I think Martha gets a bad rap. For one thing it’s clear that she’s a householder — the home she invites Jesus into is her own home. Newer scholarship sees in that the suggestion that she is the leader of a house church. A pastor, as we might say. Certainly she was the theologian in the family. (Mary may have sat at Jesus’ feet, but she did so silently. It was Martha who argued with him.) No matter what you think of Martha, you don’t have to be a pastor to empathize with her. All you have to be is someone who is anxious … [Read more...]