A Positively Poetic Priest

Many people when they reach a certain age start to feel like nothing can change. There isn't any point in setting any new goals, there isn't any reason to dream for anything different. Some people reach a state of despair or a state of indifference such that nothing really matters anymore. And really, this can happen at any age, however, it has become largely noticeable in the seventy and over age group these days. Despair can hit anyone who has struggled for a long time and feels like they are not attaining anything different or important. Working with people who have reached rock bottom can be hard to do. However, we all need a little encouragement some of the time. Our good friend, C. S. Lewis once said, “You are never to old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” Encouragement. Most people at some point in their lives find themselves an encouragement story or quote that they hang on to when the going gets rough. I remember the halls and walls of my middle schoo...

Epiphany 4A In the late 1960’s, when the United States was trying to come to terms with the civil rights movement, one man in Georgia saw the confusion and hostility and hopelessness experienced by his neighbors. Instead of marching or demonstrating, he decided to open a communal farm based off the stories in the Acts of the Apostles where all possessions were held in common and all members were considered equal. Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm, based off the Greek word for community, were well known at the time and seen as a threat to many in the South who believed in segregation. As part of his work, Jordan also wrote a new version of the gospel stories of Matthew and John, translating scripture from the Greek into the southern Georgia context. The Cotton Patch Gospels are well known for their folk style and their sense of humor. In the story of Jesus’ temptation, after Jesus stands up to the Devil and the Devil takes his leave, the angels come to take care of Jesus… “bearing a...

Epiphany 3A Matthew 4:12-23 We tend to think of being arrested as a bad thing. In many cases, this is the truth. However, for a number of people throughout the world, being arrested was the necessary catalyst for changing the world.  Every movement has a catalyst. A  precipitating event that causes the rest of the story to happen. We know this well. For Martin Luther King Jr., the precipitating event that turned him into a national civil rights leader was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, sparked by Ms. Rosa Parks, an African American woman, being arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus for a white person.  In Jesus' case, according to the gospel of Matthew, the catalyst was his cousin's John's arrest. John's arrest proved to be a little bit of a wake up call and a time of acknowledgement of the risks of what he was doing. Jesus probably knew that his ministry was not going to be easy. Spending forty days in the desert to prepare yourself for the task is...

The First Sunday After Epiphany 1/8/17 The Matthean account of the Baptism of Jesus Every year it happens. The name report. My mom is an elementary school music teacher. And every year there comes a point when she comes home fed up with trying to remember six hundred children’s names and the usual and sometimes very unusual ways that they are spelled. Sometimes it is the boys names, too many Brandons and Brendans and Brennans and Braydens and Bransons to be able to keep straight. Sometimes it is the girls names, how many different spelling variations are there of Kaitlyn or Catherine and which want to be known as Cate or Cat or Kathy or Katie? However, we all know what power there is in remembering someone else’s name. In society, being on a first name basis with someone else used to mean that you knew them very well. With the rise of the informal culture, this understanding has disappeared and knowing someone’s first name is not as powerful as it used to be. However, knowing...

2016 has been quite the year. It has been up – with the Summer Olympics, huge breakthroughs in medicine which has allowed more people with ALS, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease to live healthier and longer lives, with more equal rights for people all over the world being recognized. It has been down – with the many police and terrorist shootings, with the deaths of some major celebrity figures, with confusing political movements happening all over the world. The social and global media agencies are using their powers to create intensity and stress about certain problems and to cover up other problems. With all of this going on in the world, some people may be wondering how Christmas is even relevant anymore. Yet, exactly because of our crazy world, Christmas is more important than ever. Christmas is important because it is about a beginning. Not an end or a middle, but about a new beginning. Christmas is important because it is about vulnerability. Not hiding or shaming, but ab...

The Third Sunday of Advent One of the many museums I have been to in my life is the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas. Before I started my last job in Houston, I spent a week setting up my apartment and trying to get to know the city a little bit. I had plenty of expectations about what moving to Texas was going to be like, but part of that first week, I was trying to figure out if those expectations were correct or not. The Museum district in Houston has plenty of museums to choose from and I wandered in and out of a number of them. In the Contemporary Arts Museum though is where I started to realize that many of my expectations were going to be broken, had to be let go of. In its halls were a dizzying array of abstract art compilations, pieces made out of trash, graffiti type works, and a number of things that I stared at, simply wondering what I was looking at. I’m still not sure I understand all of what I saw that day. We all move through our lives with plenty of...

Second Sunday of Advent Year A Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven has come near! What a promise! What a call! What a loaded statement. Thank you, John the Baptist. Last week in the sermon, I talked about Jesus’ reminder to keep awake. Keeping awake and paying attention to every moment of our lives can be a very hard thing to do. However, the riches to be gained from such a practice are plentiful. By keeping awake, by paying attention to the moments of our lives, we see things we may have never seen before. We see God at work in our lives in new ways, in places we never thought God would venture. We see connections we may have missed before, between other people and ourselves. We see how we imitate our parents, probably way too much, not only in their sayings and gestures, but in the way we handle our emotions. We notice how our own bodies react and respond to what is going on around us and how that affects our daily lives. Our bodies are great at taking overloaded s...