A Positively Poetic Priest

Everyone here has some faith. We know this because we have all showed up here this morning. No matter in what kind of mood or season of our lives we are in, if we had no faith whatsoever, we wouldn't show up. So, we are working with something. Naturally there are many reasons people come to church on Sunday morning. Some come because they feel it is their duty, even if they don't always agree or they don't always feel like they believe in what we are doing. Some come because they are in the habit of doing so and they aren't really interested in thinking more about it than that. Some come because they truly want to go deeper in their faith they want to learn more, they want to experience Jesus more they have a deep longing for connection with God. Or perhaps you're here for some other reason, known to you alone. I hope that we are all here because we want a deeper experience we want to grow our faith and become more the people G...

One of the awkward things about social media  is that it classifies all our relationships as the same thing: friends. Facebook has developed over the years some ability to separate out groups  or individuals with which we have different kinds of relationships other than as friends. We are all friends, yes, but we are also acquaintances , family, colleagues, co-workers, frienemies, slightly awkward friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends, we are in groups of people we know well and some we don't know very well. We all have lots of different kinds of relationships throughout our lives.  This is part of what makes so many of Jesus' parables easy to understand. We have the same kinds of relationships with people now as they had back then, even if so much of the rest of our culture is different.  Today, from the gospel of Luke we hear a parable with some pretty interesting relationship dynamics going on.  There ar...

We don't tend to think of being shrewd as one of the spiritual gifts of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, self control, faith, humility, none of those sound remotely like shrewdness. But as I thought longer about the idea, I thought of discernment. Discernment is a gift of the Spirit. And discernment is the ability to judge well, going beyond the simple pros and cons of a situation and seeking out spiritual guidance to see the nuances and find the path forward. The definition of being shrewd is having sharp powers of judgment, being astute, being creative in thinking and looking at issues from multiple sides to see the outcomes. Being shrewd fits into the idea of discernment. Discernment is important in many different aspects of our lives. While the parable we heard from the gospel of is offputting there are a number of lessons we can learn from it.  Everyone agrees that it is a confusing and hard to figure out parable. Every...

Have any of you seen the Christopher Robin movie? Its very cute and not just for children. Actually, I think its more geared toward adults really. But, anyway, there is a scene in the movie where Christopher Robin, as an adult, is standing in an important meeting at his job, realizing he has lost all of his work papers from his briefcase. The real truth is that Tigger took them out of the briefcase, but Christopher Robin doesn't know that. He simply knows that he has lost something important and he doesn't know where it is. Luckily, Christopher Robin's daughter, Madeline, figures out that Tigger took all of Christopher Robin's important papers because she finds them with Winnie the Pooh and the gang. So she sets out on an expedition to return the papers to Christopher Robin, while Christopher Robin sets out on his own journey to find them. Along the way, both Christopher Robin and Madeline both find what they had really lost, not the work ...

Many of you have heard of the 1800's theologian Soren Kierkegaard. He was a philosopher theologian in the country of Denmark where the designated national church, the Lutheran Church, was like many other national churches.  Everyone belonged and claimed it, but only a small percentage really went to church. Going to Church in Denmark at the time was seen as a social obligation and in many ways Kierkegaard criticized the church because  the national church attitude kept people from fully converting to be real followers of Jesus. Kierkegaard used to regularly walk the streets,  talking to strangers and neighbors alike arguing with whomever would start a conversation with him. One of his ideas was that you should be able to tell who is a Christian just by the way they walk down the street. Perhaps the idea that you could tell a Christian  by the way they walk down the street is a little extreme, but I can understand his thought pro...

"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” Said by the Greek philosopher Epictetus. Interestingly, Epictetus started life as a slave, born in the year 50, but his owner gave him permission to study and eventually he made his way as a Stoic philosopher teaching on ethics in Rome, until he was banished of course, as the Emperor at that time banished all philosophical study from Rome. Epictetus is still known for his pithy teachings, written down by his students. "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." "He who laughs at himself, never runs out of things to laugh at." along with hundreds more. I chose the first one, "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." because it gets at the heart of the first parable for today from the gospel of Luke. Jesus is speaking of humility. Knowing our place in the world and not over-estimating ou...

I have completed three triathlons, two sprints and one olympic. I have completed countless 5K's, one 10K, one 15K,  and I'm looking forward to a half marathon next Sunday. I've biked 100 miles in a day, I've biked 150 miles in a weekend,  I've biked more than a thousand miles already this year alone. Yet, when I was at the EQHR conference in May in Georgia, a conference at which I was the only one who exercised during the week, someone asked me what it was like to be athletic and my first response, my immediate response, my gut response was "Oh, I'm not athletic." I did my first triathlon more than five years ago, I've been running, biking, swimming, running, biking, and swimming intently for more than five years and I still do not feel comfortable claiming the identity of "triathlete." Unfortunately in my head, from my years of being an overweight high school student  who couldn't run a mile no ...