Tag: everyday life
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Improvisation
Things do not always go smoothly, or as planned. Worship committees plan simple, but special, changes to focus our attention on Advent, and then the people who have been working on the planning get exposed to COVID or, worse, come down with it and can’t be there in person on Sunday. Or the people who […]
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A Thought on What It Means to Serve God Day and Night in God’s Temple
At the beginning of the COVID crisis, our church shifted to meeting online, like lots of other churches. But knowing that some members of the congregation would miss out on that, because of their “tech” capabilities or comfort, we – technically, our pastor, but with the enthusiastic concurrence of the Session – started mailing out […]
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Continuities
Our wonderful pastor was called away, along with her family, to celebrate the life and mourn the death of a dear family member. Hence this sermon, based on Acts 4:32-35: We don’t actually know a lot about the earliest church, the earliest Christians. Yes, there are whole large sections in libraries about life in the […]
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Reflecting on James 2 1-13
We are studying James 2:1-13 for Sunday, November 29 (which is also the First Sunday in Advent); this is James’s critique of “partiality” in the church. [A few notes on this text are here.] Here are a few questions we might want to consider in our study of the text: Who seems to be the […]
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What I’ve been doing
This is what I’ve been doing for the past three weeks. Just sayin’. The learning curve is steep. Notes on Hosea 11 & 12 are coming. Probably tomorrow. I can’t believe she expects us to do all this reading …
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Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Celebrating Our Bicentennial II)
This was the big day. This was a long day. People arrived early, to attend to last minute preparations, like putting the tree to be decorated during Sunday school in place, making copies of the program for the day, dropping off food for the buffet table. People stayed late, cleaning up, clearing the tables, putting […]
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Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Last week, we realized that almost everyone, including me, was going to be out of town this Sunday, so if anyone ended up discussing Genesis 19 they’ll have to fill me in next week. From what I could tell from my advance copy of the order of service, the preacher of the day was going […]
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F – F – F – Feelings …
Bennett, Michael I. and Bennett, Sarah. F*ck Feelings: One shrink’s practical advice for managing all life’s impossible problems. Simon and Schuster, 2015. [An Installment of the “Read Me” Project.] This recent acquisition popped off the shelf at Carmichael’s just a few days before our niece’s wedding. Purely coincidental that, no doubt. Someone* who would pay […]
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Real Life Metaphor
What looked like a bush on the edge of the woods turned out to be a sapling, bent almost to the ground under the weight of a rotting log, reaching out of the woods like a leafy, outstretched arm. How long had that log been there, pressing on its skinny trunk, forcing it out instead […]
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Third Sunday of Easter
It is a gray, rainy day in southern Indiana, with LOTS of birds about. In class this morning, we agreed that John 21:15-25 has something to do with Jesus setting Peter up to be “head of the church” going forward. But we wanted to see more than that historical or traditional message. Because everyone seemed […]
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Second Sunday of Easter
Presumably, the class this morning discussed the significance of Jesus’ meal on the beach with the disciples, and our pastor shared yet more insight on the disciple Thomas’s encounter with the risen Christ, which turns up in the Sunday lectionary every year on the second Sunday of Easter. I confess I don’t know, because we […]
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On Saying “Yes” to the Dress
Now that Christmas is over and we are back in town from visiting relatives and shopping with Christmas money, it turns out it is time to shop for prom. This is because waiting till the second or third week of January for an occasion that occurs in the spring guarantees that the early birds have […]
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Justified Extravagance
Over dinner we talked about something that seemed incomprehensibly extravagant, unjustifiably expensive, to us. “I would never spend $100 on …” “Well, if you cared about fashion – not me, of course, but if you did …” “I do buy art; I suppose some people would think spending money on art is crazy …” “Some […]
Matters of Interpretation 