The painter’s studio: a metaphor for thinking about worship

I’m at the semiannual Five Talent Academy gathering. It’s an initiative of the Virginia Methodist conference among churches who have covenanted around a set of goals for congregational vitality. Our topic today is worship, led by Rev. Dr. Constance Cherry. I’m seeing a lot of intersection between what is being said here and a book I just started reading by Andy Crouch called Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power. And it put a metaphor in my head for thinking about worship that seems helpful to me.

Some days there just isn’t a word from the Lord

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the disconnect between our public posturing as Christians and our actual behavior. I wrote last week about the difference between talking tough about sin in our public gestures and actually having tough conversations about our own sin in accountable relationships. Well today I’m confronted by the gap between the way I talk about reading the Bible and what really happens when I read it. Or at least today when I read all 8 of the weekly and daily Lectionary passages (Old Testament, Psalm, gospel, and epistle for each), God didn’t give me a word in any of them and that makes me doubt not God’s existence per se but whether I have the right expectations for what His book actually does.

Eternal life is innocence restored (Journey to Eternity #1)

There has been so much extra-Biblical speculation about the implications of the Garden of Eden story that it’s very hard to read the story on its own terms. When I was a kid, I couldn’t get over how ridiculous it was for God to be mad enough to burn billions of people in hell over a stupid apple. Well, it would be ridiculous if that were the truth. But if we read the actual text of Genesis 3, it offers us a brilliant allegorical illustration of the loss of innocence and trust that every human being goes through and which God is . A written summary for last weekend’s sermon is below. Here is the audio:

Word, life, light: the eternal side of Christmas

I decided to do something different for my LifeSign sermon this weekend. Normally for Christmas, we look at the accounts of Christ’s birth given in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Mark starts with Jesus’ baptism rather than his birth. John describes Jesus’ incarnation from His eternal perspective as the Word of God who became flesh. Part of John’s opening is one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible, John 1:5, which says, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not seize it.” Since there’s a lot of darkness in our world right now with school shootings and fiscal cliffs in the news, I felt called to preach on John 1:1-5 about the hope that is established by the incredible eternal identity of the baby who was born in Bethlehem. I will summarize my message below. Here is the audio: