St. Patrick Presbyterian Church, Epc

"Mighty God”: The prophet sang that the coming king would be “Mighty God.” The one who would set the world to right and put down all Israel’s oppressors would be “Mighty God.” And yet, here we are with the smell of animals assaulting our senses and watching our step so that we don’t step in manure. How can this be? Is this really the mighty God that was talked about? More…the attendants are shepherds? Are you kidding me? These guys are so untrustworthy their testimony isn’t even accepted in court. Parentage? Very suspect, it is rumored that the mother's espoused husband almost put her away for being unfaithful. Is what we behold in the manger really “Mighty God?”The world has been asking that question for over 2,000 years. The world wonders at the extreme tension we see here and yet, should we? Might, true might, the authority and power to really do something is always, always, always in a manger setting. True power is always wedded to weakness and vulnerability. We just don’t want to accept that, do we? The

Here I am on a typical Advent evening with my children, half-watching what was likely my own first introduction to Charles Dickens: The Muppet Christmas Carol. Maybe not the most faithful interpretation, but it’s still very enjoyable – a delightful mix of well-delivered direct quotation and bizarre vaudeville parody. As we round the final stave, I’m reminded of the tragic irony that even though this is ultimately a redemption story, and the Carol’s own testimony is that our hero was forever remembered as a man who kept Christmas well, in our own world the name “Ebenezer Scrooge” is still synonymous with cruelty and humbug. A legacy is just not something that’s in our control. I was recently given a copy of Dickens’ The Life of Our Lord, which he wrote for his children and refused to publish as he felt it was too personal. It’s a good thing, too, as the work’s theology is, well, bad. Let’s stick to the gospels, shall we? It’s sometimes disheartening to learn the truth about our heroes. Dickens was also appare

What would you give for peace? Peace among friends and family, peace in the neighborhood, peace in the city, peace among nations, or that “peaceful easy feeling”? Real peace is hard to come by these days. I suppose in a broken world, with broken people, it has always been that way. Even Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of wars till he returned. We all dream of peace, even when it looks hard. Some people even decide that they will never find true peace with the culture the way it is, so they move out and create little utopias where they can escape the never-ending strivings of people, the endless bombardment of advertising aimed to trouble our peace till we get the latest toy or gadget, or the constant level of discourse on social media. People have always done stuff like this, however there is one problem: when you move out of the culture into your own idyllic enclave with your true soul mates—you and your friends carry the war and lack of peace with you. This Sunday, we will explore this theme and

Charles Dickens’ book Great Expectations, while not technically a book about Christmas like his famous Christmas Carol, does start out with a young orphaned boy named Pip at a Christmas Feast. He is a boy of low expectations and prospects. Both of his parents are dead, and he lives with his overbearing sister, Mrs. Joe, and her husband Joe, who is also rather beat-down. It is not just that his expectations are low because of the tragedy of his parents’ death, but his sister makes every day of his existence a further descent into purgatory. Better to just manage expectations and not hope than to allow yourself to hope and have your dreams and longings be crushed.I suspect many people are like that this time of year. This season promises so much and yet so often we leave the Advent and Christmas Season feeling emptier than when we started. Why is that? Well, we seem like we are waiting for something. For children, it is new toys; for many adults, it is a time to slow down from work and gather with friends and f

So, we come to the end of the book of James. Our premise is, Wisdom works. The pragmatist says something like this, “This works so it must be true.” The Bible says something totally antithetical to the wisdom of the world; it says, “This works because it is true.” The closer we align our lives with the “oughtness" of things, the more our lives will come together. James has argued that real wisdom is living out the profession we make. And as we have seen over the last two months—this is hard. I mean, the image of the Christian life is summed up in a cross—an instrument of death. Jesus made the way of the cross the way of wisdom, “my life for yours,” “death before resurrection.” I will admit that much of the time this is a faith issue. The way of the world offers a seemingly easier road to joy and happiness. And yet….is this really true? The Bible says that “for the joy set before him” Jesus endured the cross. In other words, a cross-filled life leads to a joy-filled life, but not like you would think!As we com

In the Mid-South, your almanac is really only any good as a fire-starter. At least that’s how I felt this week, as I watched snow fall in the middle of November. I can’t imagine a world where my livelihood depended on the reliability of our weather. While less than 2% of our nation now lives and works on a farm, I know we have several builders in our church who still constantly feel the power of climate over commerce. It’s something we have to consider now as we contemplate groundbreaking for our own building expansion. But by and large, we live a climate-controlled existence, and I’m pretty grateful for that. We’ll just let Superintendent Aitken stay up and worry about the weather for us. This week I also finished the memoir of a fellow clergyman whose first pastorate was in rural Illinois. One of the treasured liturgies of his deeply agricultural congregation was the rogate, the blessing of fields and seeds on the fifth Sunday after Easter. As Rev. Richard Lischer puts it, “Rogate is the Latin word for ‘pr

I will confess that “worldliness” is a hard word to define. In our text this week, James says that “friendship with the world is enmity with God.” What does that even mean? When I was growing up I knew what it meant. To be worldly was to enjoy certain things way too much. We were naturally suspicious of any kind of pleasure. So, the way to end worldliness was to make lists of things that we called evil and abstain from them. Things like drinking, smoking, dancing, and certain kinds of music. However, even then I saw people who could keep the list perfectly but still exhibited no fruit of the spirit. What was up with that? So, what is worldliness? C. J. Mahaney says it like this, “Worldliness, then, is a love for this fallen world. It’s loving the values and pursuits of this world that stand opposed to God. More specifically, it is to gratify and exalt oneself to the exclusion of God.” (C. J. Mahaney, ed., Worldliness) Worldliness means basically to live according to the world’s value and to disregard God’s la

Words are weighty! We may say "talk is cheap," but we all know that is not true. Of all God’s creation only we can use language. Words are power! Trees, dogs, and even the most highly intelligent primate cannot take words and tell a person what is in their very soul. But words, the power of language - the most precious gift God gave us, is corrupted to the point that that which can be used for good, becomes a weapon we all use against each other. In fact, the book of Proverbs says, words have the power of life and death! Life and death. We can heal with our words and we can wound. The most powerful thing in the world is three simple words together, “I love you.” While on the other hand, if you want to ruin a child, tell him every day that he is no good.Words are why millions of people spend billions of dollars each year on therapy. Words! Words are power and Scripture says they reveal the heart. What you say shows what is in your heart. And Scripture also says, “no one can tame the tongue.” What are we to do?

I was in Colorado Springs most of this week, equipping and encouraging the church planters in our denomination. On Thursday morning, we took all the guys and their wives who wanted to join us at “Garden of the Gods” to watch the sunrise. This is one of the most beautiful places on earth. You walk into this area that has these huge stone monoliths that seemly just broke the surface of the earth, like a tooth from a gum, and they just stand there, towering about the earth in their majesty. The unique thing about them is that the rock face is flat and just soars straight up. When the morning sun coming over the rise begins to hit these mostly flat rock faces, the colors are dazzling. As I pondered the people that were at this retreat, I thought, “There must be forty church planters here, in various stages of launch. To get all these churches launched, it will most likely cost almost 20 million dollars! Twenty million! Is it worth it? Why invest so much money in new churches? And what kind of sacrifice from the

I can’t help it - heaven knows I try - but every time I am in a new setting of people, my first thought is to “size them up.” I scan the room, noting the people who sort of look like they have the same sensibilities as me. Usually you can see and sense this by clothing and conversation. I then sort of move toward these people and away from the people who look like they might be different from me. Because of the Gospel, I have enough self-awareness to know that, if I allow myself to only move out to people like myself, I have not really understood Jesus at all. James talks about the sin of partiality, and the way he talks about it makes me believe that he is talking to people who, though guilty of this sin, are blind to it and would be shocked if James singled them out. It is like James draws a large caricature to get behind their defenses so they can see it. If there is one thing I know, it is this: human nature doesn’t change much—what people wrestled with since time immortal, we still wrestle with today.

As we’ve launched into our study on James, I’ve been thinking about the Jacobite uprisings of the 18th century. The connection perhaps seems like a stretch unless you know that the name “James” is just a weirdly Anglicized version of “Jacob,” the Jacobites being supporters of the Catholic King James the II. In similar fashion, the name translated in our Bibles as “James” in the New Testament is always Iakobus in the Greek and Latin. When used in the New Testament in reference to the Old Testament patriarch, the word is translated “Jacob”, yet when used in reference to anyone living at the time of Jesus, the name is translated “James.” Presumably, when John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English in the 14th century, he translated the name Jacob as “James,” because “Jacob” sounded a bit too Jewish, and Europeans weren’t very fond of Jews at the time. When the time came for an Authorized English Bible, no one was brave enough to suggest that they might now render the name as “Jacob” when the entire project w

When I was reading the Daily Office this morning, praying and pondering the various texts, one of the things that struck me was in a reading from the book of Hosea. The whole book of Hosea is an indictment against Israel. God calls Israel his “vine” that he uprooted and planted in a large and glorious place. He gave them a rich gift. Even more, by his good grace he made them prosper. Interestingly enough, the prophet says the thing that seduced Israel away from being lost in love and wonder that God would be so gracious and generous with them, to being proud and believing that it was their own cleverness that that made them great—was prosperity. Listen to the prophet as he shares God’s heart: When I fed them, they were satisfied; when they were satisfied, they became proud; then they forgot me. (Hosea 13:6) I read years ago something the Scottish philosopher and writer Thomas Carlyle said, “Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will st

My son just finished a degree from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. After four years and a summer, he is now officially equipped for the real world. He is an expert in the field of business, and everyone should hire him and pay him a large sum of money. And, if you believe this, I have some swamp land to sell you! Or to put it another way, would you allow a doctor to operate on you if you saw his diploma and knew he had graduated from medical school a month ago and had not completed any residencies or internships? Hardly! Why not? Well, it is simple—knowledge and information are overrated. What we really need in life is wisdom. And, quite frankly, the only way to get wisdom is through life experience. Let’s define wisdom, for simplicity’s sake, as “skills and competencies in dealing with all the complexities of life."When I got out of seminary and was sitting in my office pondering the church plant I had landed myself into, I admit that, just two months in, I was wondering why they had hired me and wha

If I had heard of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon when I was in high school or college, I would have immediately made it my band's name. It sounds like an angsty progressive German punk group or something. What it actually describes, though, is much more interesting. It's the sensation you feel when you've learned a new word or idea, and suddenly you begin to see it everywhere. As a person who is delighted by words and ideas anyway, this happens to me a lot. And it can be dangerous, as was the case with Jim Carrey's character in the movie, 23. To the man with a hammer, everything is a nail. I'm in the midst of a season of my life where I'm trying to read all the books people assume I've already read, and last week I finished John Steinbeck's East of Eden. It's an imaginative retelling of the Cain and Abel story, set in Northern California at the dawn of the 20th century and got my mind reeling with regard to the fundamentals of family relationships. So when I picked up C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces this past w

I am most likely on a beach down in Florida when you read this. I am at the end of a vacation and getting geared up to be back home tomorrow. I am working on my savage tan, chasing around a bunch of wild children, and cooking the best food of our lives. As the old preacher said, “It is Friday…but Sunday is a-comin’!” And with great anticipation I will see you on Sunday.What a great day of celebration. It just so happens that we will be talking about the church looking more like a “mash unit” than a "club.” Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:16-17) So, by definition, none of us here have arrived, at best we are “unwell, in a new way.” This is huge when it comes to hospitality, because it is when we forget we too are “unwell” that we lose the capacity to be agents of healing in a broken world.This Sunday is also a great day of celebration because we will introduce Michelle Green, the leader of the Collierville chapter

Place names almost always come with associations attached, for good or ill. Sometimes the setting is itself another main character in the story. Imagine Lawrence without Arabia, or Harry Potter without Hogwarts. Sodom is not the name of a place you want to be from, and when Micah says the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, images of sheep and bread and David come unbidden. So it is with the passage we’re exploring this week as we continue in our study of Making Room: Recovering Christian Hospitality. I like to quiz people on where the story of Zacchaeus takes place. It’s a visually memorable narrative about a wee little tax collector who climbs a sycamore tree to see Jesus and ends up being seen by Him. I’ve already spoiled the surprise with my title, but the thing I’m most struck by in the story of Zacchaeus (this week anyway) is its setting. The City of Jericho ought to conjure for the diligent reader images of spies and prostitutes; of trumpets and of crumbling walls; of miraculous faith and unlikely salva

One of the shocking things about hospitality is that, when you look at places where radical hospitality is taking place, it is usually from the margins of society. The people with the least resources seem to be the people who are capable of showing the most hospitality. It would seem on the surface that people with more to give, in time and money, would be more available, but statistics and experience show otherwise.Here is why: as people move away from the margins and find themselves inside more comfortable and socially acceptable places, they forget what it was like to be on the outside. So, maybe it is understandable. But is it acceptable? Good question! The religious people of Jesus’ day used scripture to justify keeping their distance from outsiders, people who were socially unacceptable, and people ethnically different than them. Jesus, however, dropped a bomb on their neat little tidy religious lives and identified with the outsiders. Of course, he did! None of us reading this would know Jesus if he ha

While you might recognize the title as being that of the current Netflix series of which many of us eagerly await season three, the Bible is full of references to “stranger” things––that is, things that concern strangers. While we have talked much about hospitality over the last few weeks, this week we come to look at the “who” of hospitality: to whom are we to show hospitality?The word hospitality literally means “love of strangers.” I don’t know about you but, for me, that is asking a lot. I mean, strangers are, well, strange! They are not familiar, not part of our circles, and are often scary. After all, we teach our children to “beware of strangers,” “don’t talk to strangers,” and yet when we read the Bible we are struck by how much God has to say about “strangers.” In the Old Testament, God built his law to include them; in the New Testament, God himself becomes the “stranger!” Shocking, yes! And if you really seek to love and welcome the outsider, it actually might feel like the cross.So, join us on Sun

Hospitality is an industry! It is s specialty. You can get a four year degree in Hospitality, become an expert and make lots of money in your craft. I was on a business trip last week in Denver, meeting with the National Committee on Church Planting. I was staying in the Hotel Indigo and, as I was checking in, was told they had no reservation for me. I admit, I was a little miffed. The lady at the desk, however, took a lot of time to say, “Mr. Holland, we will do everything we can to make sure we find or make room for you.” She then got her boss, who checked her records and, sure enough, she had a room for everyone but me! However, she told me not to worry, she would handle the situation. At this point, another desk clerk got involved and within 20 minutes I had a room. For the next two days, everyone who was involved in this mess would greet me by my first name and ask me if everything was okay. Here, I thought, is the secret sauce of hospitality as an art and craft. This group of workers took a situation th

Yesterday’s Daily Office included John’s account of the calling of Nathaniel as a disciple. It’s a great scene: Nathaniel has been skeptical about Jesus’ background before meeting him, but Jesus greets him so perfectly, he knows he’d been expected. When Nathaniel then sheepishly asks Jesus how he knew about him, Jesus answers, basically, “I saw you before I called you.” Jesus does his research and then gives him such an overwhelmingly personal welcome that the boy immediately recognizes him as the Messiah. That’s just Jesus’ way. He sees us before we see him, and he chooses the perfect welcome with which to greet us. Jesus then follows that up with, “I can’t wait to show you all the other things you’re longing to see.” Nathaniel’s jaw drops, along with mine.In the same Daily Office, we read from Psalm 145: “The eyes of all look upon you and you give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.” Have you ever been invited to a dinner where it seemed like