St. Patrick Presbyterian Church, Epc

Today as we were touching base in the Starbucks line (our unofficial “southern campus”), Jim told me with great enthusiasm that he’d just ended a yearlong “stoic standoff” with my two-year-old by finally getting the boy to laugh. It’s true: Donovan is not one to warm quickly and is less and less inclined the harder one tries to draw him out. Jim swears the apple has not fallen far from my tree in that regard. Now I’m perhaps not as “stoic” as Jim often jokes I am (compared to a sanguine character like him, who isn’t a little melancholy!?), but he’s right that I’m not aptly described as a “jolly” fellow. I prefer dark chocolate, stout beers, and Russian novels. Just the idea of being forced to stir myself into a happy frenzy makes me very, very tired. The more superficial marks of gladness notwithstanding, I do believe it’s possible to experience the joy of the Lord as a more reserved human being, and I suspect it has something to do with being able to engage the messiness of reality in a way that the Psalms

I did not grow up in a shame culture. I grew up in a guilt culture. For purposes of clarity - guilt is what you feel when you do something wrong, say, lie or cheat. It is objective and you know you did it. Shame is when you feel like you are wrong, there is just something wrong with you. It is not that shame was not around when I was growing up, but it was more isolated and you just didn’t hear about shame unless someone did something really awful and it was usually that they had brought “shame on the family.”Times, they are a changin’. In the space of the last ten years “shame” is something that has become part of the national conversation. There are two reasons for this. The first is because of the amount of broken homes we see around us. Trauma produces shame. Children that never did anything wrong, have this sense that, “I am wrong,” or, “I am not enough,” and they don’t even know why. The second reason is iPhones and technology. When I was growing up I remember my senior year doing something that was ut

Because we cannot help but sin and do harm to God, to others, and to ourselves we must traffic in the currency of guilt and forgiveness. I confess, I have been around people who are almost incapable of admitting they are wrong. I know people for whom it is almost impossible for them to simply say, “I am sorry.” On the other hand, I know people who, God forbid, you do sin against because they will remind you of it for the next 20 years. I have been around people who catalog every offense and injury and refuse to grant absolution even when you are in sack cloth and ashes. I don’t know about you but I try to avoid people like this. I am simply not good enough!Guilt is a "merciful pain in the heart.” Merciful - because guilt works on the heart like pain does on the body. We need pain to alert us that if we keep using that skill saw on our finger it will be removed. Pain is elemental, it reacts and with good reason, it mercifully protects our bodies from further and future harm. Guilt works like this on our hearts

Have you ever taken one of the online quizzes to find out which Avengers character you are, or which Hogwarts House you’d be sorted into? One result of this popular personality profiling trend has been a widely held (false) belief that the world is filled with only two kinds of people: extroverts, those party animals who can’t keep a thought to themselves, and introverts, the shy, socially inept wallflowers. However, (as research suggests is actually true of most people), when I take the quizzes, I find that I am neither extreme introvert nor extrovert, but somewhere in between (ambiverts, they call us, which is sort of a non-name). I guess I’m just one of those boring freaks who likes to be with people sometimes and likes to be alone at other times.While I enjoy much about the popular craze of personality profiling, and especially some of the more reliable scientific archetypes behind it, I also recognize that identifying one’s preferences (even exaggerated caricatures of them) is not quite the same as recog

In Lord of the Rings, it is Sam who asks the question, sort of rhetorically, "Is everything sad going to come untrue?” He asks this question when he sees that Gandalf, who he thought was dead, is indeed alive. He also asks this question because everything in his world that he loved had been lost—his home, his friends, his pipe weed, his pots and pans, and he even believed himself dead. So to see something he loved not lost sends him into deep wonder, and you can almost feel the sadness melting away, a sadness that had grown and intensified for almost a year. For almost a year, he had watched the world he loved systematically taken away. Sadness is what you feel when something you love is taken away or lost. In a fallen world, we have no choice but to deal continually with sadness. The deeper we love something, the more sadness we feel when it is lost. In fact, as uncertain as the world is, there is no way we can avoid sadness. I remember thinking that, with six children, I had multiplied my capacity for deep

(Yes, that’s an R.E.M. reference, from that revolutionary 1992 album, “Automatic for the People.”) Jim and I have spent this week with a thousand other EPC pastors in sunny Sacramento, California, for our denomination’s General Assembly – learning, networking, strategizing, and voting as participants in the wider connectional body into which they are vowed. It’s a pretty awesome and humbling responsibility we have to stay committed, supportive and accountable to an extended family beyond our family at St. Patrick, but we are vow-keeping covenant people. So while there’s been a whole lot of socializing and sweating (it’s been 110 degrees all week!), it’s nothing at all that we could classify as “suffering for the Kingdom.”As I’ve been mulling over these themes of hurt and healing for Sunday’s sermon in our “Psalms! The Voice of the Heart” series, we’ve also been sharing in many conversations with other pastors and missionaries about what Jim jokingly calls “The Doctrine of the Sneakiness of God.” The more we r

I’m noticing a rising trend of people willing to publicly broadcast their struggles with anxiety. This was once a hush-hush condition, but today a Google search of TED talks on anxiety produces 340,000 results. Teenagers talk openly about their anxiety as if it were akin to acne – unwanted, but basically unavoidable. “Pop a Xanax” is becoming a common and often lighthearted prescription for just about any level of emotional discomfort. This uptick is actually not too surprising, given the kind of society in which we live. An entire population of deeply anxious individuals is just one of the logical conclusions of a capitalistic society.Let me explain: in our free market, the work of the advertiser is to actually create a tension in the consumer that only the purchasing of their product can relieve. The wildly successful AMC series Mad Men was based on this idea and its consequences. Fear mongering is at work underneath not only toothpaste and auto sales, but also cable news channels and educational choices. W

As we delve into the proper content of our summer series, Psalms! The Voice of The Heart, exploring the language of the emotions through the lens of the prayer book, I find myself experiencing and engaging all kinds of emotions in my own heart. There’s gladness, of course – I genuinely enjoy preaching, and as a musician the Psalms lay special claim to my affections. But there’s also fear in talking about emotions to emotional beings, with all of our baggage we bring. There’s a bit of loneliness thinking of how I’ll miss bouncing ideas off my coworkers as we’re all traveling in and out over the next few weeks for church trips and vacations. There’s also some shame when I think about how daunting these texts and concepts are and how limited I often feel before the colossal Word of God. But most of all, what I feel is anger.If that sounds strange to you, maybe it’s because we typically think of anger in one of two caricatures: the first is the kind of blind vindictive rage, bitterness, or resentment that destroy

This Sunday is Pentecost Sunday–the day we ponder God pouring out his Holy Spirit, without measure on his church. It is an interesting thing that Jesus’ ascension to the right hand of the Father and the subsequent outpouring of the Holy Spirit actually means we have more of Jesus! We are indwelt by God’s Spirit who testifies that we are children of God.A curious thing about the Holy Spirit is that he is the author of the Holy Scriptures. The Bible says that, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, the Scriptures were written:“For no prophecy was ever brought about through human initiative, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 2:21)Often in our rush for the new and the novel in a life with God, we miss the fact that, when we have the Bible, we have the voice of the Holy Spirit right at our finger tips!I say all that as introduction to the new sermon series we are starting. It is called, Psalms! The Voice of the Heart. The Psalms are the prayer book of the church. They

This Sunday is Ascension Sunday. Jesus moves from death, burial, and resurrection to ascend into heaven on clouds of glory. Literally, it is a picture of Jesus being enthroned! He is elevated to the right hand of the Father to rule and reign till he brings all things under his Lordship. It is no accident that after spending 40 days with his disciples and mostly dealing with their doubts and fears and all the things we know that keep us from believing the gospel—it is at the point of his Ascension that we see the church unleashed. We see it literally go viral and spread like wild fire across the Roman Empire.It is a moving picture, it is a powerful picture, and it is also instructive. This Sunday for those of you not out of town (it is also Memorial Day weekend and a day we remember those who have served our country in the military!) we will talk about it. This is the conclusion of our Eastertide series of Jesus’ appearances and what an epic conclusion. From Acts 1 on, the world would never be the same. (So if

Finally, this Sunday we are talking about the freedom that comes with confession and repentance. If there is one thing I know it is this, we can’t know true freedom until we learn that an authentic Christian life is one of continual confession and repentance. While the cross saves us and removes all condemnation from us, we still are sinful and live in a fallen world, and as Job says, “…but man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” So how do we walk in the light? How do we live a life of integrity? We have to lead a life of continual repentance. We have to candidly admit that we are not that good even on our best day and be quick to run to Jesus for grace in our brokenness.

A lot of bad things can happen in the silence. In the silence you cannot allow others in. In the silence you can get paranoid. In the silence you can start believing lies—you start “listening to yourself rather than talking to yourself.” But silence, on the other hand, is a thing I crave because I can’t really hear God’s voice unless I get alone and still. But still there is a silence that is rather bewildering and perplexing and we all know what it feels like—it feels like Monday morning!On Sunday everything seems so clear—we hear the gospel, rejoice with a few hundred of our friends, we sense God’s presence with us, and we are certain of what his message is for us for the next week. Then, once Monday morning comes and you begin going into your own personal context trying to live out the faithful presence of the gospel, all those great abstract ideas about God don’t make sense anymore. What does it mean to follow Jesus in this work situation? What does it mean to bring this area of my life under the Lordship

This Sunday we are looking at the poster child of doubt. Just as Judas is associated with being a traitor, Thomas is associated with doubt. If you are the one in your group who offers the skeptical or cynical opinion you might hear someone in the group look at you and say, "Well, there is old 'Doubting Thomas.'" Doubt can be a paralyzing and dehabilitating thing. Not that all doubt is bad. In the bible half the Psalms are prayers that echo some kind of doubt. However, doubt can go toxic and lead to losing hope and joy.In our text we see that in Thomas. Thomas is so lost, feels so abandoned and so hopeless that while the other disciples gathered on the Sunday of the resurrection, Thomas did not. Why was he not with the others? Was he that forlorn? Did he just have to be by himself? We don’t know exactly but we do know that he did not abandon the others and that when he was told that Jesus was in fact alive, he showed his real heart when he said I won’t believe unless I put my hands in his wounds. It is almost

I watched his face light up like a Christmas tree. This was a face that had previously featured the permanent furrow of an 80 year-old accountant on the brow of a nine year-old. He was sitting, absolutely swallowed up by my bulky, brown, microsuede office couch, next to his mother, her own face fixed in the Virgin Mary's adoring-yet-quizzical "no seriously, what child is this" repose, and he had been asking some very complicated questions about the metaphysics of our faith. I was (and still am) the new pastor who had not seen this coming, but I recognized it from the mirror of my own past.In our tradition, a few times a year we invite elementary and middle schoolers who would like to make a personal profession of faith and join the church to participate in our Communicants' Class. There, they have the opportunity to (re)hear the basics of our faith and practice and to process it over several weeks along with their parents. At the end of the class, each child schedules an "interview" with a pastor, a parent, a

We start a new series this Sunday. We are in the Eastertide season of the church. Eastertide begins on Easter Sunday and runs till Pentecost Sunday, roughly the next six Sundays. At different seasons of the year we tend to focus on different aspects of Jesus' life. For instance, during the season of Advent we ponder who Jesus is in his unique person. He is the ‘incarnate’ son of God. I confess, it never gets old pondering the God-man, and looking with wonder at the God who would give up so much to make me his son. During the Easter season we ponder the work of Jesus, what he came to do - “heal all the brokenness of the world” through his death, burial, and resurrection.So for the next six weeks we are going to talk about the various appearances of Jesus after the resurrection. It is utterly fascinating! It is so fascinating that the whole case for a resurrected Messiah rests on the various eyewitness accounts of Jesus' interaction with real people in space and time. After the resurrection, Jesus didn’t just d

Yes, that is the title to our Easter message. I struggled with whether to use the world “revolution” or not. I even called Josh and asked his opinion. Revolution is an emotionally charged word. The two most famous ones for us in America are The Americian Revolution and The French Revolution. We could name others but when we talk about revolution it is typically to speak of a new regime coming in to take over. It is usually done with power, coercion and force. We think of weapons, dead bodies, and carnage, whether it was a righteousness cause or not and what the outcome was. What ever your stance on ‘revolution’ it is typically the most powerful side wins.So to talk about Easter as a revolution is risky and yet, it seems the only word appropriate to describe the aftermath of what happened when Jesus rose from the grave. It did affect a revolution, but not like any the world has ever seen. When a man gets up out of the grave in the middle of human history – it changes everything – you have to deal with it. Only

Jim calls these the "Dog Days of Lent," and boy, is he right. As you know, I've been over any delusional sense of my own spiritual fortitude ever since The Infamous Latte Debacle of week one. I'm just not that good at being anyone's superhero of discipline, even though I am passionately committed to the power of habit as a means of grace. But now it feels like the rest of the congregation has finally joined me in the doldrums, and we're all just sitting in mud and ashes, ready for joy again. Proverbs 13 tells us that "hope deferred makes the heart sick," and our hearts are sick and tired of lenten waiting. We want to celebrate the resurrected life through the season of Easter, with all its robust feasting and restful enjoyment!And yet, there's still that persistent cross with its long shadow looming in the foreground of life, casting darkness over everything in its narrow path. It's why I'm grateful that just before the ultimate Lenten darkness of Maundy Thursday and languishing despair of Good Friday, we cel

We all have dreams that are unique to our own vocations and personalities. As a speaker, I have many times awakened in the middle of the night after a dream that went something like this: I realize at the last minute that my sermon is on my computer at my house (this actually happened recently). I get to my truck to run back and print it off, but after I get to the house, my computer won’t work. I try everything and, all the while, I am looking at my watch. Slowly, the clock is ticking and I know worship has started and I am still okay, it won’t take but a second to send it to my iPad and I can still make it in time, and no one will really know. But nothing I can do will retrieve the sermon. When I finally get the sermon printed and I calculate that I can still make it to the church before I have to preach, and before anyone knows I am absent, I can’t find my truck keys. I am looking at my watch and now it is getting really close. In my haste I am knocking over stuff, leaving the house a wreck, and I am now

It is Thursday night in Mobile, Alabama as I write this. I am tired, but have to get this written before I go to bed. I am exhausted. The week has been exhausting and glorious, but for now I am just exhausted. Michael Parsons, the leader of Soundscape, has lead his merry band of high school students through five shows in this tour of the Gulf Coast. In this tour I am the chief roadie and cook. I have found that a band, like an army, moves on it’s stomach, and this is the third and final year of my tenure as roadie and cook. I do this because I love it and because I love my son Eliot, who plays banjo. I am not a musician, nor the son of a musician – I love my son and I love to cook, thus I get up at 5:45 in the mornings to cook delicious food and I drive a big truck with a twenty four foot trailer into tight spots so we don’t have to carry the equipment very far.We finished the last gig this afternoon and Michael took the chaperones to a great dinner and I saw heaven when they put a plate of sixteen oysters in

I was going to write about something slightly different today, but as I was typing on the virtues of fasting I reached for my warm, frothy latte and realized something humiliating. Espresso with hot steamed milk is one of my favorite treats in the world and it’s been over a week since I’ve had one because I gave up dairy for Lent. You may be doing the math in your head and wondering what I’m doing drinking a latte on a Friday when I gave up dairy for Lent, and that would be an excellent question. Some of our more generous friends probably just assumed that I’m using soy or almond milk, but my wife would assure you and them that I would never stoop to participate in such vulgar sacrilege. I’m convinced the ancient Hebrews turned to cattle worship in part because the milk is just that good.No, I’m drinking a latte on a Friday in Lent because I accidentally ordered one and was halfway through it before I realized my mistake, and I’m not a legalist. I’ve got good theology that reminds me that there’s no condemnat