St. Patrick Presbyterian Church, Epc

There is this great scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones has a glorious epiphany. He is trying to find the lost Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis find it and use it as a talisman, a thing of power. The key to finding it is inscribed on a long-lost medallion. One of the Nazi agents grabs the medallion and, because it is white hot, has the inscriptions burned into his hand. Thinking they have the cipher to unlock the location of the ark, they send their teams to Egypt to dig.            When Indiana Jones takes the medallion to see an old friend, they find someone who can read it. Suddenly they realize that they have only one-half of the cipher and exclaim together, “They are digging in the wrong place!” That might be a good descriptor of what Paul is teaching us in I Corinthians. It seems, then and now, most of our best energy and investments are in the showy, flashy, even spectacular, rather than investing in the virtue of love. Of course, it is easy to see why. Compared to Jesus' kind of

There is more written about the love of God in the Bible than just about anything else, and the crazy thing is, it is hardly ever simply defined. It is, however, illustrated a lot! The same is true in our passage this week in 1 Corinthians 13. Love is not so much defined as a few attributes are credited to it, but mostly we are told what love is not. Of course, what makes Christianity unique among religions is the great claim that love itself (that is, the very essence of love) peeled back the veil and lived among us. Not just an idea of love but love personified in flesh and blood.             That is really good news, because the old maudlin song, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love” is true. The real truth about the human condition is that we were built to be loved. In fact, we demand it of other people who are incapable of loving us perfectly and then, when they fail, all kinds of untoward things begin to happen to the human soul. Interestingly enough, though, we demand unconditional love from o

Some years ago, I was coaching a church planter. I told him from the get-go, for you to be successful in planting a church, you need three things: people need to love the vision, people need to love you, and people need to love each other. These are all essential. If you miss one of these, it won’t work. This was a gifted guy but the church plant was rocky; he would get a group of people together and they would sort of dwindle, and then it would build up again, then dwindle. At one point he called me up and said, “Do I really need a core group to plant this church?” I about lost it on him. When I stopped railing on him, I calmly said, “You are missing one of the essential things, a thing that if not present your church will fail. You have to connect this group not just to you, but, more importantly, to each other—they have to love each other.”             Essential things. That is what we are talking about this Sunday as we start a brand new series called The Greatest of These. For the next six weeks, we are

Gen Z kids view selfies very differently than do the Millenials who purportedly invented them. I first noticed this while being instructed by my niece on a (then) new social media app called SnapChat. It was basically the anti-Instagram. Whereas I had grown accustomed to carefully curated and filtered digital galleries, these kids were producing and posting hundreds of thoughtless images that would disappear within the day. Terrible lighting, angles, and framing; all of it disastrous! This was so obviously one of those generational pendulum swings. Young people were (rightly) unimpressed with the gulf between online image and reality, and so they were primed and ready for its antithesis: unfiltered, unflattering, and ultimately ephemeral. The Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gough mastered the art of the selfie long before this century’s influencers, and he managed to strike a synthesis. Of his over forty self-portraits, perhaps the most famous is one displaying his bandaged (lack of an) ear. He had cut the

For me, the biggest unintended consequence of talking about “prosthetic gods” has been a sort of reawakening, as I dusted off staid old theological categories like God’s infinity, his aseity, his immutability, and, this week, his simplicity. God is simply the best, and he didn’t work out or scheme to be the best—he is, in his very being, greatness that is incomprehensible. This is where we find the psalmist this week, and he is lost in wonder. In Psalm 139, the psalmist is in the Soul Room, praying to God for vindication, a plight we humans find ourselves in quite often. He considers who God is and who he is in light of who God is. He ponders that God knows his deepest thoughts, knows his comings and goings. God was there forming him in the womb and knows all his days before he even was a glimmer in the mind and bodies of his parents.             He can only wonder at the vastness of God, and when he contemplates Divinity, he can’t get to the bottom of who God is. The finite can’t comprehend the infinite. It

It feels strange to write something like “learning to be human” but, alas, this is where we find ourselves. If the defining characteristic of our advanced technological state has left us more anxious and alienated—lonely—then we have to ask why. Ironically, it seems the push with our digital screens is to make us less human, trans-human, or to denigrate our embodied state, as if our bodies are a hindrance and are holding us back. Our quest for glory and immutability has left us less human and wondering where the promised land is that technology promised us.            We serve an immutable God who, as one writer says, “[is]without any new nature, new thought, new will, new purpose or new place…God is a necessary being; he is necessarily what he is, and therefore is unchangeably what he is.” (Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God) We, on the other hand, are finite and live in time; we are totally mutable and must change and grow in order to become the persons God meant us to be. Biblically spea

All tools and technology come with their own inherent requirements for wisdom, some more than others. It’s the classic myth of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods, thus giving humanity technology. He is punished for this by Zeus who had him bound to a rock, with his liver being eaten out every day. The myth says a lot about the ancient gods who were forever withholding from creatures they tolerated at best and exploited for their own amusement at worst. It also signals that there are inherent dangers with any new technology or tool, and we often have the technology long before we acquire the wisdom to use it.God, on the other hand, created us in his image and, because we share in God’s nature in ways theologians called the “communicable attributes” of God, God made us to advance civilization and human thriving by making tools that make life both easier and better. However, the problem with an unfettered adoption of any and all technology as a positive good is that our tools also reshape our sensibilities.

If you're like me, then you're exiting summer with plenty of regrets. Did you accomplish everything you put on your to do list? Did you go everywhere? Did you see everyone? Did you stop time around a bonfire with family or learn everything you could from your summer reading list? No, no, no, and double no for me. Spring Greg has a lot of summer hopes; Fall Greg comes back to earth. And that's when I learn to be human again. Our August sermon series aims to meet us in the mundane and find the glory God shares with His creation. "Men ought not to play God before they learn to be men, and after they have learned to be men, they will not play God." Paul Ramsey was a theologian and bioethicist at Princeton when he coined this saying. He used it to guide much of his teaching on how we use science and medicine in our modern age. Since then, many arguments have been made against it, but the principle remains. God is God; we are not. The storyline of Scripture is built on this truth. The Gospel would not be good news

With the Olympics in full swing, the internet is teeming with athletic videos. One I can’t get out of my head is of this young guy well ahead of the pack and clearly destined to win. Curiously, he looks back and sees how far ahead he is, and then sort of… pumps the brakes a bit? The gobsmacked commentators suggest that maybe he was saving his legs for the next heat. But if so, it was a terrible miscalculation, because several of the runners behind him instantly overtook his lead. He didn’t even qualify for that next round. It’s the kind of tragedy that only plays out in real-time arena sports. I’ve never been a runner, but even I was gutted.  Spectating is a fascinating activity. Your sympathetic nervous system ties the action you’re witnessing to your own sense of well-being. Your heart rate undulates. Mirror neurons cause your body to mimic the movements on the field from the stands or your easy chair. It’s such a great argument against the idea of individualism: we are actually wired to be wired to each ot

We’ve been spending the summer in Hebrews 11, often referred to as “The Hall of Faith.” Imagine yourself walking through a museum with magnificent portraits of Israel’s heroes: there’s Abel, with his glorious sacrificial lamb. Enoch’s there, maybe pictured drifting upward through the clouds. Next is Noah, standing proudly in front of his new boat, ready for lake life. Then there’s Abraham, perhaps laughing with his wife, Sarah, or embracing Isaac after an awkwardly knife-y interaction. Isaac’s next with his own portrait, embracing his two vastly different sons. Jacob is after him, with his son Joseph and two of his grandkids. Then we have Moses, of course, holding the two tablets of the law. The next painting is of a woman, Rahab, the second in the series; she’s in her house making breakfast for two men asleep on her floor. There’s a red cord coiled in a bag next to one of them.Before her portrait, though, there’s a conspicuously empty frame with, anachronistically, a little image of a crossed-out camera and

Our character from Hebrews 11 this week needs no introduction—Moses. When I think of Moses, I think of the Cecil B. DeMille’s classic movie, “The Ten Commandments”. Charlton Heston was Moses and this film aired in two parts around Easter time every year. It was a tradition. The whole family would sit down to watch this two-part series on one of our heroes made famous by Hollywood! It has been done in more recent times by Disney and others because, even if you don’t believe the Bible, the story of royalty identifying with slaves (who at first don’t even like him) and then leading them out of slavery to the promised land—who doesn’t love that redemption story?            Anyway, this Sunday we will be talking about Moses and why he occupies a lot of press in chapter 11. The text says he chose to go into exile rather than enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. What I love about this is the way the writer casts following Jesus not as a renunciation or a huge sacrifice, though both of these are true, but rather of c

Allie and I celebrated our seventeenth wedding anniversary this week. That means we’ve now been married longer than she was alive before we started dating! I love to think back to the ceremony: reverent and majestic; filled with aesthetic gravitas and ancient vows; the chancel choir, the vaulted ceiling and marble altar, the grandiose thunder and lighting, the trembling and the tears. We were just kids, reaching into the most sacred sacramental realities of humanity and daring to participate in some small way.  “You must leave and cleave,” they told us, and we thought that sounded easy enough.  As it turns out, it’s not easy. And it certainly isn’t accomplished in a one-time event. There are many ways in which the things we try to leave are often cleaving to us, and many other leave-worthy things are stowaways hidden from us in the secret clefts of our souls, waiting to surprise us. We carry so much of our inheritance in the folds of these broken hearts, which we’re trying to fit together but won’t always sti

Last week we had General Assembly here in Memphis, and I was glad I didn’t have to hobble through any airports on a bad leg. Call me selfish, but I was in a wheelchair last time I went through an airport and to have to hobble along feels just awful. Anyway, apart from all the meetings and happenings, it felt sort of like a homecoming. There, I saw people I don’t see often, some I am glad I don’t (just being honest) and others I wish lived more close by.             I also saw some of our missionaries while there. I saw Chris Furr who is in Scotland and, apparently, he has gone native. He was wearing a kilt. I also saw our good friend Chris Gibson who works in Budapest. What exactly are they, as they do their work in strange places in the world, far from the country of their birth? They are not gypsies, moving around all the time, nor are they citizens of the lands in which they minister. They essentially are “resident aliens”. What I mean is, they are sort of permanent in a place that is not their home. They

If you are wondering about growing in faith, one thing is for sure: God will introduce crisis in your life. We don’t really change much if everything is going well. By crisis, I mean things that rock your world and your foundations – things that call for decisions that make you move out or leave stuff behind. Hard truth for people in suburbia and yet it is true.Abraham in the Bible is the archetype of faith. In other words if your really want to dig in to a life of faith, Abraham is your guy. He is looked to as the father of faith in there major religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There is a reason Abraham figures so prominently in the Story of Redemption. It is to him that the great promise comes, of God forming a people and also that from his seed the whole world would be blessed. To him comes the great covenant that ultimately will land Jesus on the cross and it is why Abraham gets the most press in Hebrews 11.And yet, it was not a straight line. Genesis doesn’t wallpaper over Abraham’s sin, his do

Boston, Massachusetts, 1919. A factory had just transitioned their business model from supporting the war effort toward making rum, only to discover that this too would be only a small window of opportunity. The magnanimous Temperance Movement was giving distillers one more year before shutting down the sale of all alcohol in the country. So, the Purity Distilling Company decided to increase production, making hay while the sun still shone. And shine it did that January morning, raising temperatures so quickly that the unthinkable happened.  The shotgun sound of bursting rivets was chased by 2.3 million gallons of molasses onto one of the most densely populated city streets in the US. The towering wave moved at an astonishing 35 miles an hour, swallowing and crushing everything and everyone in its path. Locals who had complained for months about the container’s shoddy construction had been unheard, as they were mere non-voting immigrants. In one way, many of these victims were now silenced permanently; in ano

I confess, I have not looked forward to this one—Enoch. What the heck is he doing in this rundown of the great heroes of faith? I mean seriously, when you read the list, he is the most unlikely, at least on the surface. All of the folk in the rundown of Old Testament greats demonstrate their faith in an extraordinary manner. By faith…and then some heroic activity. So much so that in a summary of their greatness in Hebrews 11: 33 we read, “through faith they conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, punched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war. Put foreign armies to flight.” Yea! That is what I am talking about.            And yet, while Hebrews 11 tells us all the great things that some of our forbearers did, Enoch is the only one that by faith doesn’t really do anything much, but rather has something done to him by God. His is not much a backstory; it is buried in all the “begettings” of chapter 5

A stroll through Hebrews 11 would be similar to going to an ancient castle: beautiful and austere; something out of another world on the outside and, as you enter, you would see the story of the place as you walked through in the form of tapestries and pictures, relics of another world. It is the world of the people who once inhabited the place and fought to keep it in the family for hundreds of years. Heroes, if you will, folk of renowned.             Hebrews 11 is the story of Israel in the Old Testament; it is also our story. It is the story of faith that endured. What is fascinating is that the writer takes us all the way back to the origins of the story of redemption and, guess what, it is the story of God’s grace coming to people and of them laying hold of God’s promises by faith. There are two stories always going on, and we see all this in Genesis 4 in the story of Cain and Abel. One story, the one you think is the ascendant story, and the other, the real story of how God is working in history. One st

I just made it through Shelob’s lair in Cirith Ungol. It seemed like the quest to destroy the ring had died with a stab in the neck to Frodo by Shelob, the huge spider that haunts this dark passage and has lived there time out of mind in malice and death. It was a near thing but that is just the beginning of the trouble of Frodo and Sam. I am almost through my annual trek through Middle Earth and perhaps the hardest part of the whole quest is the thirteen days Frodo and Sam face in Mordor after Sam finds Frodo. It is a test of endurance. Small folk in a hostile environment, with the weight of the ring so heavy Sam must carry Frodo. Nothing is easy, nothing is safe, terror is around them and also in them. They are physically beat, emotionally exhausted, harassed by Gollum and plagued with doubt—doubt that almost undoes the whole quest in the end—and yet they endured. To put yourself inside the story is almost too much to bear. Our text in Hebrews reminded me a lot of that this morning. We start a new sermon se

No one is asking me for fashion advice. I’ve never really cared for clothes, and I became even less inclined to participate in style when I realized that it continually changes. You mean to tell me I need new clothes not just seasonally, but also according to the whims of teenagers and Frenchmen? No thank you. In fact, after a recent week among the monks of Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico, I had almost resolved myself to radically simplify – maybe just jeans and a black t-shirt every day like Steve Jobs. Then I remembered that this would not be acceptable to my wife, as my outfit often serves as merely an accessory to her own. I have already made vows, after all. So, I don’t fuss over clothes. But over a decade ago I was teaching through Colossians and I got to the part in chapter 3 when Paul says we are to clothe ourselves with Christ. That sent me down a rabbit trail where I discovered that in some ways, the whole Bible is a better story about clothes! From nakedness and shame in the garden to

In recent years, May has become a calendaring nightmare. The convergence of end-of-school, civic, and extracurricular events with beautiful weather means that even Mothers’ Day is far more frantic than she deserves. This is the month of end-of-year exams, graduations, performance recitals, dress up days, awards ceremonies, soccer tournaments, parties for kids unfortunate enough to have been born in this cruel season, crashing into Memorial weekend trips to the lake. Oh, and of course we also want to make sure we faithfully celebrate the Ascension so that we’re ready ten days later for all the Pentecost revelries. Of course, I’m joking about that last bit. We don’t live in a time or place where the liturgical calendar is a factor in this conversation. The number and range of obligations outside of that are staggering. How much worse it feels it’s gotten since all the lockdowns ended! In fact, I’m proposing a swift, orderly change in name: from “May” to “Must.”  Stacked social obligations have always led me to