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I am a great fan of New Year’s resolutions. As December turns into
January, I find myself taking them pretty seriously, pondering what one
or two resolutions I might make for the coming year. What is most
important to me is choosing something that I can make into a habit,
thereby improving my way of being in the world in some small way.
There’s a real danger in today’s culture, especially if you’re a
young person in some kind of creative industry - I even feel this as a
church leader - that in order to survive and become successful, you need
to end up becoming obsessed with promoting yourself.
The Bible gets four shots to tell Jesus’ birth — well, four gospel writers plus Paul and the other epistle writers, so at least four.
But the manger only appears in Luke. For many current-day Christians,
the Christmas story would be incomplete without the manger scene:
little baby Jesus wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.
I got into a car recently, with another female pastor and an
Evangelical man. I asked the guy about his church and he said, “I go to a
church where men’s leadership is very important. Men don’t go to church
any more. And so our church puts men in leadership so that it will
attract more men.”
My friend Tim Ghali
asked me to contribute some liturgy for an Advent service, and I chose
to use the O Antiphons as a base. The O Antiphons are the daily prayers
for services during the week proceeding Christmas Day.
The
little rural church I serve, along with two other retired clergy, has
two dozen members, if you carefully count everyone whether there or
not. No one is young. The church growth gang (now called church
transformation) calls it a declining and dying congregation. The thing
is, it's been there for over a hundred years and has never had more than
a couple dozen me
Maura was bleeding profusely and knew that death was likely waiting for her after every short and gasping breath. Yet,
she noticed that the men had already sprinted back to their van. Their
guns were still warm from the bullet they had discharged and the death they had wrought in Maura and her sisters: Ita Ford, Jean Donovan, and Dorothy Kazel.
Not so much the eating part, but the preparing part. For the past three
years, since becoming a stay-at-home dad, I have done most of the
cooking, especially around the holidays, planning, preparing, and
cooking festive feasts.
On this past week’s This American Life, the third act, “Wary Home Companion,”
told the story of an elderly woman with a middle aged son who is
autistic.
