RoboPreacher

but how you going to lift it with your arms folded tight? advent is over We’re in the Christmas season. In the church-year that means we’ve moved from expectant waiting to living with the promise. Now, in this fabricated church-year, we live with that hope for which we’ve been waiting. Now, that hope is in our arms, wrapped in swaddling clothes, ready to change everything. Change everything... Maybe you haven’t noticed, but little has changed from 12/24 to 12/28. maybe nothing has The world doesn’t seem to be bursting with hope. If anything we’re just as, if not more, cynical, pessimistic… What does that mean? One could infer it means that Christianity is a farce. And maybe it is. What does it mean if all this is simply motions we go through, some sort of opiate to cope, some opiate to ease the pain of capitulation? What would that mean? These are questions Christians must consider... Personally, I think intentionally malevolent people have expl...

cash rules. consider this the hundredth draft… It has been a while since I’ve updated this Advent series, and indeed Advent is quickly coming to a close. I haven’t updated for lack of topics, rather it has been because of the trouble I have had addressing one particular topic. I’ve had trouble collecting my thoughts, writing anything coherent, putting the pieces together in a meaningful way. I’ve had trouble talking about this because it hits close to home in many ways. Most troubling, though, is the difficulty I’ve had in imagining any meaningful way forward. With each entry I have not been happy merely to discuss something that I am waiting for an end to; I have always tried to include something I am waiting on to begin as well. This post is about jobs. I am part of the generation that graduated from college near the end of the 2000’s. This is the graduating class that faces such a lack of jobs that we may comprise the next “lost generation.” Many of us worked hard...

i keep waiting forever. ( Editor's Note : This post is only tangentially related to the Advent-project. This is a reflection I gave on 12/12 at Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg , during the chapel-service. This reflection discusses the intersection of theology and practice, as we wait for God's reign of justice. For those who are unfamiliar, or uninterested, in Lutheran theological categories this post will be "most unsatisfactory." Mea culpa!) Luke 3:7-18 : I had enough. I was tired of it. No, that morning I would not be waking up early. That morning I would not be running in the cold before class. No. I didn’t need to, I had already secured my position on the varsity team. Nope, I was not going to run that morning. Upon retrospect I can see I was throwing a tantrum. Petty fit or not, feeling arrogant that morning, I decided I would not go to cross-country practice. And I didn’t... … And I also had to run with the underclassmen for a week after...

you’ll take it because you don’t know what you want suddenly I had this uneasy feeling: “It seems like everything is changing and it is never good for the people.” My mom said that. I was talking to her while running to catch the metro. I had a final that night and I was running a little behind. I had been pretty caught up in my own little world of balancing school, work, and trying to get out to OWS stuff (and my computer quasi-crashing in the midst of it all). With some news from my mom I was suddenly ripped from all that nonsense, and I just felt… uneasy. I was feeling uneasy because my mom had just told me the company she works for had just been bought by another larger company. She wasn’t going to be laid off or anything, but the compensation was going to change. All this within two months of the same thing happening with the company my father works for, too. oh yeah, my parents aren’t hedge fund managers. My family is thoroughly blue-collar. My...