RoboPreacher

then you get worried The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark the 1st chapter! Let me start by making a confession: I hate meetings. I think it runs in the family… In fact, at the conference I was at last week, I was talking to a pastor who was bemoaning the fact that some committee he formed was causing trouble. Hearing that I couldn’t help but blurt out, “wait a minute! you started a committee? What’s the matter with you, are you some kind of sicko?!?!” Such is my view of committee meetings. Despite my disdain, though, the constitutions says we have to have them, and today is no exception. Today is the date we set for our Annual Meeting… While the devil may be in the details; after looking at the Annual Report you’ve got to admit ‘God is in the numbers.’ These numbers, at least… Reading the reports our committee chairs submitted, is truly a humbling thing to do. All of us here are blessed by their faithfulness.  This group of folks, chosen from a...

to tell you the truth, i ain't been sleeping too well The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark ! We all have riffs in our lives, places where tensions threaten to pull our lives apart, don’t we?  Despite our best attempts to mends those riffs, we haven’t been able to repair the breach. So, instead, we’ve made our compromises, we’ve done what we can to just try and get along, to not let the riff grow any bigger… We all know, though, we can’t hold the tear together forever… And ain’t it just like us, folks who have decided the best we can muster, is to hold the tear together for now to hear something truly remarkable; and reply with a distracted yawn, as if we had merely heard the weather report? We hear about Jesus’ baptism, and we only start thinking about the things that need to get done it we’re going to hold the breach together today. Despite our cold hearts, though, today’s Gospel is doing everything possible to get us to sit up and listen! We h...

you’d be frightened by the open hand The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke! We can relate to this story, can’t we? Those of us who have been commissioned to share the Good News; we all know what it’s like to lose our voice… There are a few reasons the church loses its voice these days. First; we’re not as powerful as we once were. There’s more folks who mark “no religion” on their census, than there are Lutherans, you know. We lose our voice as one after another, more and more folks walk away from the church… Second, in these changing days, we’re far too likely to turn on each other. In the face of the new challenges the church must address, we turn on each other and fall into internal dissension. We lose our voice when we get too caught up in our own little squabbles to bother speaking to those folks who have walked away from the church; or those folks who have never been in a church in the first place. The most devious reason we lose our voi...