RoboPreacher

& here's the moment it turned into The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew ! It is good to be here. Thank you for your gracious invitation. It is also good to see all your familiar faces, & the new faces, too.  Of course, it’s a bit of a trip. The familiar faces have changed . Your image, although the same, has also changed a bit. The kiddos I got to do Sunday School with, aren’t so young anymore. And I suppose I am not so young, either … Of course the changes of time are not the only reason it is such a trip to be here. Today’s Gospel presents us with a couple happy coincidences.  For one thing, Matthew was the Gospel we read each Sunday for most of the year I spent with you. For another, today’s Gospel touches upon some of the themes the shaped my internship with you all… Jesus said, “Give, therefore, to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s; and to God, the things that are God’s ,” after his interrogators said the image on the coin ...

embraces in the street       The Holy Gospel According to St. Mark, thetenth chapter!   Like last week, we have a question projected. This question is a part of our stewardship campaign for the month. Last week we asked everyone to meditate on the ways that God has already blessed us with enough .   This week the questions are: What do we have "enough" of? and What can we give up to simplify our lives?   Now all of us in the stewardship committee know y'all aren't a bunch of millionaires here. Important note, though! If you are a secret millionaire come talk to me, I want to tell you about some exciting investment opportunities here at Trinity.   Presuming that no one will come up to let me know that actually they are secretly wealthy, the stewardship committee still thought this was an important question to ask during our stewardship formation month. Yes, it's not like we all have a bunch of extra habits ...

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...

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...