RoboPreacher

dependent, undisciplined, sleeping late A sermon on Daniel in the lions' den for the first Sunday of Advent : Today we begin Advent. And know this: we won’t be finished with this season until its last day , like it or not. Sorry, but you’re stuck . Christmas won’t be coming early this year… In fact, when the hymn committee met; I straightened my tie, put on my most serious face, and laid it out: Absolutely NO Christmas hymns until after this season. You can’t ’get out of it. This Advent, you’re stuck . You won’t be freed of this season’s expectations until the Eve of Christmas. At the earliest .  Well, okay . It wasn’t exactly like that.  In fact, one of the things I most love about you all, is you don’t clamor for the Christmas songs until due time. You seem to be a people who feel at home in this season. A people who find comfort in this season. Which is just as well, today . Today it’ll help you relate to Daniel. To hear this scripture as mor...

and close the path to misery The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, the 1st Chapter! Today is the last Saturday/Sunday of Advent… In just a few, all-too short days , we will celebrate Christmas. Soon our vigil will be completed. Over. In Advent we wait. We prepare.  What did you wait for?  A new you? More patience? An end to conflict? Peace at home? An era of goodwill among humanity? Concord in the family? Christ’s coming? His return? How has it been? Have the things you waited for come to fruition? Are they at least nearly fulfilled?  Perhaps it was just too hard for you. You couldn’t bring yourself to hope this year. You gave up looking forward. There wasn’t anything to look forward to. Your last hope was dashed long ago. You didn’t wait this advent. Not for anyone. For anything. For you, this season was just another trip through the motions. Christmas always seem to promise more than it delivers, doesn’t it? A person can only ...

...these shackles i've made in an attempt to be free A sermon from Philippians There are days when faith comes as easy as a spring sunrise. Things go the way they ought to. Everything just falls into place… The trouble, though, is those days are fewer and further apart than the other days. The days when faith does not come easy. Whatsoever…  Too often, right when we wake up, what faith we’ve managed to cobble together is already threatening to break apart. We have to gather our faith up. We try to hold it together. We do what we can to get through our days with our faith in one piece. Intact.  As my favorite musician quips, “ We need faith for the same reason it’s so hard to find. ” That’s the trouble. It isn’t easy to keep up the faith, is it? We hear the pastor drone on, how God is a God of love. After a short hour we have to leave . We have to live most of our lives out there, in the real-world.  The headlines of terror and trag...

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...