Week of March 24, 2019
I’ve been thinking a lot about Lenten disciplines this year, mostly trying to find alternatives ways of looking at them than just “I’m giving up this because it just happens to be Lent and we’re support be suffer, etc.” I’ve posed the idea that a Lenten discipline could (maybe even should) be something that transcends…
Week of March 17, 2019
We have not talked a lot about this lately, but this Sunday is the Discretionary Sunday for the month of March. That means that all loose offering (cash which is not in an envelope designating the donor) goes to our discretionary funds. For those unfamiliar with this, Trinity Church has two accounts designated as “discretionary…
Week of March 10, 2019
Today in prayer, I asked God, “what was the most faithful, most Christlike thing I did over the past weekend? What did I do that was good in your sight?” The answer that came back? When I stopped by the church Saturday morning to grab my vestments before heading to Topeka for the bishop’s consecration,…
Week of March 3, 2019
As the season of Epiphany draws to a close and Lent draws near, it feels to me almost like Spring in reverse. The verdant green of the Epiphany season, indicating the fertile opportunity to learn about who Jesus is and how God feels about us darkens into the somber purples of Lent. The worship become…
Week of February 24, 2019
At the 10:30 AM service we had the rare but not unheard of occurrence of someone commandeering the service for the purpose of asking for financial help. In this case, a person well known to me as someone who frequently asks for help out of the discretionary fund took to the microphone during the announcements…
Week of February 10, 2019
A few weeks ago I wrote about my experiences trying to minister to the strangers in my neighborhood using my new snowblower. Most of those people didn’t know me, beyond a passing face walking a dog around the block. Last Sunday’s gospel reading (John 4:21-30) reminds me of the struggles of ministering to people who…
Week of February 3, 2019
Last Sunday the passage from the eighth chapter of Nehemiah was read with little context or introduction. The prior week we heard from Isaiah, and the following we will hear from Jeremiah (who actually preceded Nehemiah chronologically). But the Nehemiah passage is a powerful one in terms of the history of the Hebrew Bible, for…
Week of January 27, 2019
Both my wife Mandy and I hate shoveling snow, so we recently treated ourselves to a new, small, electric snowblower, and this past week I had the first chance to us it. I had so much fun clearing the driveway and the sidewalk that I rounded up my two daughters, armed them with snow shovels,…
Week of January 13, 2019
Many of you have asked: during this time of transition, this liminal period in the church, what can I do to help? There are always opportunities to volunteer for various outreach ministries, worship assistants, and children’s ministry helpers, but right now we have a particular need in certain areas of ministry. We need office volunteers…
Week of January 6, 2019
There’s a term for a period of time like this: liminal. It means to be barely perceptible, or just bridging a threshold. You might be more familiar with a more complex form of the word, “subliminal,” which means just below a noticeable threshold. Trinity is right now in a transition, about which only God is…