May 1, 2016 Easter 6 – Where the heck is Macedonia?
Macedonia is in the middle of nowhere. You could make that kind of statement if you lived in America, and you do. Macedonia is a little North of modern Greece, a little East. It is between Greece, which you most certainly have heard of, and Kosovo and Serbia, which you have also, regrettably, heard of; regrettably because that part of the world usually rises to our attention around the word atrocity, or genocide.
But Macedonia, little, easily overlooked Macedonia, called out.
Well, maybe not so easily overlooked, after all it was on the way from here to there, sort of like Jerusalem. It was a place you went through. It was closer to Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, than most of the rest of the Empire and so it made a convenient landfall for sea faring traders as well as overland trade and trade, as we all know, brings the world closer by bringing us things from far far away.
What came to Paul from Macedonia was a dream.
During the night, Paul had a vision. I wonder if the Lord has ever tried to contact me in a vision. I hope I’d remember but I have to confess that I do not typically remember my dreams. I have never woken up in the middle of the night with a great idea from a dream and had to write it down, I never wake in the morning and tell Debbie the story of my dream from the night before. I just don’t.
I wonder if God gets a busy signal when trying to send a dream my way. …
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April 17, 2016 Easter 4 – Zombie Apocalypse (revelation)
I have never watched the Walking Dead. I am completely without knowledge of this apparently seminal moment in American Culture and I have exactly zero interest in correcting this horrible and probably fatal condition. Of course, since I’ve never seen the show, I do not know if I will rise again to preach in some kind of zombie church later on, should my lack of Walking Dead cool points prove a mortal condition.
Because there are always rules. There are always to zombies. First you separate them into fast zombies and slow zombies, letting you know if you need cardio to survive the apocalypse or just a decent head start (come on, slow zombies!). Then they tell you it was an asteroid, or it was a monkey pox gone wild from the heart of Africa, it sells the brain it makes you actually dead, and then alive again, there are a lot of rules it would seem to the Zombie universe.
In 2009 they went so far as to write a book entitled Pride and Prejudice . . . and Zombies, and this spring they made a movie of the same name. I read the book; I do not care to see the movie. But those were fast zombies, it was the black plague that caused them to rise – there are rules.
Jesse Eisenberg in the movie Zombieland, also a fast-zombie movie, lived by his rules and since the zombies were fast ones, rule #1 was, Cardio. …
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April 10, 2016 Easter 3 – Barnett Wedding – What were you expecting?
Sometimes it just hits you, you know? Sometimes fate, or luck, or God or whatever it is that moves you when you are doing something else comes along and grabs you from the safety of your world and uncovers a path going off in a strange direction, a darker, thornier path as often as not, one with brambles and low hanging limbs and the detritus of centuries, slowly rotting along the pathway.
You, on the other hand are on your way down the road. You plotted your course and set your sights on a star and are following the path you knew in advance. You’ve got it all together. You know who you are and what is going on, the road is easy and smooth, the skies are clear and the air carries the sweet scent of flowers.
That’s the vision we all have of ourselves. We’re the ones who plot our course and know the way. We are the masters of our own lives and we are the ones who plot and plan and practice so that there will not be mistakes.
That’s the goal of post-enlightenment mankind, isn’t it? To find a disease and cure it, to see a mountain and climb it, to have the vision to see what is coming and be ready for it. It is a whole industry, actually several industries. We invest according to a plan; we have children and raise them according to a plan; we go to school according to a plan so that we will have a career according to a plan and retire according to a plan.
Plans are good. Plans may be the very highest achievement of mankind once you bore down through all of the little things, curing polio and stuff like that. To plan is to master the unknown. …
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