St. Antony’s Cave

“You’re just a kid!” O how age can be made an accusation. (more…)

   There’s an oxymoron for you: “Ministerial Health.”  According to some researcher somewhere the “average” minister puts in 55 hours a week.  He vicariously experiences divorce, death, and disease more times a year then he would like to remember. And besides all this there is the daily pressure on him of concern for all the churches (2 Cor. 11:28).  Ministerial health?  Nope.  There’s ministry and there is health.  They don’t go together.  To bolster my point I cite one comic and one fact.  (more…)

  Nobody likes to fall flat on their face. It means embarrassment, humiliation, and defeat. I doubt there’s a pastor alive who has not had that dream where he fell flat on his face while giving a sermon: his notes blow away; his manuscript is unfinished; he has no clothes on. The variations are many, but however your dream goes I’m quite sure you wake up with a start. That’s why it will probably strike you as strange to hear me say that falling flat on your face is the solution to all problems in the ministry. (more…)

 I was celebrating the Lord’s Supper one Sunday about 4 years ago.  I said the dismissal, “Now may this Body and Blood strengthen and preserve you in the true faith unto life everlasting.  Amen.”  As I said, “Amen,” I heard a visiting communicant say in a loud, affirming voice, “Amen!”  I was taken aback. (more…)

I was raised in the era when the Flag touching the ground was an unforgivable sin.  My time in the Army reinforced this.  When I flew the Flag from the flagpole outside our church the Sunday after 9/11, I was careful not to let it touch the ground.

Among the Greeks and Romans, one of their idols falling over and touching the ground was a big deal, a bad omen, something to be avoided at all costs.  Centuries before them, the Philistine’s god, Dagon, was disgraced when the Lord caused that idol to fall “downward on the ground before the ark of the Lord” (I Samuel 5:3).  My favorite apocryphal story about Baby Jesus’ flight to Egypt is that as soon as He crossed into Egypt all the idols crashed to the ground at once.  How cool!

But I write not about the Flag touching the ground or false gods touching the ground, I write about the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, touching the ground.  (more…)

    One of my favorite apocryphal stories about Jesus goes like this:  Jesus, Mother Mary, and Joseph are fleeing the wrath of King Herod heading for Egypt. They are all riding on the back of a donkey. Joseph becomes impatient with the slow progress of the beast, and he begins to dig his heels into the animal. This doesn’t do any good, so he resorts to whipping the plodding donkey saying, “You stupid, good for nothing donkey!  Don’t you know that you are carrying the Christ-child? Don’t you realize that Herod is out to slay the child? Don’t you know that you must hurry or he will catch us?” Just then the Lord gives the donkey the gift of speech. (more…)

     In the movie 300, Leonidas is leaving with his small band of men to fight the invading million man army of the Persians.  He bids his wife goodbye. As he marches away to certain death she calls out to him, “Spartan!”  Not “king” which he was but “Spartan.”  His glory is not in ruling but in being a Spartan.

  So it is with pastors.  Our glory is not (more…)

     Driving from Texas to Michigan in December 1977  John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas” seemed to be on all the radio stations.  At that time in my twenty-year-old life Lennon’s melancholy lyrics particularly the line “so this is Christmas, and what have we have done, another year older, and a new one begun,” expressed my understanding of what Christmas was suppose to be.  (more…)

Bart Simpson cleared it all up for me.  I’m not a regular watcher of the goggled-eyed little guy but I happened to catch a re-run of a Christmas episode.  Dad, Homer, had only received 13 dollars for a part-time job he had taken to fund the family Christmas.  Being far below what he had expected, he was in despair.  A co-worker suggests that Homer go with him to the local dog track and parley that meager check into a real Christmas bonus.  Bart tries to discourage Homer.  Homer remonstrates.  Bart says something like, ”What the heck.  TV has taught me that at Christmas time I should (more…)

   That’s a proverb Luther quotes.  He says what is to be feared is not the trying, difficult, despairing times, but the good times.  The Church has always believed this.  From this sort of theology comes the oft quoted remark, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

   But being a pastor, a shepherd under Christ is tremendously difficult these days.  Who in their right mind would really want to do this? (more…)