Intersections

  As much as I've enjoyed the winter weather... I can't help but to look ahead to when it's a little warmer outside. I know it's a little before the season, but does anyone enjoy garage sales? I mean, it's a great way to clear out stuff from your house you've accumulated, and if you're lucky, then you can get some cash out of it to do whatever you want with, whether it's to trade it for more stuff or not!   Anyway - about five years ago, at our old house, we tried to have a garage sale. We got all our stuff around, put on a half dozen tables, labeled & priced everything to move. It was part of a whole neighborhood two-day sale; we thought - how can we not get rid of this stuff?? We opened the garage on the first morning, hoping there'd be a line down our street. There was no one. We said, maybe it's just early - the people will come later.  At the end of the first day, we had no customers. What we didn't realize is that as much as w...

  Ah... the good old days... back when everything was more simple, am I right? I’m sure each of you has a story or two about “back in my day...” that you could tell me about. It may even involve being thrown in a snowbank (my uncle’s favorite threat), or walking to school, uphill both ways in waist-high snow, barefoot. We have gained so much in the 60-odd years since this church was built, yet I believe its best days are still in front of us. Technologies have changed, improved, and re-evaluated modern life, but not everything can be the way it was when we began.  In 1959, when this church was started, a few other things were: the middle of the Cold War - that probably wasn’t difficult for anyone... Vice President Nixon met on LIVE TELEVISION with the Russian President and debated on the merits of each of their systems. Could you imagine something like that today? The Pioneer 4 unmanned spacecraft was supposed to do a fly-by of the Moon and photograph it. It failed to take any...

  Love - I know it may feel like a couple weeks early, but love is in the air today. Our passage is one of the most well-known excerpts from the New Testament and Paul’s writing. If you’ve been to a wedding, most likely you’ve heard some bit of this. It’s hard to dismiss love at a wedding, right? I’m not sure Paul would agree using this text at a wedding ceremony is appropriate, but we’ll get into that later. I’m sure I could make a whole series of this one chapter, but I promise to get you out of here in a reasonable amount of time for lunch, if you’re worried about that. Who thinks there should be more love in the world today? Show of hands…. Don’t be shy. Many, if not all of you… right? We look around at our world, and we don’t see that there’s enough love, that people aren’t acting with love. Is love an action? Or is it just a feeling? We have countless bits of movies and television showing what love is from just about every possible angle. But what’s the most truest love? We g...

  You ARE the Body... YOU are the body... you are the BODY... this sentence can be read in many different ways and mean other things. Some of my initial thoughts about this reading today sent me to a place I hadn't thought of in a long time - One of my guilty pleasures in my early twenties during college was watching Maury Povich. He was a talk show host whose topics were typically around family dysfunction running the whole spectrum. My favorite type of show was around contested paternity... and the guests would agree to paternity tests, and the results would be released live on television. This was NOT my finest hour of television. ANYWAY - Maury, the host, when reading the results, always said... "You ARE the father" or "You are NOT the father!!" depending on the situation. Don't get me wrong - it makes for theatrical television, but this is not something I should be watching these days. Although, given my former employment in family court, it reveals a...