Jeez, almost two months since I've been around here.
Smokin' conference near Santa Cruz (and like a rookie I didn't bring a board or wettie), another in Austin (nothing like rooting for the Lakers against San Antonio down in the nation of Texas). Fried a hard drive - down for a week, then of couse the waves / weather have been exceptional here...
The traditional day to celebrate Pentecost is this Sunday which should help the worship services here quite a bit - they must be drunk!
Recent reads: "Most Moved Mover" by Pinnock - very interesting / provocative / persuasive. "essential christianity" by berkley - a good basic book that will go to our h.s. grads. "The God who risks" by Sanders - following similar lines with Pinnock.
Dang - next one might be "Creation and the persistence of evil" by Jon Levenson, looks like an interesting one.
Keck, give me a call sometime.
Peace

Perhaps the Adversary is trying to discourage me with the recent trend of Sunday swells… Calm winds, good tides, strong swell on Easter Sunday… easy come, easy go. Waves never seems to pose too big a problem for Jesus and I do want to follow in his ways…
So today, the day after Easter my encouragement comes from his Victory. And Jesus said, “Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.” Lk. 20:36
Children of the Resurrection have better things to look forward to than good waves, and besides, the Lord will grant me some good ones soon enough.

Just amazing how people connect, and don’t connect, with worship services.
Of course its Good Friday today, and so we had a service. It was unique in that it was ecumenical, put on by our local Christian Council. It was really nice, right up to the end when two things happened, a blessing (benediction) and a reproach. The reproach is a traditional element of Good Friday services in the Reformed tradition. The idea is that we generally don’t get it. We don’t connect with the crucified God, we are not in touch with the abandoned Messiah, and we should think and pray long and hard about that. It’s presumptuous to imagine that we’d be among the very few who stayed at the foot of the cross with Jesus dying above them. It is much more likely we’d have ditched the scene like the disciples, or tried to stick around only to betray and deny him. In fact, it’s highly likely we’d be standing on the sidelines concurring with the leaders’ slander that Jesus saved others so he ought to be able to save himself. Or perhaps we’d have left the spectacle and gone on with whatever else we’d planned for that afternoon. This is exactly what just about everybody who attended our Good Friday service did – went merrily on with their Friday afternoon. We’d been asked to leave the service in silence (which most did not do) and to take a little different journey over the next 48 hours or so and think about God Crucified. For my part there were a few moments of silent reflection, most of which revealed to me just how out of touch I am with the events that unfolded that day – but I too went on to my list of things to do – chief among them being a swell and surf check. What a bummer that was, there won’t be good waves here for another two days or so… The disgrace…
The Reproach
O my people, O my church,
What have I done to you,
or in what have I offended you?
Answer me.
I led you forth from the land of Egypt
and delivered you by the waters of baptism,
but you have prepared a cross for your Savior.
Lord, have mercy.

Holy God,
Holy and mighty,
Holy immortal One,
have mercy upon us.

My peace I gave, which the world cannot give,
and washed your feet as a sign of my love,
but you draw the sword to strike in my name
and seek high places in my kingdom.
I offered you my body and blood,
but you scatter and deny and abandon me,
and you have prepared a cross for your Savior.

Lord, have mercy.

I was asked by one of the administrator / counselors at our local high school to speak to a class of juniors this morning about choosing a career in ministry. Two other professionals joined me, a banker and an architect. It was kind of a unique / funny thing to do as ministry is so different from other careers. Fist one needs to be a believing Christian, which cancels out a lot of people. Then one needs to sense a call from God to go into ministry as a vocation / occupation. Then one needs to go through (in the case of the Presbyterian Church) a sort of series of checks and balances – or filters – to have the community of faith help discern if it really is the right direction to go – which is obviously a flawed process staffed by flawed people – evidence being Presbyterian ministers who deny the sufficiency of salvation in Christ, or who view Jesus as one of many ways to God, or who believe that sin is an outdated concept that we’ve got to get rid of – who would rather send people to therapy instead. OK, enough of that….
Anyway, the students at Ilwaco H.S. generally didn’t know what to make of having a preacher speak to their career class. So I gave them the top three reasons they should consider a career in Christian ministry.
3. (Simpson’s reference) Reverend Lovejoy can be your hero too!
2. As a minister your never more than a few offering plates away from vacationing in Cancun.
1. Of all the professions that require advanced degrees, ministry has the shortest workweek – one hour, Sunday Morning.
There were a few laughs, then on with the class. The Q&A was funny; the best question was “Are you supported by the Government, do they pay you?” Overall it was an interesting exercise. Now, back to Holy Week…

What a lot of time has passed since I’ve blogged.
Perhaps it is a mistake for pastors to schedule retreats, vacations or study leaves in the days and weeks following Easter. For me it seems to be distracting from the ministry opportunities of Holy Week.

I’ve been thinking a lot, and reading a little, about the providence of God for a few months. I’m very intrigued, perhaps close to being persuaded, by the so-called “open” view of God’s providence. The funny thing is that one of the things that so pleases me about the model, that our God can be prevailed upon in prayer and that prayer really does affect our world and even our God, is also the thing that I’m finding increasingly difficult to engage in. Petitionary prayer. This may be because I so often think of petitionary prayer as something that would be done in larger chunks of time – in the prayer room / closet for hours each week – that sort of thing. It is quite easy for me to pray throughout the day as I’m busy with the things that I’m charged to do as pastor here, but those prayers follow closely my own wandering thoughts. I don’t deny that God may at times guide or even inspire my wandering thoughts, and so make them a little less arbitrary, but I do recognize that such a pattern of prayer is severely limited in scope. The most balanced prayer times are when Heidi and I have the “Prayer at the Close of Day” which is a service of prayer in the book of common worship. It’s a tremendous resource and a great way to end the day – but presently it is an inconsistent endeavor – mostly because of the changing and challenging sleeping patterns of our young children. Of course those patterns will change relatively shortly, which will bring to us a whole host of benefits, prayer being only one. One obvious option would be to include the “morning prayers” of the bcw in my morning spiritual reading. Each day at my office I begin by reading the selection for the day out of the “One Year Bible,” and then the selection for the day from the Book of Confessions. Its generally good stuff and good for me. Perhaps I’ll add some of the sections of the Morning Prayer this week. Its funny, I used to do that quite often, but somewhere along the way gave it up or took a break…

that sucks. blogged a bunch only to lose it because of msWord's lameness. ugh. so, highlight some text from a blog post prior to publishing, hit cntl X, and you can cntl V it all you like, but cut the same text while in explorer and then start Word and the text gets lost. starting word clears the clipboard? that's lame.
I deeply dislike microsoft products & practices.

I was reading some of the links keck put on this blog site of mine and there was considerable overlap with my sermon prep study today.
John 12:25 "Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life."
"This statement points not to the reprehensible character of this life in itself, but to its destiny in eternity..." Herman Ridderbos, "The Gospel of John." (Eerdmans, 1997)
To "hate" here also being a Hebraism pointing less to the hating of this life and more to a single minded loyalty to Jesus (after all, those who follow Jesus' pattern of losing life as the condition for an emerging new life "keep" the life they "hated" for eternity.)
So the idea seems to be to value the life that Jesus promises will continue after death over the lives we could live prior to our deaths. Eternal life then is not the goal, rather it is the destination. Living this life with a single-minded loyalty to Jesus is the goal from which life after death will emerge in Christ, leading to life after life after death - or the resurrection.
To that end resonate with Schnackengburg (quoted in one of Ridderbos' footnotes), "the 'life' to be won not to be merely an eschatological existence in the future, but life in the present which extends into the future," and that is something I can really dig.
Typical with sermon preparation however, though the learning journey can be very cool it somehow must arrive on Sunday morning with something understandable and applicable for those who have been on very different journeys all week. Ah, the challenge...
Lord, please give a life-giving Word to your people come Sunday.
Peace