wow, oh, wow.

These stories make we want to avoid anything having to do with movies or mission trips when I become a pastor.

via the internet monk

thursday june

the coffee pot smashed into a million smitherines. today was to be a thermos day. it could have been a sleep day for it was surely a sleep night. my bed was a cloud and ferried me to the stratosphere, no, make that the ionosphere. when my head hit the pillow, my bed hovered around the room then bolted out the open window, through the rain, over the arch, and toward the moon. The sheets flapped in the wind like Old Glory over the Potomac. Ducks and Wild Turkeys seemed to be flying backwards. My bed was breaking every aviation record involving furnature, matresses, and linen. The thread count on my sheets increased a hundredfold. My comforter started her own afternoon talk show and women's magazine. Birds chirped, then I was shaving and making a mind altering pot of coffee. However, the coffee pot did not want to wake me up. It woke me down.

101 proof morning

I kept hitting snooze. then i was late. no time for breakfast. a little gargle. it was humid. there was a wild turkey strutting around the soccer field. the few drops falling did not provoke me to hoist my umbrella.

sunday june

I climbed to the dome of the courthouse where the slave Dred Scott brought a suit against his owner. It is just a couple blocks down from the Hooters and TGIFridays. Rain dropped when we stepped outside, pelting us as we crossed the city streets. The Magnificent Arch shielded the wind for a moment. At the bottom of the the grand steps, there was our car parked on the old cobblestone street a few feet from the lapping Mississip.

Pulpit Supply Bug

I signed up for Pulpit supply and will be filling in for pastors that are out of town. So far, I am planning on preaching and leading the Divine Service five times this summer. That is crazy. I know many pastors do this every Sunday. Some preach/preside over services 3 times on Sunday. But I am not in that groove yet and I am filled with a sense of nervousness, excitement, awe, pressure, tenacity, responsibility.
I have conducted pretty much an entire service by myself just once. But even then, my supervising pastor did the ordained clergy only parts (the Absolution, Words of Institution and Benediction). Now I will be on my own. Scary. Nah. It's ok. It's my job. Almost.

It will be fun to do some exegetical work and write some sermons and preach a bit. I'm going a little stir crazy walking in circles around the seminary delivering mail. I think it is travel fever. The bug has bitten me.

A Conspiracy of Euphemism

The religion spin does not favor Christians. Here's an interesting take from the atlantic. It seems the Christians too often get the broad brush treatment. All Christians like to shoot people or whatever.

The eight a.m. NPR news update today included word of the fatal shooting of one soldier and the wounding of another outside an army recruiting station in Arkansas. The news reader, Nora Raum, outlined the incident and stated that the shooting appeared to have "religious motivations." She did not name the suspect, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, or tell NPR listeners what those religious motivations might be. In other words, it could have been a radical Unitarian who gunned down the soldiers, or possibly a violent Presbyterian.

Why the shyness? Why not tell people what is actually happening in the world? We saw this a couple of weeks ago, when the press only gingerly acknowledged that the malevolent though incompetent suspects in the synagogue bombing-conspiracy case in New York were converts to Islam. How is the public served by this kind of silence? The extremist Christian beliefs of George Tiller's alleged murderer are certainly relevant to that case, and no one in my profession is hesitant to discuss them. Why the hesitancy to talk about the motivations of the man who allegedly killed Pvt. William Long?

the atlantic

I don't want to be in St Louis for 2 more months.
If anybody wants to give Becca and I jobs and a house and food until the end of September, give me a call.
It is hot here. I sit in a/c and read bill bryson and listen to jazz and imagine myself on a double decker bus or a rue or a playa with a pivo or a vino mucho cuerpo or a lager in my hand.

Although in Europe I doubt there is much of a chance that we can hitch a ride from a fat, gay, drunk, white dude who is wearing a Skip Shumacker jersey and who is holding a boombox that is blasting rap music, who also is driving a golf cart down a bike trail in the middle of the night having just journeyed through 9 miles of neighborhoods in a densely populated urban environment. Not that we'd want to or anything. But we did meet this guy in Forest Park. He flashed his lights at us. And we did hitch a ride with him. He sounded like a cross between Krusty the Klown and Little Richard. Becca held his boom box and he talked about how you don't want to "be a victim", then swerved off the bike trail and onto a walking path. I asked him where he was coming from and he said the Cardinals game. "Where were your seats?" I asked. "Oh, I wasn't at the game. I just watched it down at Mike Shannon's. Now I'm heading back to Jackson's in Dogtown. The owner lets me park my golf cart there. I'm doing my part to save the environment." This guy had done almost 20 miles round trip through St Louis.
Becca didn't like the experience. Something about the whole victim thing. I;'m still convinced that he didn't have it in him to stab us or anything, but she's not so sure.

This summer we are going to visit some churches around the area. We went to a big one the other day. We figure that we should check a few of the large ones out even thought they are not our cups of tea.
It was in the suburbs. I'm not a fan. If I go to a church located in such an area someday, then ok, but for the most part, they give me the willies.
This church had a big orchestra type thing and choir and handbell group and half a dozen acolytes and a handful of pastors. It was liturgical, which was cool, but the pastor zoomed through the Words of Institution (which is a pet peeve of mine) and there was no silence after the Confession and before the Absolution. I think silence is wonderful in church. Gives you time to think and meditate. It inspires and sense of awe and otherworldliness Often it makes you feel uncomfortable, which is especially helpful in delivering sermons.
This church had 4 services, and it seemed like they were under time constraints of something. It seems to me, and this is mere conjecture, that about 300 people would be a about a big as you want to get in one location, otherwise it seems unmanageable. Church family, community and all that.
Anyway, I am looking forward to having my own parish in a couple, err, 3 years. It will be fun. Seems like a good job.