Sermon: “Who’s There?”

“Who’s There?”

(January 22, 2012) Depending on who is calling us, we respond in different ways. Samuel initially doesn’t respond to God’s call because he doesn’t know it’s God doing the calling. In our time when perhaps “the Word of the Lord is rare,” how do we recognized God’s call for what it is, so that we can respond? (Psalm 139: 1-6, 13-18; 1 Samuel 3:1-20)

iLearning

(screenshot from Apple.com)

I’m very excited about the iBooks 2 roll out with textbooks. I’ve been hoping for something like this since the Kindle came out. I see infinite implications for education, particularly. Wealthier districts are already providing each student with a laptop or netbook; it’s get on the ball so each student in the country can have one, or watch students in lower income districts get left behind. I don’t think it needs to be the sleek Apple product we think of as the iPad. I imagine something partway between a Kindle and an iPad: an electronic book reader, with wifi capability, and the ability to make notes and view multimedia. Microphone and speaker are necessary. It will need a text/email function, too. Oh, and a graphing calculator, so we don’t have to buy those anymore. Optional keyboard. GPS locator and auto-lock for if it’s lost or stolen. First-generation Kindles cost $80 (and the Kindle Fire, close to what I’m describing, is brand new and $200). I bet in five years, you can buy an educational iPad-type product for $100 per student plus licenses and data plans (the school buys a bulk license for the textbook in public school; the student buys their own in higher education). If you’re outfitting each student with a new stack of textbooks in each class at $60 a pop, you’re saving money.

Here’s what I imagine will be possible:

Textbooks, like all non-fiction books, would have in-text popup citations (with a link to the cited work for sale, should you want to add it to your library). New information, corrections, and editions can simply be downloaded as an update.

Don’t recognize a word? A popup glossary defines the word for you. Tapping an icon saves the word and its definition to a list for you to study as a list or in a flashcard application.

Think of something as you’re reading? Tap the side of the screen to pull up your notes on the chapter and add your thoughts. Save all your notes on the chapter as a study guide, or email them to yourself/your friend/ your teacher. Tap to print. Tap to send a note (or all in the chapter) to your teacher via email as a question (or as a homework assignment). Tap to send a note as a post to the class discussion board. Tap another part of the screen to read the class discussion board.

Enter your notes via keyboard or using a stylus to write in your own handwriting. Or, use the voice recorder to make and transcribe notes. And use text-to-speech to read the text of the book or your notes to you (imagine the implications for special education students, and for commuting students in secondary ed and beyond).

During class, make notes in a notebook feature, rather than carting those around too. Save, email, and print your notes as pdfs. Use your stylus to doodle in the margins. I can’t take notes otherwise.

At certain places, an icon might invite you to view a video clip or hear an audio file. This might be anything from a scene in a movie adaptation (say, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” How does the courtroom scene differ in the book and film interpretations? Why?), to a video demonstration of a chemistry experiment illustrating its formula, to a tutorial of how to solve a math problem, to a map or model, to a recording your teacher made.

What was that? Yes, the educator could add custom notes, recordings, or video clips, viewable to only the students in her class, or on his team. Teachers could also use the book’s review questions as homework assignments (and the students could fill in their answers directly where they appear and then email or print the worksheet), or write their own questions in place of the provided ones. Educators all using the same textbooks might be invited to share their questions in a forum, and pick an choose their favorite questions to build custom assignments. Educators on teams can link chapters, review questions, and study guides between one another to facilitate interdisciplinary units.

In class, the teacher might be able to “take control” of the digital readers in the room, so that they all “open” to page 24 at once, or everyone views the same multimedia clip on the smartboard at the front of the room. Using questions or notes emailed to her, the educator can lead the discussion, or prompt students to raise the questions they thought of (and made note of) while reading.

And if every student already had an iPad type device, non-school groups could make use of them too. Imagine a youth group book study or bible study. Imagine an adult one, for that matter. Just imagining the Bible as a full multi-media book gives me little chills. That’s a whole other post. The maps! The iconography! The links to other passages or other sacred writings! The clips from bible-themed movies! The option to text a question to your pastor

A word about fiction:

As excited as I get about the potential applications for education, I drag my feet a little around fiction books. This is just a personal preference, I think, although overall I’ve been slow to embrace technology in entertainment compared to the speed with which I’ve embraced it for productivity. Only very recently (with the purchase of my iPhone 3GS), have I gotten fully on board with mp3s (and they’re not really mp3s anymore!). I *like* my shiny CDs. And don’t tell me you’re going to take my DVDs in their pretty packaging away and give me a mega-terabyte hard drive with digital copies of all my movies searchable by title, actor, genre, and keyword! Oh the horrors.

I like to read books. Paper books. I like the way they smell. I like the way they feel. I like that I can go to the library and get them for free for a little bit and then give them back (although, what if the *library* bought a digital copy of the book and then I checked it out and it was pushed wirelessly to my e-reader for two weeks and then I had to pay to renew it if I wasn’t done…). Even given the massive amount of moving I do and the huge pain it is to pack and unpack books, I wouldn’t trade them. If you offered to replace all of my books with ebooks and a kindle, I would take you up on it *for my professional library* (minus a few gems), but not for my personal library. I have a connection to books in print that I don’t have with their e-counterparts.

All that said, as I was flipping for the millionth time from the text of A Dance With Dragons (George R.R. Martin) to the back to figure out who a character was in the house lineup, and then to a map to see where they were from, I thought how easy it would be to have character names linked to their lineage, house names linked to their banner or motto, place names pop up with their location on the map, and words in foreign language offer their translation (or a recording with their pronunciation). Could I have the option of locking the book so I can’t skim ahead (or unlocking it so I can if I want to– or searching a name and only reading the parts about Tyrion…)? Oh, even my fiction has footnotes!

And then when it comes to producing and publishing books we are in a new world. This is where the publishers will revolt– just as the music industry did back when we all remembered what Napster was. Because what if an author could write a book, and imbed whatever media s/he wished, and then have that material reviewed and formatted by an editor and e-publisher, and then directly distributed to e-bookstores? No mass paper production. No shipping. Production costs so low we could sell books for fractions of the cost and yet authors could keep five times the income they do. I, as consumer, could pay you, as author, for the artwork you have made, the goods you have produced. Not the paper, not the cover, not the shipping– just the story or the research or the philosophy. I could pay you whatever that seems to be worth, and you could keep it (minus editing and formatting/production). I value your work, and you value my reading experience. Kind of like Louis CK’s pay-to-view comedy special, only (typically) without so much swearing.

As I said on facebook, I want in on the brainstorming about this. Oh, the possibilities!

Sermon: Water-Tossed

“Water-Tossed”

(Jan 15, 2012) Sea glass is formed when broken pieces of glass are tossed in the salty water of the ocean until, over time, what was once trash is transformed into a treasure. In the sacrament of baptism, we claim the presence of God’s grace, like water in our lives, smoothing out our rough and broken places, and making of us something treasured: God’s beloved children. (Genesis 1:1-5, Psalm 29, Mark 1:4-11)

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Sorry the upload took so long, folks. The site that hosts my audio files did a blackout today in protest of SOPA. The effects of attempts to censor the internet are far reaching.

More on Jesus and Religion – links galore!

I’m pleasantly surprised by the interest in my recent post in response to the “I hate Religion but Love Jesus” video. Thanks for reading, sharing, and commenting, and for linking to your own reflections.

In the spirit of fairness and follow-up, Rachel Held Evans drew my attention to this email exchange between the video’s creator, Bethke, and pastor/blogger Kevin DeYoung. In it, Bethke responds to DeYoung’s reflections on the video in a way that demonstrates thoughtfulness and maturity in the face of feedback. Kudos to him.

Here’s part of their exchange. Bethke emailed Kevin in response to the latter’s blog post, and gave him permission to share it:

I just wanted to say I really appreciate your article man. It hit me hard. I’ll even be honest and say I agree 100%. God has been working with me in the last 6 months on loving Jesus AND loving his church. For the first few years of walking with Jesus (started in ’08) I had a warped/poor paradigm of the church and it didn’t build up, unify, or glorify His wife (the Bride). If I can be brutally honest I didn’t think this video would get much over a couple thousand views maybe, and because of that, my points/theology wasn’t as air-tight as I would’ve liked. If I redid the video tomorrow, I’d keep the overall message, but would articulate, elaborate, and expand on the parts where my words and delivery were chosen poorly… My prayer is my generation would represent Christ faithfully and not swing to the other spectrum….thankful for your words and more importantly thankful for your tone and fatherly like grace on me as my elder. Humbled. Blessed. Thankful for painful growth. Blessings.

Grace and Peace,

Jeff

Racial Justice in the Nation’s Second-Whitest State

(photo from Seatle Times website)

As we observe a day in celebration and thanksgiving of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I’m thinking about what it means to live in racial justice, and seek the sort of equality among people of all ethnicities that Rev. Dr. King dreamed of.

I grew up in and have returned to live in Vermont, which is the second-whitest state in the United States, according to the 2010 census (behind only Maine). White-only Vermonters make up 94.3% of the state’s population. I love my state, but it’s not exactly a hub of diversity.

This leads me to ask how one can practice racial justice and equality in a predominantly monochromatic environment. Here are three ways I think we can begin.

1. Education. Growing up in Vermont and with very liberal parents, I didn’t encounter racism very often, if at all. On the one hand, there’s something innocent and lovely about that– to a certain point. Unfortunately, it also made me pretty oblivious to racism as a young adult and even now. I was shocked when I put together that my traveling companion in college (an Afro-Caribbean woman) and I were being treated differently. Only took me an entire day to figure that out. In Berlin. Where literally everyone was white. Just a couple of years ago, there was a tremendous controversy about a Photoshopped picture of the White House with watermelons on the lawn. I had no idea that this was a racial stereotype (I still don’t understand, or really care to, what in the world watermelons have to do with African American people). My point is that my lack of exposure to racism and stereotypes leaves me oblivious to the point of ignorance when it comes to racism around me. In order to confront something, you have to know it’s there.

I try to remedy my own ignorance by listening to my sisters and brothers from communities of color, and hearing the stories they tell, and by examining my own prejudices and assumptions. More importantly, and more in my control, I work hard to have conversations with my daughter and raise her awareness of racial injustice. Clearly, we’re starting small with the almost-seven-year-old, but finding and lifting the teachable moments will, I hope, help her be better informed than I am.

2. Lift role models (not tokens). Teaching kids especially about people they can look up to is important, and here I was on better footing growing up. My biggest hero was (and still is) the man of the day himself, Rev. Dr. King, whom I admire for his passion for justice, self-sacrifice, and pioneering spirit. I have also always emulated his in my mind perfect relationship between faith and politics and his powerful preaching and public speaking. Rev. Dr. King (I always use the Reverend there) is one of my inspirations to be a pastor and a preacher, and I keep his picture in my office to remind me, not of racial justice or civil rights, but of prophetic preaching and living one’s convictions. But there have been other role models in my life, and are many in my kids’ lives, who are people of color, and to whose example we aspire because they are magnificent people, not because they are magnificent people of color. From friends of the family to Sunday school teachers (to presidents), role models who happen to be persons of color– and who are patient enough to deal with the blundering questions of children and more sheltered adults– can teach more about racial justice and equality than anyone or anything else.

3. Confront any injustice, prejudice, or stereotype. In the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, we tell jokes about people from the town of Hardwick. I can’t tell you why exactly, but people from Hardwick become the punchline of every “redneck” joke or story about stupidity. And I bought into it. Why not? Everyone else was doing it. But this mentality is used to explain racism too. I honestly believe that, in the absence of a significant ethinic minority against whom to discriminate, we as humans wil find some category, any category, to label as inferior, make the brunt of jokes, and where we can, strip of dignity and rights. It’s a sad truth about us. Fortunately, I think the converse is also true: whenever we learn to confront stereotypes and prejudices and injustices against anyone, we become better able to confront them overall.

There’s a long way to go, individually and as a society, when it comes to living with justice and equality for all people. I know I am far from there. But today of all days, I have hope.

I love Jesus, but I kinda like religion too

A lot of folks on facebook have been posting links to this video, where political science graduate and non-profit worker Jefferson Bethke seeks to “highlight the difference between Jesus and false religion” (text of video description). Mr. Bethke is a self-proclaimed healed pornography addict, and attends the Federal Way campus of Mars Hill Church (dot com) in Washington. For those keeping track at home, that’s the mega church pastored by Mark Driscoll (as opposed to Mars Hill Bible Church [dot org] in Michigan, pastored by Rob Bell– man, did that confuse me for a while). I won’t try to articulate my concerns about pastor Driscoll, but will refer you to the excellent critique of his particular brand of (in my mind, masochistic) Christianity by Rachel Held Evans here and here.

Jefferson Bethke’s YouTube video has some merits and some pitfalls in my mind, and so I’m torn when I see it on facebook on my friends’ feed or as a recommended link by The Christian Left. Here are my thoughts on religion and Jesus and this particular video.

Pros:

The video is thought-provoking and invites reflection and discussion. Case in point. Anything that encourages us to think about our faith instead of blindly following gets bonus points in my book.

The video challenges certain assumptions about religion and Christianity, which I think is helpful. For example, Bethke says that being a Christian and a Republican are not the same thing (nor are being a Christian and a Democrat!), and that we should be freed by Christ, not enslaved by what he calls “behavioral modification” through the rules and chores that he sees as religion. I think breaking free of the rule-based way of thinking about religion is important.

The speaker insists that Jesus doesn’t support self-righteousness. I agree, although I’m not totally sold that the video succeeds in demonstrating that.

The video clearly separates Jesus from religion with what I see as a beautiful distinction (if phrased in gendered language that makes me gag) “Religion is man (sic) searching for God; Christianity is God searching for man.” Further, the words separate religion, which Bethke says he hates, from the church, which he says he loves, and that makes for good reflection as well. I fully agree with leaving behind some or all of institutional religion to follow Jesus, if that is what is needed.

We are asked “Would your church let Jesus in?” Not a new question, but an important one.

Finally, there are some beautiful words, phrases, and ideas here. I like “Religion says ‘do’; Jesus says ‘done’.” But my favorite:

If grace is water, then the church should be an ocean. It’s not a museum for good people; it’s a hospital for the broken.

Preach.

Cons:

I’m not sure what the speaker thinks religion is. He distinguishes it from “Christianity” as well as from Jesus, says he hates it, calls it an infection, and blames it for wars. But I’m not entirely sure what he means by “religion.” I suspect he may mean “institution,” but it’s not clear. I would define the broad concept of religion as a set of beliefs about the Divine (theology) and a particular way of living out beliefs (praxis), held in common by 2 or more people in a given place and time.

The video then blames this ambiguous concept of religion for war and attacks it for failing to feed the poor. Since religion, as I define it, is a series of beliefs and practices, it doesn’t really *do* or fail to do anything. Rather, religious people carry out actions and explain them using their theology and praxis. Religious people have gone on crusades and committed genocide, slavery, and rampant discrimination, claiming religion as their motivator. Religious people have also preached civil rights, resisted apartheid, lived among lepers, and given all their wealth to the poor, claiming their religion as their motivation. Maybe this is a little like saying guns don’t kill people, but I see religion as a tool, an implement, and in the wrong hands, yes, a weapon. It’s what we do with it that matters.

Bethke also decries religion for being a human invention. While I like the above-mentioned distinction that religion is humanity’s search for God while Christ is God’s search for us, it is presented as if this is a bad thing. We cannot simply receive God’s searching for us separate from our human responses. Yes, religion, church, prayers, worship songs, cathedrals, ministry programs, global institutionalized church, and YouTube videos are all human-made. And they are imperfect. What else would they be? The fallible, broken, human construct of religion is humanity’s response to and search for God. We’re still working on it and we don’t get it right, but we’re in it together with one another and with the Holy. We might show *that* a little grace, too. We never know how the God of the Universe might be able to use even the broken vessels of the church, her people, and each individual person of faith. I hear God’s good at that.

Having rejected and resented “religion,” Bethke replaces religion with something else that looks a lot like… religion. He replaces it with a series of beliefs about the Divine and implies a way of living out some of those beliefs in practice.

Furthermore, I don’t like the theology he presents in place of “religion.” It’s very strong on substitutionary atonement (the belief that Jesus took on our sin and bled and died and did we mention the blood? for us– you can read some of my reactions to this theology here). It’s also very dominated by masculine, hierarchical, and violent language. I get squeamish about blood dripping down Jesus’ face and him dangling on a cross thinking of me. Just not my thing. It may move us away from adherence based on fear to adherence based on guilt, but I’m not sure that’s a drastic improvement.

Finally, rejecting religion undermines the important function of accountability it serves. The video itself suggests some good theology and some bad, and the praxis is largely unknown or perhaps irrelevant. In the context of a “church” or dare we say a “religion,” there are other believers present against whose wisdom we check our theology and praxis. If my relationship with Jesus teaches me to hate gay people or club baby seals, who is to correct me if “religion” is vile and my personal interpretation is all that matters? Rather, the institution of religion, for all its faults, serves as a clearing house, a sounding board, a discernment group. Call it what you like, but it keeps the crazies at bay. When corrupted, yes, it mistakes the prophets for the fanatics (because there are fine lines already), and Jesus is crucified. But when it tries to let God work, it can also lift up the Desmond Tutus and the Mother Teresas, and it can resist the false prophets of Fred Phelps and his ilk. All of us individually searching for God are bound to make mistakes. In the grouped-together theology and practice of religion, our mistakes can indeed be amplified and multiplied, and more to our shame. But the good that we do, the times that we reject discrimination and violence, the voices we lift for the outcast and oppressed, the compassion we extend in word and deed– these can also be amplified and multiplied and tested, empowered, and equipped.

In Summary:

I applaud the video for raising questions and provoking discussions, for challenging outdated assumptions about religion and for lifting important, beautiful, inspirational concepts about what the love and grace of God are like. I support the sentiment of serving Jesus, even where that breaks from the institutionalized church (perhaps especially there!). I agree with the critique against what the video’s text description calls false religion. I hate false religion, too. But I remain unconvinced that the theology and (lack of) praxis lifted up here in place of such false religion are better, or a place that I would feel comfortable, and I believe the demonization and rejection of religion as a whole is throwing the baby (possibly the baby Jesus) out with the bath water. Instead, I would affirm the rejection of false religion, and the call to make the church and individuals therein more faithful to the true ministry of Christ. Let us swim in the ocean of grace.

Sermon: The Thirteenth Day of Christmas

“The Thirteenth Day of Christmas”

(Jan 8, 2012 – observing Epiphany) The Christmas season does not end on December 26, nor can it be contained to one place, one time, one people. Christmas– and its message of God’s presence with us, our hope and strength in the midst of the world’s struggle– is uncontrollable and uncontainable. We tend not to like what we can’t control, but that’s the Holy for you. (Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12)

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for my blog. How nice of them (and how interesting to read!).

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Counting the Unaccountable

It’s that glorious time of year when United Methodist Churches hunt down, compile, and report their statistics for the year. For a growing number of us, this is now part of a larger system of reporting of statistics year round, designed to help us measure our churches’ “Vital Signs” (part of the Vital Congregations program).

My concession: Numbers are good to have. I do think that we need to set goals and have ways to measure them. Although I try not to live my life by the thrill and agony of my weekly attendance numbers, I do believe they (and their near-consistent flat line) are relevant and important information in both my ministry and the ministry of the church where I serve. Although it by no means tells the full story, I do believe that the pledged giving on my church’s budget articulates a piece of the spiritual health and growth (and sometimes the lack thereof) of my congregation. Numbers of new members, and where they came from, do tell us a little about how the congregation stretches beyond itself in a time and place. These are part of how we measure and account for ministry, which on the whole is a nebulous, hard to grasp, amorphous thingy.

We thought the Doctor had it hard trying to measure spacetime. We need his thingamajig detector that goes ding when there’s stuff to measure the wibbly-wobbly, spirity-weiridy stuff we call ministry.

The problem, as every pastor I know will repeat, is that the numbers that we measure do not tell the whole story. Of course not. Ministry isn’t about numbers, nor is discipleship about statistics. There’s the wily, uncountable, unaccountable Spirit. Jesus himself seems to have preached his crowd of several thousand down to a core congregation of 12– and some of them weren’t too great at showing up consistently. Poor Thomas missed the best sermon in the series, and Judas fell in with another congregation entirely. All that costly perfume and the extra baskets of bread meant their budget never balanced, and the lay leader and chairman of the trustees (brothers of course) never could stop arguing long enough to fill out their forms in triplicate.

Numbers try to describe the number of people in Bible Study, but don’t tell how one person’s life was saved when he stumbled in by mistake and found a community of care. Numbers count the people who ate at the soup kitchen (maybe, if you fiddle with them), but don’t account for the way the meals were served and shared with mutual compassion and respect, rather than pity. Numbers tell us who came to worship, but not who left transformed– or who left hurt and angry and vowing never to enter a church again. Numbers tell us how many people gave how much money to the church, but can’t figure out which pennies were the widows’ mites. And numbers never tell us the tears shed, the hands held, the dignity upheld, the hope gained, the faith shaken or restored, how often God was revealed or pushed aside.

And this is all okay, if we treat numbers as only part of the story, if we ingrain in our system ways to tell the rest of the story: annual meetings, for example, where the congregation tells their story to one another and to their District Superintendent; structures in which the DS and the Bishop know the pastor and the church and hear their stories; organization from top to bottom that communicates that size matters less than faithfulness– something we find hard to measure but accept, because after all we serve a God who cannot be contained in our tables and figures.

But as we move more and more toward a corporate model, and give our numbers more power in the decisions about appointments of pastors and churches, we have a problem. The elevation of statistics itself is a problem, to be sure. But if we’re going to rely on all this counting, can we at least try to count more of what matters?

Just as an example, the Vital Congregations program defines marks of a faithful disciple of Jesus, saying a disciple “worships regularly, helps make new disciples, is engaged in growing in their faith, is engaged in mission, and shares by giving to mission”. I don’t disagree with that, but…

• We count the number of people who come to church. Can we count the people who follow up on an aspect of the worship service by joining a volunteer opportunity or engaging in a reflection suggested in the sermon? How do we know people didn’t just attend but worshiped?
• We count our new members overall, but a new member is not a new disciple. Last I checked, Jesus did not tell us to “go make of the world members of your church,” nor is the mission of the UMC to “make professions of faith for Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” How do we measure our follow-through with visitors and new members to encourage them to grow in faith? Speaking of which…
• We count the number of people who attend small groups or studies, but can we somehow measure how we “growth in faith”? How would we even begin?
• We count the number of people who go on United Methodist mission trips, but what about other forms of mission in our communities? What about those who give of their time and talent to the background work of mission?
• We count how much money people give to God and God’s mission, but what about the gifts of time and talent that people give?

In an effort to at least address that last one, this year I invited my congregation to report the time they gave to God in service both within and outside the church. Teams, committees, projects, meals, town boards, camp directing, and state committees are all up for the counting. Many people filled out little cards in worship to report back, but I also had to call some folks that I knew volunteered and ask them for their estimates. In a couple of cases, the numbers were larger than I expected, which gave me the chance to hear about projects and passions that my congregants give to beyond the church. In several cases, the numbers were lower than I expected, in which case I called or emailed the person and rattled off all the stuff I know they do for the glory of God, and we recalculated and celebrated.

And at the end, I was pleasantly stunned. In 2011, the people of my little 65-person average attendee congregation volunteered their time for the church and the community an estimated 7,807 hours.

That’s 325.3 24-hour days, or 10.8 months. If that were a 40 hour-a-week job, we would have worked 195.2 weeks. That’s 3.9 years (with 2 weeks vacation a year). If we calculated a wage based on the lowest estimate for what a volunteer’s time is worth ($17.79/hour), we would have given the equivalent of $138,886.53 (almost 85% of our entire budget) to the glory of God!

There are still many things we can’t account for: boxes of tissues and theological wrestling matches, hardships weathered and forgiveness offered. But in telling our stories, even in part, we seek to honor all we have done in God’s name, celebrate our faithfulness, confess our shortcomings, and challenge ourselves to greater service in the times to come.

What would you like to count? Better yet, what stories would you like to tell?

Sermon: Begin Again

“Begin Again”

(Jan 01, 2012) As the year turns over yet again, we have on opportunity to look back with celebration and with confession, and to look forward with commitment and prayer. How are we willing to commit ourselves to God this year? Sermon includes a call to confession and covenant, which is a totally Methodist New Year’s type thing to do (Ecclesiastes 3:1-13, Matthew 25:31-46).

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Sermon was also preached on zero coffee, so I apologize for wandering around in thought circles. Boo.