Program Sermon In 587 BCE, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar. The temple was destroyed and most of the residents were taken into exile. In 538, the Persian ruler, Cyrus, defeated the Babylonians and encouraged people to return to their homes. While many Jews remained in diaspora, preferring to keep the lives they had built in exile, some …
Return (and a Letter from the Board)
Whenever we return to someplace we’ve been before, memories bubble up like a spring. My memories tend to be visual. When I think of Kidd Springs, I think of the light. Three walls are glass looking out over the pond. The light filters in through the trees and bounces off the water in the pond. Life wanders by outside and …
Packing (Program and Sermon)
Program Sermon Living on the Gulf Coast, you become deaf to the warnings. Threats constantly loom in the Gulf from June and November. When I first moved there, I obsessively checked weather sites, monitoring, projecting, guessing, hoping. Most of the time, storms go elsewhere; there’s a lot of coast to destroy. Even when they look like they might head your …
Packing
There was a period in my life, during college and dropping out of college and returning to college, that I moved fourteen times in seven years. After Lisa and I were married, we slowed that pace to moving only once every couple of years. Sometimes, the move was only across town and sometimes it was across the country. Either way, …
What We Leave Behind (Program and Sermon)
Program Sermon We just went on vacation. We went to a place in the Hill Country, to a little plot of land that has been in Lisa’s family for almost a hundred years. The Hagy Camp sits on a bluff above the Western fork of the Frio River, about six miles north of Leakey, Texas. Lisa’s ancestors started going there …
A Little Bit of Death, but So Much Life
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There’s this naked lady living in a garden with her boyfriend, also naked. A talking snake tells her to eat an apple, so she does, and things go downhill fast. The God of the garden knows they’ve been bad, so they lie about it, blame each other, and get kicked out. Not …