A mentor once told me that most pastors who have been pastors for 20 years don’t have 20 years of experience; they have 5 years of experience 4 times. Meaning: once the reach the edges of their skills and maturity and true growth and learning is required, they take another call. I’ve begun to wonder if we can’t say something similar about church members. That most don’t have 20 years of learning of how to live in community, remain connected with those we disagree, reconcile after conflict—we’ve got 5 years of experience 4 times.

🧵on pleasure:

I recently preached on the Nazirite vow in Numbers 6. A Nazirite is someone who voluntary takes a vow of holiness committing to abstain from 3 things: being around dead bodies, cutting their hair, and wine.

Hidden in the text is a fascinating prescription.
/1 When one completed the length of their vow (it was for a prescribed period of time) they were to offer a sin offering.

Why?

They had just completed a period of increased personal holiness. Why, then, do they need to make a sin offering?
/2

Over the weekend, I’ve seen a lot of people express nostalgia for President Bush.

I get it. Compared to recent years, his memory feels steady. Simpler. There’s a sense that things were less complicated and compromised.

But I’m curious, what do people truly miss about him? When the planes crashed into the towers, Bush had an incredible and impossible task before him. And while there were moments when he offered a steady response and felt measured and in control, we need to be honest about how he led us to deal with the trauma of 9/11.

We didn’t.

My daughter is black. She is loud, boisterous, opinionated, charismatic, stubborn, and lively. I love with her with the same ferocity with which she does life. It’d be easy for me to say, “I’m not a racist.” But I must admit: I have racist thoughts. Here’s what I mean. I can remember a couple years back after a particularly difficult time of parenting that I wondered, “I wonder if my daughter is so loud and opinionated because she’s black?”

That’s a racist thought. Straight up.

It grieved me to see it in me.

In the last year, young people punked a presidential campaign into thinking millions would show up at a rally and manipulated a stock, toppling hedge funds.

If you don’t think society is going to experience significant change in the next 20 years you may not be paying attention. Let me expand on this a bit.

What we are seeing is that those under 30 take unique, black swan type approaches to problem solving.

Read the story of the Good Samaritan, but replace the man in the ditch with a man trying to get into a full hospital—for any illness—and the priest and the Levite with a Christian refusing to wear a mask or worship online. The priest and the Levite would have been disqualified from their temple duties in caring for the man in the ditch. In other words, they were prioritizing their worship of God over the physical needs of the one before them.

There’s a parallel to today’s arguments for meeting.

Had a conversation with @chuckdegroat this morning about reading “blessed as the poor in spirit” as “blessed are those who have come to the end of themselves” and I can’t stop thinking about how that’s good news for all of us this year. Are you at the end of trying to hold it all together?

Blessed are you. For yours in the kingdom of heaven.

The amount of conspiracy theories shared on Facebook in the last month is absolutely staggering. Humans are meaning making creatures. When something doesn't fit our current paradigm of thinking, we pull together disparate facts... ...to make a story to that gives meaning, purpose, or reason. Using facts makes those stories believable. But just because something is believable doesn't make it true.
Sadly, most of the people I see sharing conspiracy theories are Christians.

Evangelicalism must accept that the American public doesn't trust its pro-life ethic because it hasn't politically advocated for the children who are alive in the way it has for the unborn. Far too many evangelicals have worked to silence BlackLivesMatter, have echoed the words 'They aren't our kids', celebrated tax cuts for the rich at the expense of safety nets for the poor, chosen policy over families, and sided with sexism and misogyny.