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  • Working on preaching with fewer notes. This morning I took about half of what I usually do with me, and was able to fit it all on a single sheet of paper tucked in my Bible.

  • NT Wright on the martyrdom of St. Stephen:

    In the great Jewish tradition of martyrdom, the dying called down curses on their persecutors; the first Christian martyr followed his Lord in praying for their forgiveness. But forgiveness wasn’t what they wanted (despite the fact that this was what the Temple stood for!); they wanted their worldview left intact. That’s the stuff that stonings are made of. But God has laid in Zion the true corner stone, precious beyond imagining to those who believe.

    N. T. Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year A, (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2001), 63.

  • Finished 2023: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker 📚

    Essential ideas for understanding the essentially foundational nature of sleep, written with energy and in some places even poetry.

  • Finished 2023: On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy by Saint Maximus the Confessor 📚

    Maximus, helpful and inspiring as always. was gratified to find that his description of the liturgy maps closely to what I participate in weekly as an Anglican Christian.

  • The Lord knows that in deepest places of the human heart, we all desire peace. We all desire to rest from our anxieties, from the pressures to perform, from the pain of strained or even completely broken relationships.
    I want you to think of where the disciples were in their heads and hearts when Jesus first appeared to them in that dark, locked room. They were grieving the loss of their friend, knowing they had just been betrayed by one of their own—Judas—and perhaps thinking over their own acts of abandonment when Jesus was in the most excruciating moments of his suffering.
    The text tells us they were afraid of leaders of their own people. Would they be the next ones to be unjustly and unfairly hunted down? And to top it all off, where was Thomas!? Inner and outer turmoil was high.
    Today is the second Sunday of Easter! The high point of celebration has come and gone and we come face to face with the fact that life can continue to be hard, even after Easter Sunday. I wonder if perhaps you are grieving something, someone today? I wonder if you have been subject to unfair treatment and unjust actions? I wonder if you have some unresolved tensions and maybe even turmoil in your heart. Perhaps in your mindfulness you have become acutely aware of your own acts of abandonment of God, of your friends, of your family, of your community. Perhaps you’ve even abandoned yourself, if you will, to certain desires that you know only lead to death.
    Whatever it is that you and I are feeling this second Sunday in Easter, I am hard pressed to think that the disciples wouldn’t be able to relate. Listen to the first words out of Jesus’ mouth when he appears, suddenly, without warning, in his perfected and resurrected body to his troubled friends and followers:
    “Peace be with you.” Peace be with you.
    And then he shows them his wounds to prove that it is really him, and not just a ghostly shadow of his self. Although his body has be raised with some really cool new properties like the ability to walk through a locked door, it is not altogether different—it still bears the wounds of the crucifixion, and this is proof of his identity, and further proof of his love.
    He doesn’t show them his wounds and say “Payback time, baby!”
    No, he shows them his wounds so that they will really believe that the one that was crucified, and that they had doubted and departed from, is indeed the one that is now standing in their midst and offering peace through forgiveness, to people that perhaps don’t deserve it.
    We see here the heart of Christ which is the very heart of God. Don’t miss this: Christ grants peace, and his peace begins with forgiveness.

  • Game night last Friday at the church was blast. Games played:

    Codenames
    Azul
    Catan

  • Guitar players, like myself, believed for years that these artists had access to futuristic tools and production tactics that were out of reach for the ordinary musician.

    The opposite was true.

    As a musician, this post by the ever-insightful C. J. Chivers on how “process wins every time” really resonated.