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| "When Love Came to Town" Luke 2:1-20 | Brad's Blog Brad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on12/24/2007 11:23 AM | |
| In the documentary “Rattle and Hum”, the popular Irish band U2, meets up with American blues legend B.B. King to practice a song that they will sing together in a U2 concert in Fort Worth, Texas. B.B. King is impressed with the strength of Bono’s songwriting and even shows a little hesitancy in playing such a song with them. But play they do, and the song became an instant classic. The name of that song? “When Love Comes to Town”.
In one way, this song is a typical love song. Each verse details a different situation where the singer has done something - or someone - wrong, but in each chorus he owns up to his mistake: “Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down, but I did what I did before love came to town.”
It’s a common theme in pop music, isn’t it? True love comes like a flash of lightning, a thunderbolt out of the sky, and then things change, in a big way. When love comes to town, we are changed people. Never again will we be the people we used to be. Our ... |  | |
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| | A New Beginning...Again | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on12/19/2007 12:44 PM | |
| Greetings!
I bet you have heard the old brainteaser that asks, “Do Christmas and New Years Day ever fall in the same year?” Our first inclination may be to say no, but of course they do – every year! Still, there is something appealing to me to look at Christmas as happening “this year”, while New Years Day will always be “next year.” And this is not just because I am a baseball fan and “next year” is the eternal cry of everyone who didn’t win the World Series this year. (Although, we Detroit Tigers fans have every reason to believe that “next year” is finally going to be “the year”. Witness the trade that brought Miguel Cabrera AND Dontrelle Willis to the Tigers last week…it has Peter Gammons calling the Tigers “a modern era ‘Murderers Row’…the team to beat in 2008.” But, I digress…)
There is no doubt that the new year offers us a psychological new start in lots of ways. New Years resolutions abound on January 1st as we all try to use this important, if artificial, starting poin ... | | |
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| | Memorable Lines and Great Stories | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on12/13/2007 1:45 PM | |
| I read scripture the same way I watch movies. Sometimes the breadth and the depth of the story is so wonderful that I may not be able to recount a single line of dialogue but the point is so clearly and beautifully made that I will never forget it. For me, “Sophie’s Choice” was such a movie. I don’t recall any scenes or speeches, but the agony of “the choice” haunts me to this day.
Sometimes, a movie is great and has some lines that are just as memorable as the story…remember any of these? “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid”…”God made me fast, and when I run, I feel God’s pleasure”…”You ask me why I am crying. I’m crying because I don’t know if I love you anymore, and I don’t know if I can go on without that.” (If you can identify all three of those great movies, let me know and you will have my unending respect!)
Occasionally, the story is not that great or even awful, but a memorable line will never leave my psyche. Who knows this line and can tell me what bad m ... | | |
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| | "A Restless Peace" Matthew 1:18-25 | | Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on12/10/2007 10:02 AM | |
| The gospel story that is most associated with the coming of Christ is the one found in the gospel according to Luke. It is a lyrical, beautifully presented story of the mystery and the majesty of the original advent season, when the world was first waiting for the messiah to come. It is the one we usually highlight on Christmas Eve, mainly because it is so beautifully written and carries with it such a feeling of awe and power.
But there is another gospel that also presents those events. And it is not as full of light and beauty as Luke. It is a dark story written about a dark time. It’s darkness and tension foreshadow the ultimate need for the light that comes into the world with the birth of Jesus. It is a story that still commands our attention, because this was the world that Jesus was born into, a world that would be changed by his coming. But because that change is incomplete, it also speaks to us today. The world can still be a dark and foreboding place to many, and we can learn fro ... | | |
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| | Stop and Enjoy | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on12/5/2007 11:24 AM | |
| | So, here’s how my morning started out: Just before heading out the door to go to church, I began to pull some things out of the freezer and cupboard to put in the crockpot for dinner tonight. While I was doing that I was also thinking about what I had on my plate today. Write a midweek missive, firm up some plans for the Christmas Eve service, attend staff meeting, make some phone calls to some folks who are a bit under the weather, make sure our Advent readers are on board, continue to work on my sermon for Sunday…and then the phone rang. It was someone I needed to talk to, nothing of earth shattering importance, but still, a call I wanted to take. So, as I prepared the ingredients for dinner, I sat with the phone crooked on my shoulder and carried on the conversation, some of which had to do with things that I had to do today. When the call was over, I put the phone in it’s cradle, started to put the ingredients and seasoning back in the cupboards and refrigerator, cleaned up the counters, put the cut ... | | |
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| | Prepare to be Surprised | | Brad's Blog
| By Brad Miller on12/3/2007 12:53 PM | |
| It is hard to believe that we are about to enter Advent! Where does the time go? Are you prepared for Advent?
You know, being an old Boy Scout – a proud Eagle Scout at that – I have had more than one occasion to reflect on the Boy Scout motto: Be prepared. So simple, so to the point, so utterly ignored by me too much of the time! But if I really do work at being prepared, things go much better.
In the church, the more I plan and get out in front of the seasons of the church, the special services, the special bulletins, the smoother things go. The more time I spend in study, the more prepared I feel for preaching and teaching. The more I think about how things can go wrong in a service, the more I am prepared to react when they do. The lesson is a simple one: when I plan, when I prepare myself, things go well. When I don’t….well, it could get ugly!
Advent by it’s very nature is a time of preparation. Certainly in our secular celebrations during this “most wonderf ... | | |
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| | Preparation and Celebration | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on11/29/2007 11:06 AM | |
| Greetings on this bright November day!
Sometimes I forget just what this season we call Advent is all about. I know we use it to prepare for the celebration of the birth of Jesus, and at the same time prepare for the promised return of Jesus. It is a time of celebrating what we have been given, and a time of preparing our hearts and lives for the future. It is a time for remembering and celebrating the past and then using those memories to rededicate our lives to fulfilling God’s will in the future. To put it in a nutshell, it’s about preparation and celebration. Preparing and celebrating…two things that we can not do enough of.
This past week, Carol and I were able to spend some time in Charleston, South Carolina. My cousin Jeananne and her husband John live there and my sister Kay Lynn and her husband Bruce came down for Thanksgiving, too. It was a nice relaxing week with way too much food and lots of good conversation, fun and reminiscing. At one point my sister and ... | | |
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| | Give Thanks | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on11/20/2007 9:46 AM | |
| Greetings on this beautiful day!
Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite times of the year. Growing up in Michigan it meant that it was growing increasingly colder and that winter – and skiing and sledding and skating – would soon be firmly entrenched. It meant that we would gather with cousins and grandparents and catch up and celebrate all that we had been given. It was a day when someone would always ask the question: “What are you thankful for?” It is a question I think we should ask often.
This Thanksgiving day, I hope you will take some time to really contemplate that question. The answer will be different for each of us, but at the heart of all the things that I can imagine we might be thankful for, one leaps to the top of the list: I am thankful for the witness of Jesus Christ and the grace of God that has given me every good thing in my life. Carol and our wonderful partnership in marriage, my family and their love, my friends ... | | |
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| | "The House of the Lord" Exodus 35: 4-9, 20-24 | | Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on11/18/2007 12:00 PM | |
| This reading we just heard Carolyn read would make a wonderful Advent scripture. The main idea is of the Hebrew people under Moses direction responding to God by building a wonderful tabernacle of gold and acacia wood. This tabernacle is designed to honor God, to give the people a chance to worship God properly, to recommit themselves to what it means to be God’s people. But, if we were looking at this scripture with an Advent lens, we would see that there is a deep importance and meaning in the preparation for God’s coming. Just as we use our Advent season to prepare our hearts to celebrate the wonder of the Christ child’s birth, so are the Hebrew people preparing themselves for the coming of God to the tabernacle, always to be with with, never to leave them.
But it is not yet Advent so we will not spend our time on exploring those themes.
The reading we just heard would be a wonderful treatise on the subject of repentance and forgiveness. Just prior to the gathering of the materials an ... | | |
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| | Always Listening | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on11/14/2007 12:29 PM | |
| | Greetings on this beautiful day! (And it may rain today!)This noon I attended a monthly meeting of the Atlanta area Disciples of Christ ministers. Being so close to the assembly, and having had a chance to talk with most everyone there just this past weekend, I almost decided not to go. I have lots to do, meetings this evening…you know the drill. But, I decided that I should. These meetings are great chances to catch up with colleagues in a low key atmosphere, hear a though provoking program and have a good lunch. So I went.The presenter this week was Phil Foster a minister and psychotherapist in Decatur. He was presenting a program on Rumi, a mystic poet of the 13th century who came from a Sufi Islamic tradition. Now, poetry is not usually my bag. But as Phil talked about Rumi’s journey, about mysticism in general and then read some poems I found myself really pulled in, my imagination whirring. I was especially taken with a poem in which Rumi was talking about living in the world. At one point he wrote, “Al ... | | |
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