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| Called to Serve | Brad's Blog Mid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on5/3/2012 8:45 AM | |
| One of our priorities as a congregation as we moved into 2012 was to expand our Community Service and Outreach activities. We who have been blessed with so much are called to do what we can to help those in need. Sometimes those needs are spiritual; sometimes they are physical. Some people need advocates; some people need friends. We cannot be all things to all people, but we can help.
To that end, there are four opportunities in front of us that all fall into the category of community service that I would like you to be aware of.
FLOWERS FOR MOTHERS : Friday May 11, 10:00 am until noon the BCC Garden Club will host a “PAINT YOUR POT AND PLANT YOUR FLOWER” activity for the Child Development Center. Each child will paint a pot and then plant a blooming flower for their mother. This will be the third year we have hosted this event. It is always messy and lots of fun. All children of the church are invited to participate along with the CDC. Addition ... |  | |
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| | Sunday April 29, 2012 "Building the Easter Community: Confronting the Culture." | | Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on5/2/2012 9:08 AM | |
| I sometimes struggle with scripture.
Sometimes my struggle is with understanding what I am supposed to learn from the scripture. And sometimes my struggle comes from the fact that I understand all too well what the scripture says.
Let’s deal with the first kind of struggle.
Because our holy scriptures are so varied and of so many different genre – history, poetry, advice, allegory – we have to learn how each differs in it’s purpose and meaning. If it’s history, it might simply be something we need to know in order to understand the progression of God’s presence in the world. But, sometimes history can serve to show us how we should act, too. If it’s poetry, we run into a similar dilemma: does this poetry represent how things were, how things are, or how things should be? And if you get into allegory and morality stories and parables, well, it can quickly become complicated. Am I to read these stories and find my place in the story? I ... | | |
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| | Remembering Mike Holloway | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on4/25/2012 2:29 PM | |
| | On Monday I found out that a friend of mine had died. His name was Mike Holloway and the fact is, I did not know him well, but when I learned of his death I was affected more than I would have expected. You see, Mike was a person I met here at the church. About 2 ½ years ago he came to the door, recently released from prison, working hard to get back on his feet. I never knew the whole story, but there was something in Mike that made me believe he really was trying. That first day he just said he needed a place to pray, and so I turned on the lights and he went into the sanctuary for about an hour. When he went in, the fear and stress on his face was palpable, when he came out, he looked relaxed and ready to take on the day again. We talked some that day, but he didn’t ask for anything other than a prayer on his behalf. Over the next couple of years I was able to help him occasionally with a Marta card or a small bit of money to get groceries. But mostly, he just stopped by to talk, to pray, to ... | | |
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| | Building Community | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on4/12/2012 7:55 AM | |
| What a wonderful day Easter Sunday was! A chance to gather together and celebrate the most incredible event in all of history. A chance to give thanks for the grace that God has extended to each of us through Jesus Christ. A chance to share all of it within this wonderful community of faith. A chance to commit to making sure that Easter is not just a day, but a way of life. And the big question is, how do we do that?
At the beginning of the year, BCC identified priorities for 2012 and one of those priorities was to strengthen our already strong commitment to Community Service. We identified the community as both the BCC community and the community outside the church. We have already strengthened our relationship with the Interfaith Outreach Home and Campbell Stone Christian Centers, and we are working toward a new partnership with an organization called “Street Grace”, about which you will hear more about soon. We also want to strengthen our “inreach” to the members of this cong ... | | |
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| | April 8, 2012 Easter Community Sunrise Service "Roll Away the Stone" Luke 24:1-12 | | Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on4/10/2012 4:11 PM | |
| This is the day we have been waiting for.
This is the day the Lord has made.
This is the day we rejoice.
This is the day we celebrate the resurrection. The day when the burial tomb was unsealed, the day the entrance was unblocked and God rolled away the stone on death. The day when Jesus conquered death and in so doing offered life to all of the world. The day when each and every one of us was offered a chance to begin again, renewed, whole and at peace with God.
This is the day the Lord has made.
We have arrived at this day and this place along many different roads, and I would hazard a guess that they have not all been easy roads. We have experienced good times and bad; times of despair and joy; loneliness and fulfillment. We are humans, after all.
In our humanness, we somehow lose sight of God’s presence in our lives. Oh, we know in our heart of hearts that God is ... | | |
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| | Sunday April 8, 2012 Sanctuary Service "Practicing Resurrection" John 20: 1-18 | | Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on4/10/2012 4:07 PM | |
| In the book “Practicing Resurrection”, the writer Nora Gallagher recounts her spiritual journey following the death of her brother. She experienced dark days, not sure what was real, and not sure what to believe, or how to believe. She tells of an innocent question that began the process of her awakening. A friend asked, “What would be the best possible gift you could receive?” Gallagher answered, “I want to believe in the resurrection.”
When I first read this statement, I was somewhat taken aback. But the more I thought about it, the more I understood that my belief in the resurrection is a bedrock of my faith. The promise that through Christ, death has been conquered is one that is pretty hard to grasp, but it is that reality that leads to transformed lives, here and now.
Yes, death has been overcome. Yes, we have been promised a seat at the heavenly banquet. Yes, the price of our sins has been paid. But there is much more to it than that. Because of ... | | |
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| | Spreading the News | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on4/4/2012 3:01 PM | |
| Well, apparently no one I know won the Mega Millions last week. Watching the news reports of the events leading up to the drawing, and now the mystery that surrounds the winning tickets, I had the feeling that this was the biggest news event of the year, maybe the decade! I mentioned that to a friend and he said, “Oh, it’s just the media machine ratcheting things way out of proportion.” I thought about that awhile, and decided that he was probably right. And then I started thinking about the big event we celebrate this weekend: the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. Now, as big stories go, this is probably the biggest. The thought suddenly popped into my head: “What would it have been like if today’s mass media had been on the scene of Jesus’ resurrection?”
It’s sort of an interesting question, isn’t it? Would the media have staked out the Disciples houses to get a glimpse and maybe a quote? Would Mary Magdalene have become an instant celebrity? And what of the others who were ... | | |
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| | Dreaming | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on3/29/2012 8:38 AM | |
| | The Mega-Millions Jackpot for Friday night is $500 million. That is one-half a BILLION dollars! I can barely get my head around that number. But it doesn’t stop me from dreaming. What you do with $500 million dollars? Well, first of all after taxes and in a single cash pay out, it would probably be much lower…like $250 million. (Oh, forget it – like I could live on that!) I bet most of us have taken some time to dream about what we could do if we won the lottery. Pay off your house? Pay off all your family members houses? Pay off the church mortgage? Donate to lots of worthy causes? Make sure your children’s education is fully funded? Travel? Retire? Buy a small country? Start a new business? The possibilities they say, are endless, and there is nothing wrong with dreaming. The week I joined the faculty at Northeastern University in Boston, the lottery jackpot was one of the highest ever. The chairman of the department took me and the other new faculty member out to lunch one day to welcome ... | | |
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| | Stuggling with Scripture | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on3/21/2012 1:58 PM | |
| Greetings on this beautiful spring day,
I have been reading a lot of Psalms lately. Some of it has been for a class that I have been facilitating, some has been for possible future sermons and studies, but mostly, I have been reading the Psalms for me. Tradition says that the bulk of the Psalms were written by King David. Not all scholars believe he wrote all of them, but his hand can certainly be seen. The Psalms are prayers that were probably used in worship – maybe as a reading, a litany, a pastoral prayer, or a song to be sung – but there are still several Psalms that clearly come out of a personal need or angst or celebration. They are a good place to go to remember that even folks like King David had their days of fear, and guilt. I am taken by the fact that David, too, experienced times when he could not feel God’s presence, and I am buoyed that he never gave up believing or seeking for that presence to be made known. It helps me to understand that if God seems distant it ma ... | | |
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| | Sunday March 18, 2012 "Faith" John 3:14-21 | | Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on3/20/2012 10:12 AM | |
| I bet a lot of people here know part of this passage by heart. Say it with me: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not but perish but have eternal life.”
It’s a good verse to know, isn’t it? It’s one of those verses that we can come back to time and time again, almost as a mantra to remind ourselves how we have been blessed. It is especially important in this season of Lent as we make our way toward the reality of Holy Week, the horror of the cross and the glory of Easter.
Over and over and we talk about Lent as being a time of introspection, meditation, prayer and study. We are called to work on “us” and on our relationship to God.
It’s not just navel gazing, this Lenten journey, it is hard work at understanding just who we are and what we have been given. There comes a time when during this Lenten journey, we must begin to turn our focus away from our individual situation ... | | |
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