Sunday will be the last day of the year and the last day of my term as ad hoc interim pastor at Ossian First Presbyterian Church in Ossian, Indiana.  Retrospectives on 2023 abound online, so I will confine myself to a retrospective on my 20 months at OPC, as the congregation calls her.

Just after Easter 2022, I received a call from the chair of our presbytery’s Ministerial Committee.  A good friend, he told me the story of one of our congregations that had just gone through a difficult separation with their pastor.  Would I be willing to moderate their upcoming session (board of elders) meeting?  Sure, I’d be happy to give a Tuesday night to a church in need.

The third Tuesday in April 2022 became 20 or more Session meetings as the elders worked through the immediate and then the longer term “what next?” questions, and, in time, called a congregational meeting to elect a pastor search committee and then, some months later, another meeting to call a new pastor. Continue reading →

Becky and I are with family this week, and wish all of you a very Merry Christmas!  Perhaps sometime in the next two or three days you might find time to read these accounts of the Nativity as told first by Luke and then by Matthew:

Luke 2:1–20

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. Continue reading →

The word joy is making its annual appearance in our joyless world this month.  We might call joy a crossover word – explicitly linked to the story of Jesus’ birth, it also appears with holly and candy canes for completely secular purposes. “Christmas Joy” is the title of a cheesy Hallmark movie I have not seen and don’t plan on seeing (If I haven’t seen it, how do I know it is cheesy?  As I said, it’s a Hallmark movie.)

So, what is joy? Specifically what is Christmas joy, if not a cheesy Hallmark movie?

The small group Becky and I are a part of, our Life Group, met earlier this week and we talked about joy using as our text the story of the angel’s message to the shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night.  “Good news of great joy that will be for all the people” the angel says.  And then he fills the message with meaning, “For to you is born this day in the City of David a savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

But what is joy, this response to the good news of the birth of Christ? What is Christmas joy, Christian joy? Joy is  mentioned nearly 200 times in the Old and New Testaments, but our lexicons won’t help much in getting at its meaning.  The Hebrew word is said to mean “gladness, joy, mirth, rejoicing.”  The Greek word is defined as “joy, rejoicing, happiness, gladness.” Joy is common to the human experience.  We know it when we see it. Continue reading →

I will be preaching to wise people this coming Sunday.  For sure those in the congregation at Ossian First Presbyterian Church, but also those plaster figures behind me.  Each Advent the church displays a classic nativity scene in the chancel right in front of the communion table.

No Second Commandment comments are planned, but I will tell those wise men – Magi the NIV pew Bibles will say – that they don’t belong.  Yeah, a quick rehearsal of what the text in Matthew does and does not say.  Gifts of three kinds but not three wise men.  No Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. Not a stable and a manger bed, but a house with a baby perhaps as many as two years after the night an angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds who were sore afraid. No angel choir and no friendly beasts.

But after the great debunking, I won’t ask the Magi to leave the chancel.  They’re welcome to stay.  I’ll be talking to them. Continue reading →

They say polite conversation avoids politics and religion. I will try to keep this post polite, but it’s going to come dangerously close to politics and religion.

Two headlines caught my attention last week. The first, from New York Magazine’s ‘The Intelligencer’ asked, “Do Young Voters Actually Prefer Trump to Biden?” The second from the New York Times told us, “Americans Under 30 Don’t Trust Religion – or Anything Else.”

There’s something wrong with the kids. In terms of polled preference for president a year out from the election, younger voters, those 18-34, the Gen Zers and younger Millennials, are roughly evenly split in their preference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Multiple polls say so. And our columnist is dumbfounded. “There’s no world in which Donald Trump should be the preferred presidential candidate of young voters,” he fumes.  But apparently that world is our world.

There’s something wrong with the kids. The decline of the church in the west and the rise of the “nones,” especially among the young, has been well-documented. For those of us who mourn the loss of religious attachments among our kids, our misery has company. In the final installment of a six-part series exploring the issue, the writer tells us, “What distinguishes the under-30 set is a marked level of distrust in a variety of major institutions and leaders — not just religious ones.” Continue reading →