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| Preparation and Celebration | Brad's Blog Mid-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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| | "The Big Ten" Exodus 20:1-17 | | Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on11/11/2007 11:00 AM | |
| When it comes to picking scriptures for worship, we at Brookhaven do things a little differently than some churches. A few years ago we decided to try and coordinate our scripture for worship with the scripture being studied in the children’s Sunday school that day. Thus, the sermon topic is tied in somewhat with the Sunday school lesson. We view this as a holistic approach where the whole church, the whole faith community, is focused on the same theme each week. We see this as a way to bring our community even closer together through the study of God’s word.
Here’s how it works: the Christian Education Ministry, headed by our Director of Christian Education, Debbie Kinney goes through various curricula and makes some suggestions as to monthly themes and weekly scriptures. Then we meet together to tweak the suggestions to take into consideration special Sundays, special church seasons and celebrations and the like.
This month the theme is cente ... | | |
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| | In Control? | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on11/7/2007 3:18 PM | |
| Greetings on this crisp fall day!
Yesterday I had one of those experiences at the office that, while small and seemingly insignificant, made me feel, however briefly, like I was in control of things. Let me explain:
Our new administrative assistant, Ruth Luckett, has been with us since Thursday November 1st and has already shown herself to be a nice addition to our staff. She has been working with Nichole Woodward to learn the computer software we use here; with Judy Mowrey to learn about office procedures and tasks; and with Chris Brooks to become more familiar with our website and how to maintain it. A lot has already been thrown at her and she has handled it all with good humor and grace.
Yesterday afternoon however, something suddenly was amiss. While attempting to update the prayer list on our website, she was suddenly unable to complete the task and the computer was denying her access to the program she needed. I tried to bring it up on my compute ... | | |
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| | From the Killing Fields to the Blessing Field | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on10/31/2007 1:42 PM | |
| Greetings on this beautiful All Hallows Eve! At Brookhaven Christian Church, we have been blessed in different ways by all who have walked through our doors and entered into fellowship with our community of faith. But one group of folks have had a special impact on us. I speak of our Cambodian friends who have become such an important part of our community. They have blessed us with their friendship, joined in with our fellowship, become important parts of our w ... | | |
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| | Giving Thanks | | Brad's Blog
| By Brad Miller on10/30/2007 3:29 PM | |
| As we move into November, we move ever closer to one of my favorite holidays of the year. Oh, Easter and Christmas bring incredible joy and awe on an almost cosmic level, but Thanksgiving is a more personal holiday to me. That is, as much as I am overjoyed to celebrate Christ’s resurrection as well as his earthly birth, the fact is that those events are almost incomprehensible. God on earth? Jesus died, but then he lived? My soul is stirred by such pronouncements even as my little pea brain has trouble processing it all! But Thanksgiving is a different story.
Thanksgiving stirs my soul and is something as real as the people who surround me on that day. Thanksgiving is a chance to honor God for all we have been given, and most importantly to me, a chance to give thanks for those who have paved
the way for me to be where I am today. Thanksgiving is a family and friends holiday. Thanksgiving is a time to cherish the overwhelming bounty that is our ... | | |
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| | Give Me A Reason - Joshua 24:14-24 | | Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on10/28/2007 4:00 PM | |
| Remember the old westerns?The ones where the good guys and the bad guys were easily identifiable.Sometimes it was as easy as looking at what color hat they wore.Sometimes the bad guy was the one who hadn’t shaved for days and the good guy was somehow always clean cut and well groomed.If someone had a scar running down the side of their face, you knew they were the bad guys. ... | | |
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