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| Home | Brad's Blog Mid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on7/21/2010 10:12 AM | |
| Greetings on this hot and going to get hotter day,
I have been thinking about home a lot lately. Not just the place I call “home” but the whole idea of what “home” really is. It probably started about two weeks ago when I was talking to my sister about plans for our annual family reunion at our cottage in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at the end of July. 16 of the 18 members of the family will be there, the only 2 missing will be our nephew Daniel and his wife Rachel, who are expecting their first baby in September and so can’t travel from Seattle. It is always great when we can all get together, and getting together at Munuscong makes it all the better, because that is one of the places that I definitely think of as “home.” Summers growing up my parents ran a church camp that had once been a fishing and hunting resort owned by my Great Uncle and built by my grandfather. From the 1920’s on, it has been a special place for my family. Today, no less than 8 cottages on the river b ... |  | |
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| | SUnday July 18, 2010 "Choose the Better Part" Luke 10: 38-42 | | Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on7/20/2010 9:30 AM | |
| My mother was a doer. All 4 foot 11 inches of her was a human dynamo.
She could be a whirling dervish of activity. Even when she sat down to watch TV or listen to music she was always “doing.” She was a knitter and always had a project going – an afghan, a sweater, a scarf – to be given as a present for someone. One of my most enduring memories is of my mother sitting in her easy chair, knitting needles a blur, yarn being fed from her big knitting bag that sat on the floor beside her. And all the while, she would be watching TV or carrying on a conversation. She just needed to be doing something.
My mother was also a planner. She was, in a very real sense, the glue that held our extended family together. She loved to host parties – at Christmas, at birthdays, for special occasions such bridal showers and baby showers – she had a knack for knowing how to plan and carry off a good party.
From a young age, I loved having all the people ... | | |
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| | Thankful | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on7/15/2010 3:05 PM | |
| Greetings on this steamy day…
All week long I have been singing a song inside my head…”It is good to give thianks…it is good to give thanks to the Lord…” Those of you who were at “Praise on Peachtree” last Sunday know that the theme was gratitude and that song was one of the centerpieces of the service. As I have gone through the week, I have found myself giving thanks for so many things. Big things and small things. Mundane things and extraordinary things. Things that can bring a tear to my eye and things that can make me laugh out loud. And I find myself in a much better place when this happens.
Which brings me to the question of the hour: do I feel closer to God because I give thanks? Or is it my closeness to God that causes me to give thanks? Sort of a chicken and egg thing, really. While still wrestling with the definitive answer, I’m leaning toward to saying yes to both questions. There are just days when the sun shines and the sky is blue and the h ... | | |
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| | Standing on Their Shoulders | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on7/15/2010 3:02 PM | |
| Greetings!
Yesterday we began the “Visioning” Process for BCC. We held the first of our five scheduled “cluster meetings” aimed at getting the input of the friends and members of BCC as to what they need from the church, what we are doing well and how we can move into the future serving God’s will and God’s people. It’s the kind of exercise that is necessary every once in a while, especially in the midst of changing times. Since I first arrived at BCC almost 9 years ago, we are a different church. Children have grown into young adults; some parents are now empty nesters; new members have joined; new babies have come along. The last year or so have brought added change, and not of the welcome variety. The changing economic situation has impacted us all, and that leads to new stresses and strains. So, now is a good time to take stock, to ask questions, to make plans for the future. And so, we are gathering in various groupings to do just that. Over the course of the next two week ... | | |
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| | How Important is the Bible? | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on6/30/2010 8:11 AM | |
| Greetings!
I gave up a long time ago recommending movies to people because I discovered that movies that I find riveting don’t always hit other people the same way. (Isn’t that right Rev. Jennifer?) These days the only two movies I wholeheartedly recommend are “Field of Dreams” (especially for fathers, sons, and baseball fans) and “Ordinary People”, a profoundly real movie about the pain and heartbreak and joy of life in late 20th century America. Those are probably my two favorite movies of all time, although any good (or bad for that matter) Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Katherine Hepburn or Cary Grant movie is always a good bet.
Now, all of this is my way of leading to saying that I saw a movie this week that got me to thinking, but this is not, I repeat, this is not a recommendation for people to see it. Some might like it; many would not. Having said all that, I recently saw a movie called “The Book of Eli” starring Denzel Washington. It was one of those p ... | | |
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| | Sunday June 27, 2010 "Don't Look Back" Luke 9:51-62 | | Brad's Blog
| By Brad Miller on6/30/2010 8:03 AM | |
| In C.S. Lewis classic book, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, there comes a time when Aslan, the Christ-like lion king, begins his movement toward the climactic final confrontation with the evil forces threatening the kingdom of Narnia. Throughout this portion of the book, the refrain echoes throughout the land, “Aslan is on the move.”
In the scripture we heard read this morning, I am reminded of Aslan. It seems plausible to me that in the period when these events took place in the ministry of Jesus that his followers might have spread the news across Palestine and Israel: “Jesus is on the move.” They might not have understood what he was moving toward, but they probably knew that something was different; something was about to happen.
Beginning with chapter 9 of Luke and continuing for about 10 chapters, we are presented the gospel account of Jesus’ final journey toward Jerusalem. Most of these stories are found only in Luke’s gospel and while the sto ... | | |
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| | Blessings | | Brad's Blog
| By Brad Miller on6/23/2010 3:12 PM | |
| Greetings on this first full day of summer,
I like to keep things neat and in order. I say, I like to, but that doesn’t always mean I do. Oh, I do well at home. I don’t like dishes to pile up in the sink, so I make sure to clean up after dinner and load the dishwasher and wash the pots and pans. I like things to be in order when I get up in the morning, which means I try to put things in place before I go to bed at night. I just don’t like a lot of clutter in the house. But my desk in my office at the church is a different story.
Like many of you, massive amounts of paper cross my desk every day. The really critical stuff gets dealt with immediately; the stuff I’m working on in the short term goes into a special folder; but what to do with all that other stuff? Some of it can go directly into the recycling box under my desk. Some of it goes to other people. But a lot of it is sort of in that in between, gray area. Might be useful someday…looks interesting ... | | |
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| | Sunday June 20, 2010 "Deep Calls to Deep" Psalm 42 and Psalm 43 | | Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons | By Brad Miller on6/23/2010 3:08 PM | |
| “Deep calls to deep.”
I remember the first time I heard this phrase, and I was a little mystified. When I was a kid, before we asked the blessing and ate, someone read a devotional for the day which included a scripture and a short reflection. On this certain day, Psalm 42 was the scripture and I really didn’t know what it meant, this idea of “deep calls to deep.” I remember not wanting to ask right at that moment, mainly because I was hungry and wanted to get to dinner, but after the blessing and as we were eating I asked what it meant.
My brother said he thought it meant something “really heavy was going on.” Which wasn’t a lot of help. My father said he thought that it meant that when things start to go wrong, there is a tendency for us to let things go from bad to worse. My mother said she thought it meant that when things are going really, really wrong, when we are in the deepest pain, we call out to the deepest source of hope we know, God.
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| | Facing Fear | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on6/22/2010 2:18 PM | |
| Greetings on another steamy day,
Recently Carol and I went to a play in which one of the characters uttered this line: “It scares me so much that I just know I have to do it.” As the line was delivered, I knew that even though it got a big laugh from the audience, it was profound and instructive beyond the attention given it. It was used to illustrate what a free spirit the person who uttered it was and it served it’s purpose well. It got me thinking about times I had stepped up to my fears, and what the result of that was.
When I was about 14 our Boy Scout troop was chosen as the Governors Honor Guard, which meant that we got to spend two weeks on Mackinac Island in a barracks behind the Governors summer residence. We put up the flag every morning, we worked as guides in Fort Michilimackinac, we got to meet the governor and his wife, and each day about 3:00 we got to go to the Grand Hotel swimming pool. The Grand Hotel is an enormous turn of the century hot ... | | |
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| | Sunday June 6, 2010 "Are You Happy?" Psalm 146 | | Brad's BlogMid-Week Missive | By Brad Miller on6/8/2010 1:49 PM | |
| We live in a society that holds happiness as one of the great goals of life. Our marketing culture points to happiness with almost every advertisement we see. You certainly can’t be happy unless you have the latest, the most stylish, the fastest, the cleanest, the tastiest, the best. Our consumer culture is based on the notion that we need things to be happy.
But it goes even deeper than that. We look to our leaders to provide that happiness, too. Every election cycle, which now is every day of every year, we see people running for office that market themselves much like Madison Avenue markets consumer goods. And what they are selling is the fact that their candidate can make us happy. Oh, this is not a new phenomenon: from the 1920’s on, the theme song for one of our two major political parties has been “Happy Days are Here Again!”
It’s not just our leaders and our consumer culture that places such a big emphasis on happiness. How many parents have told ... | | |
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