Flights - by Judy Brown August 23, 2010

Rev. Nancy Allen came across this poem and I loved it.  Thought I would share it with the interwebs.

Flights
Yesterday,
An easy flight
For me. Not so
For him.
He was an hour
Late because a
Jar of caramel sauce
inside a suitcase, broke,
And ran out, down
The outside
Of the plane.
They didn't know
What the suspicious
Liquid was.
Was it mechanical?
A terrorist plot?
As it turned out
They should have
Called for ice cream,
Not mechanics
And the bomb squad.
So hard to know
What we are seeing,
Sometimes. Especially
When we're scared.

Can flower charts be any uglier?

 Every church I have seen that has less than 700 in worship each week has what is known as a "flower chart".  These are charts that have lines in which you fill in the date and then people sign up to underwrite the cost of the flowers that week for worship.  Most people buy these flowers in 'honor' or 'memory' of someone, and some of the slots are filled up.  However, there are always weeks in which no one signs up.  I think it is in part because no one wants to walk up and put their name on these disgusting looking charts. (see below)

And so, for the love of all that is good and holy, I will be willing to pay up to $20 for a flower chart that does not look like it belongs in my grandmother's basement or on a kindergarten bulletin board. 

Sermon bit - William Willimon

"Yet I suggest that we are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story -- the one according to Luke not Dickens -- is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers."


"We prefer to think of ourselves as givers -- powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the biblical account of the first Christmas. There we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are. Luke and Matthew go to great lengths to demonstrate that we -- with our power, generosity, competence and capabilities -- had little to do with God’s work in Jesus. God wanted to do something for us so strange, so utterly beyond the bounds of human imagination, so foreign to human projection, that God had to resort to angels, pregnant virgins and stars in the sky to get it done. We didn’t think of it, understand it or approve it. All we could do, at Bethlehem, was receive it."


In this sermon Willimon imply the question to Christians, "What narrative drives your understanding of Christmas? A Christmas Carol or the Gospel?"

Click here for the entire sermon of Willimon.