I spent last night in a relatively calm mood. After making dinner (whole wheat pasta with broccoli rabe, cherry tomatoes, and sausage), I sat down to watch hockey. Of course, I put on the New York Rangers – Carolina Hurricanes game, which the Rangers won 4-2. But I also kept an eye on the Islanders (why I would care about the Islanders, I don’t know, but they did beat the Atlanta Thrashers 5-4 in OT), the Pittsburgh Penguins at the Boston Bruins and the Chicago Blackhawks at the Dallas Stars matches over at NHL Center Ice. Afterwards, I made a cup of chamomile tea and went upstairs to read for an hour.
Falling asleep around midnight, I then proceeded to stay asleep until 7:02am.
Ugh.
I know, it is just smidgen over seven hours, a normal allotment of sleep. But we’re talking about me! I rarely get seven hours of uninterrupted sleep.
But by sleeping this long, I had to rush to get over to church for Morning Prayer. I made it in time.
I am back home now and feel like I missed half the day – which is going to be a busy one. I have a couple of visits this morning following by a visit to the Wartburg Home over in Mount Vernon; then I have a couple of other appointments on the New York side of the Hudson, including a birthday dinner I have to attend; and then I am heading out to a hockey game, also on the other side of the Hudson. If I am lucky, I’ll get home before 1am.
Maybe it is a good thing that I got all that sleep last night????
After a rather lengthy morning meeting in Central New Jersey, I have returned back to New Milford. My meeting – which caused me to miss Morning Prayer this morning – dealt primarily with clergy issues. Nothing shocking. Nothing out of the ordinary.
It is my last meeting of the week. I have two next week – one on Tuesday in White Plains, which, thankfully, has been moved to 10am from noon. Amen. That means I will get out of Westchester and across the Tappan Zee Bridge before rush hour.
For some reason, I have a bunch of telephone calls to return this afternoon, which I will begin returning after I finish posting.
If you need to get a hold of me – my remainder of the day is going to be spent at home. I have a number of church-related items to complete. If you need me, give me a call on the home phone or my cell.
According to the Pew Research Center, more and more Americans are loosening their ties to being part of any particular religious denomination for an extended period.. More and more people each year are experimenting with varying denominations, testing the waters to find something that “feels good.”
Speaking from a Christian point of view, religious lives of Americans are more fluid today, which gives all churches an opportunity to re-examine who they are what they are all about. It provides a chance for pastors and congregations to take a serious look at themselves and challenge themselves to be rock-solid in their understanding of Holy Scripture, not watering it down to make people feel good.
People tend to view reports like this one in a negative light. Instead, it provides mainline churches – of which Saint Matthew’s is firmly planted in that category – the opportunity to be stronger in our understanding of what God tells us through His Word. It pushes us to offer programs, like our pre-school that is opening in the fall. It makes us reflect on what our Lutheran heritage means and drives us to tell others the blessings we receive from our Lord.
By standing up for God and His Word and the grace received through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, we will stand out from watered-down churches who profess love of God, but require much in terms of keeping mandates of legalism.
Something is up with the blog right now. Have to take a little time to figure it out – and that has to come later in the day.
Right now, our font size is all messed up, along with a couple of other things. As I type this, I don’t have much time to fix it. That’s for later.
UPDATE: Everything is fixed now. It didn’t take me as long to find the issue than I thought it would. I am no way an expert in HTML coding. Actually, to call me a novice is probably less than what I truly am. But it is all fixed now. Time for Morning Prayer.
I received a telephone call a little while ago where I was informed that I had won two tickets to see U2:3D (the concert movie) at Chelsea Cinemas in the city. The prize is from New York’s newest rock station, WRXP 101.9FM, the former smooth jazz radio station.
Goody!!
It was a terrific concert – and the 3D was spectacular.
After waking up for the second time in two days around 4am (actual wake up time today – 4:11am), I kind of figured my day would drag, especially since today is a my official day off this week. Whenever I get out of bed at that hour, I feel like I am carrying a 50 pound weight on my back. By midday, I want to sleep. And it doesn’t matter that today is my day off.
Of course, I have been working – doing some things that need to be completed earlier in the week – and shopping for food items for our homeless dinner our Samaritans are serving tomorrow at Saint Cecelia’s shelter in Englewood.
My weekly schedule is in flux as two meetings that were due to gather this week were canceled over the weekend (I found out about them this morning). I don’t want to say that I am happy that they were canceled this week, but let me just say I am not unhappy that they aren’t happening. One of these meetings was out-and-out canceled; the other was postponed. The postponement means that instead of traveling over to White Plains this week, I get to go next Tuesday.
I was able to pay bills this morning – never a happy experience. But it got done.
And now I am sitting here surfing the Internet. Found an interesting trailer for the upcoming “The X-Files 2″ movie (or whatever they end up calling it). Makes me drool.
If you haven’t guessed, I am a big fan of “The X-Files.”
On that note, I was considering going to see a movie, but nothing interests me. The last movie I watched wasn’t even a movie with a plot – it was a U2 concert in 3D.
It’s Monday – maybe I will just finish cleaning the house and then listen to some music.
This morning, I got a little lucky – I was able to purchase a couple of tickets for Billy Joel’s July 18th concert at Shea Stadium. Even though I wanted to pick up 4, getting 2 was pretty good.
After waking up, I came downstairs and fired up my iMac and opened the Safari browser and pointed it to www.507tixx.com. This is the site the Mets were using to sell tickets for the concert. Last Saturday, when they put tickets for the July 16th concert on sale, almost immediately the concert was sold out. I guess it would have been since it was being billed as the final concert ever at Shea Stadium and people wanted to get their hands on the tickets. They offered them first to Mets’ season ticket holders, who ended up scarfing them up. Some were left over for us little people and surprise, almost as soon as they went on sale, they were sold out.
I hopped over to Ticketmaster, who was holding an auction for a few tickets, and to Stub Hub, where people who bought tickets were legally scalping them (what else would you call it when $95 tickets are being “sold” for over a 1000 bucks?). Unsuccessful there, I joined the untold numbers of Billy Joel fans who were ticked off at the entire process. Someone in the Mets organization heard the cries of angry fans and were able to get Billy to schedule another concert, this time two days later on Friday night, July 18th. So the first concert, which was billed as the final concert ever at Shea Stadium, was not so final.
So this morning, considering that a lot of Billy Joel fans were angry and also sitting in front of their computers, I didn’t have much hope of getting tickets, but I labored on, opening up the browser and 11 tabs pointed to www.507tixx.com. To my surprise, less than a minute after the tickets went on sale, I was able to log onto the site. The only problem – I didn’t know I had gotten into their sales page because I had so many tabs open. I was flipping through them when I got in. It took me about 20 seconds to realized that I had logged on.
I tried to buy four tickets, but was unsuccessful. Then I tried three, also to no avail. Hoping beyond hope that I could still get any kind of ticket, I tried for two – and I got them! But I had a five minute time limit that was ticking away fast. First, I had to create an account with 507tixx.com. They I had to pay for the tickets ($227 for two seats). I got my payment in under the wire (a little less than 1 minute left before they would release the tickets). The seats are on the floor, section A1. If you look at the stage, A1 is over on the left side near the third base fair line. But they are on the field where the Metropolitans play baseball. Pretty good seats, I would say.
What got me is that they charged $37 in fees for the two tickets. Sixteen dollars in “fees” and another $5.00 in ordering charges!! Ugh. Even though I was not happy about the added fees, I can’t be too upset. I got the tickets.
This morning, I woke up a little later than usual. I had dinner last evening with a family friend over in New York. His life has been a real rollercoaster – at one time, he worked on Wall Street as a broker, mad obscene amounts of money, and got married to a beautiful woman with whom he had three children. One of his life goals was to teach economics and buy a “summer home” in Hawaii. But then the demon of alcohol grabbed a hold of him and his life hasn’t been the same since.
Alcohol drove him down into a pit of despair. His wife ended up divorcing him and moving up to Vermont. He lost his job on Wall Street and subsequently his apartment in Midtown. He became isolated from everyone – family and friends wondered what had happened to him.
It was about three years ago, while in a drunken stupor, he stumbled into Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church (an ELCA congregation) on Lexington Avenue in the city. Something happened to him as he heard the preacher talking about our Lord Jesus Christ. He told me last night that he ended up sobbing rather loudly as he heard about what Christ did for him. As I reminded him, the fact that Christ is his atoning sacrifice for his sins - that is the most precious gift he could receive.
Upon leaving the church, he said he vowed to change.
At the time, he was renting a small studio apartment in Soho. He went home and dumped all his alcohol down the drain. “The recyclers hated me that week,” he said while giggling. But in explaining how many bottles of booze he had hidden around his small apartment, he said that he never realized just how low he had fallen. “The devil took a hold of me and dragged me down,” he said.
After eliminating his stash of alcohol from all over his apartment, he went out to a book store to buy a bible. In his divorce, he said his wife took it in the settlement. So he went out and finding a small bookstore that was opened, he purchased a copy of used King James Version that they had on the shelf. He bought it, went home, and started to read.
And as he read, he said he realized that he failed God, but our Lord didn’t blame him. Instead, he saw God as the prodigal son saw his father in the parable, a man with open arms ready to embrace and love his son. From that moment on, he vowed to live the best life he could serving God.
He started by attending AA meetings a local school. He found a job at a bank working as a teller. In a few months, with the remainder of the money he had saved from his time on Wall Street, he bought an apartment in the Financial District. One day, while going out to work with the Wall Street Journal under his arm, he ran into one of his old friends from the brokerage house he once worked at. That little chance meeting got him a job offer, which he accepted.
But it is his life outside of work that made me smile. He goes to mass everyday (he is a Roman Catholic). On weekends, he lectors and serves as a Eucharistic minister (those who help the priest distribute communion in the Roman Catholic church). Without fail, he calls his children every night before they go to sleep (including last night). His relationship with his ex-wife has been repaired – even though she has remarried and moved back to the area. This renewed “friendly relationship” has allowed him to spend more time with his children. In his free time, he volunteers for a number of organizations, including a pediatric AIDS organization and a group that helps homeless veterans.
He tithes to his church, giving 10 percent of his annual income before taxes. He donates money to a dozen charitable groups. He hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol in more than three years. While he has been tempted, the memories (those which he can remember) of his alcoholic days keep him on the straight and narrow.
At the start of the year, he moved out of his nice apartment in the Financial District to a spacious home in Westchester County.
And he reads his broken down King James bible everyday.
The weathercasters project somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 5 inches of snow for our eastern Northern New Jersey area today. Funny. It looks like we already have more than 3 inches on the ground. And the snow is expected to last at least until sometime in the afternoon, when sleet is supposed to take over, and then overnight, a return to snow.
Traveling is hideous today. Schools are closed throughout the county and there is not much traffic on the roads.
My scheduled visits today have been canceled. I have to find out about a member of our church – she was to go into the hospital this morning for knee replacement surgery. As I sit here, I don’t know if she went.
To clarify a post below, when my middle school friend told me that she couldn’t believe that I was a pastor, it wasn’t because I was sooooooo bad as a teenager. No, it was because I was soooooooo shy and quiet. It is hard for people who knew me as a kid and a teen to believe that I would be able to stand up in front of a crowd and talk.
Others, however, who knew me post-school, when they say that they can’t believe I am a pastor, it is for the reason that I was a pain in the back side when I was reporting that it is impossible for many of them to accept me as a clergyman.
After church tonight, came home, spoke on the phone for about 40 minutes, and then sat down on my way-too-comfortable couch that caused me to get sleepy. So I get up, sat down in front of my computer to surf and I came across a funny, though serious, article on the Westchester County Journal News website:
You never know who you’re going to run into on a daily basis. It could be in a local deli or the post office or the library – but there is just that chance that someone from your past could be staring at you in the face..
Today, that happened to me. I ran into someone I hadn’t seen since middle school. We didn’t keep in touch in high school – we went to different high schools. In college, we met a couple of times and chewed the fat. But since then, nada. Turns out she finished her business management degree and then attained a Master’s. She met her Garden State-bred husband in graduate school. After they finished up, they got married and set sail, so to speak, for the beloved suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio.
They came into town to visit his family this week and lo and behold, they were in the bank this morning. At first, I didn’t recognize her, but she recognized me. We spent a little while chatting and exchanging phone numbers and email addresses.
But she said something that made me laugh.
When I told her I was a Lutheran pastor, she got that quizzical look on her face and said: “You? A pastor? You’ve gotta be kidding.”
I haven’t written a lot about my favorite hockey team lately, namely the New York Rangers. They seem to be one of those “up one day, way down the next” teams that always seem to fight for the final playoff spot. When they have a good game, we tend to get excited that they may just be coming around. But then they have a real stinker of a game, and we wonder what in the world is wrong with them.
Last night’s game could only be classified as the stinker of stinky games.
They were up in Montreal facing the Canadians and were in the lead, 5-0. With a lead like that in hockey, it is pretty comfortable. In order to lose that kind of a game, your team has to basically go home. Well, the Rangers were up 5-0 last night.
Rangers’ fans, like me, are wondering what the heck is wrong with them. With a game like last night, they shouldn’t make the playoffs. They should just mail it in the rest of the year and hope for something better next season.
You can’t lose 6-5 after being up 5-0 and still consider yourself a playoff contender.
Ah, it is knocking on midnight and for some reason, I am still working here in the home office.
I am tired, but for some reason, I keep sitting here, reading through service notes for this coming weekend’s services.
It is not like these notes won’t be here on the desk come sunrise. But I feel like I need to tackle all the service issues before hitting the bed and going off to sleep.
This morning, I had a visit with a senior citizen who I talked with at the New Milford Senior Citizen Center last Thursday. As you all know, I am a member of New Milford’s Senior Advisory Committee and have attended several events at the Center from time to time. Last Thursday was the Center’s annual Valentine’s Day lunch with an Ice Cream Social. The woman’s husband had died several years ago and she found that she thoroughly enjoyed the daily companionship she found at the Senior Center on River Road. Though not a Lutheran, she asked if I could come and visit with her sometime to talk about God.
Of course, I never turn down these types of requests. Earlier this morning, I went over and visited with her and her grandson and his friends who came to town during a break in their college routine. They came to visit New York City and staying with “grandma” here in Northern New Jersey saved the group a ton of money.
When we finally started talking about God, the conversation took on a more philosophical tone and focused on the internalized battle in all of us – living a sanctified life versus the need for faith. The woman’s grandson said he attended a non-denominational, song and clapping church where church services lasted several hours. These services are highlighted by lots of songs and lots of law preaching – the kind of preaching that teaches the listeners their lives will have more order if they “do this” and “don’t do that.”
The woman’s grandson explained that he and his church friends do a lot of work in their community. Their church has sponsored homes for Habitat for Humanity; they have an active food pantry and they have just started to sponsor a homeless shelter; and they regularly go to hospitals to cheer up sick children.
I said all of that is wonderful. But I asked a simple question – why were they doing all that work?
The answer I received is that God wanted them to do it. They were working for the greater good of God’s Kingdom.
But I wanted a deeper answer – just why were they doing all that work? Was it because they were told to do that work in church or that they were doing it out a greater sense of Christian charity stemming from their faith in Christ?
The reason we do good works is not because the pastor or the congregation mandate this work. We do good works because they grow out of our faith. We hear the Words of Christ imploring His disciples and all of us to love our neighbors as ourselves, but we can’t truly love them unless our faith compels us to love. It is our faith that drives us forward to show love to those in need. We aren’t doing it out of some sense of obligation to show God that we’re worthy – we do it because our faith is guiding us to help those who are struggling in any way.
One of the hardest things to explain is faith. Many Christian denominations claim that faith is primarily a “people event” instead of primarily a “God event.” How many times have we heard the “You must accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior” mantra? I’ve heard it many, many times. The understanding of this “acceptance” is that we have to make a move to God and believe in Him before He can bestow any grace.
The perfect example is a person hitting rock bottom. They’ve lived a life of excess or a life of personal gratification. Something bad happened to them and they’ve hit the bottom with no place left to fall. Those who believe in the “accept Jesus” notion of faith claim that when a person is at his or her lowest, they will recognize their failures and seek God. They will open their hearts to Him and let Christ in. From that point on, this idea goes, that person has “accepted” Jesus.
I say that’s bunk.
When we hit our lowest, it is God who is seeking us out. At that lowest point in our lives, it is God who is calling and pulling us to Him.
We come to faith not because of what we do, but because of what God has done. He’s come to us by His Word and His Holy Spirit dwells in us. The faith we have comes not from our finally figuring out that our lives stink, but because God loved us and came to us and dwells in us. He makes us believe in Him because our sinful lives could never accept the notion that God loves us.
And just by that very notion that we believe, God’s grace has already poured down upon us — and it will continue to pour everyday.
My morning visit was very interesting and enlightening. I don’t know if I got through to them. God-willing, maybe something clicked.
All opinions and ideas expressed on The Pastor's Blog are those of the individual writers. Copyright (c) 2006-8 - Saint Matthew's Evangelical Lutheran Church, 225 Center Street, New Milford, New Jersey 07646. Design Downloaded from www.vanillamist.com
