Saint Matthew's

For some reason, I woke up ridiculously early today. Of course, that is if you consider 3:32am early. This after falling asleep around midnight.

I had a weird dream.

Very weird.

After waking up, I had no choice but to think about the dream and try my best to figure what it was about. By the time I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth it, it was around 4:30 and I couldn’t fall asleep.

One of the big benefits of waking up so early is that that I have already read the local newspapers, did a load a wash, dried it, folded it, and have fiddled around internet news sites already.

And with my super busy Thursday staring at me in the face, I know by 3pm, I will need a caffeine boost.

Ugh.

The doors of church are open between 7:00am and 7:30am every morning for what is called Morning Prayer. I don’t just talk about this service during our weekend church announcements because I have nothing else to say. Yes, the doors are open and people are invited to come inside to partake in a most blessed time of hearing the Word of God, reflecting on it, and responding to God in prayer.

It doesn’t take long, yet the spark it gives awakens the soul.

Are there some days when I would rather stay in bed and not run over to church to lead this service? Of course. That even happens — very infrequently, I must say — on Sundays, as well. But I do get up and open the church doors for anyone wishing to come in.

If no one shows up, I am there alone. I will go through the same service walk through I would normally do if the church was packed on a particular weekday morning. I will read a Psalm, a portion of Scripture, recite the Apostle’s Creed and Lord’s Prayer, and then pray specific petitions. On a daily basis, we pray for the sick of Saint Matthew’s and our soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I change up the other petitions daily.

This is not a long service, but at least to me, it is very meaningful. Hearing the Word and responding in prayer — it is a blessed way to start the day.

When we started this Monday through Friday service at Saint Matthew’s in August 2005, some people thought it would last a few weeks and then it would fall by the wayside. The same was said for our Midweek service with bible class that started a month later. And in Lent 2007 when we started our Saturday evening divine service, there was little hope of that service standing the test of time, much less the Lenten season. Yet, all three services continue, stronger than ever simply because God is blessing these opportunities to spend with Him.

It doesn’t mean that people are knocking down the doors to attend each day or week; we have a small group of devoted people who attend these services. Sometimes, other members of Saint Matthew’s drop by, especially on Saturdays when they know that on Sunday they would not be around. And yes, even visitors drop by to partake on the gift’s of God.

And this service continues unfettered, as does Morning Prayer and our now Tuesday Midweek service with Bible study.

If you have time, remember — church isn’t just for Sunday mornings at 9:30. It is available everyday for your edification.

To continue on the sports vein……

My professed sports love of the New York Yankees is well known. I have never been afraid of tackling those who rip into the baseball team that has stolen my fan heart. And I’ve been tough on those Yankee fans who forget to show humility to others, especially to our crosstown rivals, the Mets.

Well, the Yankees made a huge trade last night with the Pittsburgh Pirates where they picked up outfielder Xavier Nady and lefthanded pitcher Damaso Marte for a group of minor leaguers. As a diehard, I was kind of stunned that the Yankees were able to pull off such a trade, essentially trading a group of minor leaguers, most if which have an upside, for two pieces that will solidify two of weakness of the big team, left handed relief and outfield. Yes, I was happy. Actually, I was thrilled.

Today the trade was modified by the Pirates with the Yankees switching two of the parts of the deal. Nothing major, in my book. Diehards will be happy that no blue chip prospects went in this trade. In the end, our minor league system is still chock full of talent.

But there are some Yankees fan who are getting hot under the collar over the trade — specifically the bandwagon jumpers. Ugh! These people are annoying. They jump on as fans during October 1996 and have stayed on board through the next decade because the Yankees are winning. All of a sudden the Yankees trade a group of minor leaguers and the jumpers start jumping up and down, complaining that the Yankees gave up too much.

Please!!

I’ve been through the dark days in Yankeedom when the team couldn’t do anything right. I suffered as current band wagon jumpers were on the Mets band wagon and they owned the town. Now that they have become “Yankees fans” and are backing the Bombers, they act as though the team is going down because they traded a couple of minor leaguers for two proven major league talents who will help this team now and into the future.

Aaaarrrrgggghhh!!!

I feel better.

Now back to religion.

As a pastor, I love this story.

Using the Stanley Cup as a Baptismal font!!

Wow.

As you know, I love hockey. And above all in hockey, I adore the Stanley Cup (too bad my Rangers team doesn’t seem like they want to win it).

One of the traditions of winning the Cup is that the players get the opportunity to have the Cup pay a visit. In this morning’s Sporting News Today digital newspaper, Detroit Red Wing Kris Draper admits something that shows utter disrespect for the Cup (outside of the fact that he let his kids use it as breakfast bowl):

His daughter pooped in it.

Oh, Kris admits he was just trying to get “the perfect picture,” but please! He let his daughter drop a load in the Stanley Cup!!! That is outrageous!!!

What of the next person who gets the Cup for a couple of days? They will have the knowledge that their teammate’s daughter used the Cup as a diaper/toilet. Just too embarrassing and too disrespectful to the greatest trophy (outside of the World Cup trophy) in sports.

Click on the picture to read the entire article.

I am just testing out the new blog software on my iPhone.

Is being a drunken moron a sin?

I would say, “Yes,” after reading that article.

Again, another “It Can Only Happen to Me” story:

I will keep this one short. Yesterday in the supermarket, in the cereal aisle, I was looking for Total Whole Wheat cereal. A gentleman was standing in front of the Total cereal area and asked him if I could just reach over to get a box. As I began to reach over, the top shelf slipped somehow and boxes of cereal poured down upon me and the man standing next to me.

When the rain shower of cereal stopped, I laughed.

This stuff can only happen to me.

When Roger Daltrey of “The Who” hits the stage and Billy Joel smashes a guitar in pure “Who” style, there is only one thing to say: “The Last Play at Shea” concert on Friday, headlined by Billy Joel, was out of this world!

I have been a big Billy Joel fan for years. I have a number of his albums and have enjoyed his fun music for years (my favorite song of his is “Captain Jack”). Back earlier this year when tickets for the second “Last Play” concert went on sale and I somehow was able to garner two tickets (OK, I paid $227, so I guess that isn’t really garnering them), I just knew this thing would be a blast.

But calling it a blast doesn’t do it justice.

Tony Bennett, Garth Brooks, Steven Tyler of “Aerosmith,” and Daltrey made special appearances, all of which were topped when Sir Paul McCartney took the stage. He brought down the house. And when he sang “Let It Be” to end the concert in the third encore, there was nothing more to say. Leaving Shea Stadium after witnessing that magnificent concert, my heart was happy.

If I had to rank the special appearances, I really liked Daltrey and McCartney. But Steven Tyler, belting out “Walk This Way” was particularly fun. Garth Brooks sang “Shameless,” a song he borrowed from one of Billy’s albums and made it a country hit. Tony Bennett was, well, Tony Bennett when he dueted with Joel on “New York State of Mind.”

I believe Kristine and I would agree — “The Last Play” was a concert experience we will not soon forget.

Getting home was another matter. I should have figured it out when the Mets warned everyone not to drive to Shea and instead take mass transit. When you end a concert of 63,000 people at midnight and most of them took either the 7 train or the LIRR (which we took), there is going to be a LONG, LONG, LONG line. Thankfully, we were able to snake our way up to the train in a little over an hour. We eventually caught the train and got back into the city by 1:40am.

By the time I got home at around 3am, I couldn’t fall asleep. It actually took me about an hour and half to doze off. I couldn’t get Joel’s “The Entertainer” out of my head. Hopefully those whom I visited on Saturday didn’t notice the bags under my eyes.

Just a couple of things:

1. Yes, I do have a broken rib. Yes, it hurts most times. Yes, I was given pain killers by the doctor. And yes, I am taking them. It doesn’t really matter. A broken rib hurts, even with the drugs. 

2. To the woman who sat down at my table this morning as I was consuming a cup of tea while reading the Record: A hearty “Your welcome.” For some reason, my clerical collar attracts people to talk. For a while, this young woman went through many of the difficulties that have cropped up in her life recently. As I finished my tea and she her coffee, she thanked me. But it is was how she thanked me that made my day. “For a pastor, your different. You’re easy to talk to.”

3. To the woman in the Prius who caused that little car accident this morning: It doesn’t matter that you own a car that gets great gas mileage. You still burn gas. And because you still drive your car and burn fossil fuels, you still have to follow the rules of the road, meaning you can’t change lanes without signaling or looking to see if anyone is in the lane you’re trying to move into. My friends, if you’re wondering why I would remind the Prius driver of her use of fossil fuels, it is because that is one of the reasons she used to try and get out of her culpability in causing the accident. Oh, I kid you not. Thankfully, I wasn’t the person who got bumped by her. I just saw it happen right in front of me.

And finally this blessedly hot Friday:

4. The Mets are playing good baseball. There, I said something nice about the Mets. Now will Larry in Paramus stop emailing me regarding my Yankee fan lifestyle.

This afternoon, I attended the wake for the young woman I wrote about in my post on Saturday. Her husband, Greg, met me at the funeral parlor at around 1:30. As you can imagine, he was pretty broken up. Family and friends slowly filled the funeral home as people kept saying that Jennifer was “too young to die” or “why would God give her such a terrible disease.”

I tried my best during the period I had to lead the assembled in prayer (and through a little homily) to dispel the notion that our God is a mean God. When we are grief stricken and heart broken, the easy thing to do is to blame God for the tears. Instead of looking to our God for comfort, we tend to go to the blame game and God is the only culprit.

We want our loved ones near us and when they die, a void is left in our lives. But it is God who provides comfort. It is God who pulls us close to Him during these times of grief and gives us the blessed reminder of His love through Christ. When our lives end, we believe firmly in the promise of God that He will call us to Him for all eternity. Faith in Him, borne of God, is what leads us home.

As a child of God, born of water and of Spirit, our prayer and hope is that Jennifer is with her Lord.

I left the funeral home a little bit after 3 and arrived home a half hour later. For the rest of the afternoon, I was shaken by the sadness in that room. I’ve done numerous funerals in my short ministry, but today the tears and the sadness really got to me. It is times like this when I am feeling really blue that I wish I was married just so I can tell someone and let everything I am feeling out. It is just so hard to explain to friends how I am feeling when I face situations like this; as someone who is supposed to keep it altogether, how can I tell a friend just how bad I feel?

So, I don’t. Instead, I collapse into a shell, not responding to phone calls, emails, or text messages. I end  up sitting down and sometimes crying.

It was a little bit before 7 when my phone rang. It was Greg. He asked me if I would come to tonight’s wake to “do what I did this afternoon.” I got ready and headed off twenty minutes later.

When I arrived at the funeral home, the place was packed. The line to get into the room stretched down the hallway. Jennifer touched the lives of many people and tonight, her friends and acquaintances wanted to pay their final respects to her. At around 8:15, the funeral director asked me to come forward to lead the overflow crowd in prayer. I spoke the briefest of homilies, of which it will lead into my sermon tomorrow morning where I will speak of the resurrection.

At 9, when I snaked my way through the now-smaller crowd, Greg’s father tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to come back to his son’s house. We arrived at the house around 9:30. Greg pulled me aside, offered me a glass of water (he was surprised when I took a beer instead), and asked me some questions about the funeral. I explained that since we were not going to a church for the funeral service, we would do most of the service in the funeral home, about 2/3rds. The final third is the committal, which takes place at grave side.

When I finished my beer around 10, I figured it was time for me go. I went up to Greg, who was speaking with his best friend and best man at his wedding, Evan, and said, “Good night.” Greg, looking lost, responded with the same “Good night.” But he added a short story.

A couple of months ago, he and Jennifer made plans to spend a couple of days in New York City. They only lived in Nyack, but they felt it would be fun to spend time in the city at a hotel and take in the sights for just a day or two.

One of the sights they wanted to take in was tonight’s Bon Jovi concert at the Garden. He pulled the tickets from his shirt pocket and broke down crying. He said he forgot all about them until he came home tonight. He went into his dresser drawer looking for a clean shirt; the tickets were in the envelope that lined the bottom of the drawer. After telling me the story and starting to cry, he collapsed into my arms and we both stumbled down to the floor. First we crashed into the side of a corner table near the couch, which caused the lamp on the table to fall to the floor and shatter. My back was a little worse for wear, but I was OK as I left.

I arrived home at around 10:40 with my back hurting a lot. It got rather uncomfortable driving down Route 9W. When I got home and went upstairs to change, I noticed that pieces of the shattered lamp were in my hair. Also, I realized that my left rib cage is hurting and aching. I think I will have a heck of bruise there tomorrow morning.

However, a bruise on my rib cage is not what is bothering me tonight.

It is that I feel so downright crappy.

Do you think church is making you fat? That is the question posed this morning on the “That’s Fit” blog, part of the AOL network.

A short answer – no, church is not making you fat.

Eating too much and sitting on your rear end is making you fat.

Church has nothing to do with it.

My situation with my thyroid caused me to stop losing weight. Funny thing — my thyroid is working just fine now and I am not losing weight. Why? It isn’t church. It is that I eat a lot of garbage several times a day and I sit on my rear a good chunk of the day reading, studying, visiting, and writing.

When I visit people at their homes, I sit down for a while and eat whatever they put in front of me. When I go to hospitals, I sit down at a person’s bedside. When I write up visitation reports, I sit down while chomping on something icky. When I prepare for Sunday services, especially my sermon, it takes hours of studying one particular verse. And how do I study? Sitting down.

Yes, I am fat and I did it. I don’t blame fast food restaurants or Dunkin Donuts or even church. I blame me. I did it to myself.

And now that I have publicly mentioned this, maybe it is time I started to change this lifestyle rut I am in — maybe time to get back onto the ‘losing weight’ train.

Early this morning, I went hospital hopping.

I came upon a man who was crying outside of the hospital.

His wife died this morning after a two year bout with ovarian cancer

Doctors tried everything, he said, but the cancer was just too aggressive.

Even though she was given the “3 month” death sentence, she fought like a trooper.

She went to work and jogged as much as she could, but when the cancer made her too weak, she stopped.

This past week, she was in bad pain. Doctors tried to fight the pain the best way they could, but she just kept getting worse. Doctors gave her a couple of days on Thursday.

She held on until this morning.

This young man, only 29, had met his wife seven years ago after returning from college. He said that they were as complete opposites as two people could be. She was athletic, loved to bike ride, hike, ski, and snowboard. She was very outgoing and could spend hours out with friends bar hopping and having fun. She loved basketball — not to play it, but to watch it. She loved the Nets and “had a crush” on Vince Carter. He was her polar opposite — overweight, shy, loved video games, had a daily date to watch the Mets on TV, enjoyed a good bottle of Chardonnay, couldn’t stand staying out late and loved to work on cars.

He said the weird thing was when they introduced the other to friends and family — he said they all had the same expression on their faces: “What does she see in him?”

I asked him about their attraction. He said it was simple:

They loved to just talk.

Whether they had a good day or a bad day, they talked for hours. They’d meet in an out of the way place to just talk. Hours would go by and they would not be tired of spending this quality time with the other person.

He said they both realized there was something between them when they were at Playland in Rye, New York (one of my old haunts) getting ready to go on the Dragon Coaster. She was slightly taller than him and she made a joke that he should check to see if he was tall enough go on the ride. He responded by telling her that she had to put on a hardhat because tall people had a greater chance of hitting one of the beams that pieced together the roller coaster. They laughed and they just knew.

A year later, they were married.

And they were happy.

I could see in his eyes that talking about his wife helped him. For the next twenty or so minutes, we just talked about their lives together. And we talked about the “what’s next” when we die. I spoke of Christ and the salvation we have through Him.

After we talked, his tears stopped. I told him that I would pray for him.

As I got close to the front door, he called to me and asked me if I would perform his wife’s funeral ceremony. While they were both Christian — he is Methodist, she was Roman Catholic — they both hadn’t attended church for many years. I told him that I would. He said that if she had known me, she would approve.

He turned and went to the parking lot to go home and meet family. I just stood there.

Tears welled up in my eyes.

No, I did not stand online yesterday to buy a new iPhone. I have the first version and with the new software update, it works like a charm.

Yes, I did have problems updating my phone. After downloading the update, loading it into my phone, it would not connect to the iTunes store to finish the update. After 10 minutes of waiting, I was getting upset. By 25 minutes, I was fuming. Couldn’t anyone at Apple figure out that all that updating and buying would overload their servers? Why not bring in a few more to help with the overload capacity of people like me who just wanted to update our phones and go to work?

About 2 hours into the update, my phone connected and I was able to use it again.

The new software brings a bunch of bells and whistles that were sorely needed. One of the best things — outside of the new Apps store — is the mass delete and move function in email. Oh, going through each individual email and moving it was tedious. Now, much faster.

Will I get the new phone?

No. Not on my schedule right now. But at the rate of how fast the battery drains on my current phone, I may need a new battery soon.

However, I do need new headphones for the phone. Can’t listen to music without them. Basically, I shredded my headphones yesterday.

Don’t ask.

We are trying something out for the summer — we’ve moved our Midweek service and Bible class to Tuesdays from Wednesdays starting yesterday. The hope is to see if more people would come and take part in bible class. Wednesdays apparently were too busy for many people and they could not partake in the weekly bible study discussions.

Starting last night, our bible class continued to look at the Lutheran Confessions, namely the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth commandments. Oh, that was the plan. We never got to the lesson. Instead, we chatted about various things, including the theology behind the Office of the Keys and why we have a crucifix in church.

So, we got some bible stuff done, though not what was planned.